The Supreme Court has ordered Louisiana to hold congressional elections using a House map with a second mostly Black district, despite a lower-court ruling that called the map an illegal racial gerrymander.
As someone who lives in Louisiana’s 2nd district, the main problem (some) Republicans have with the map wasn’t that a 2nd black district was drawn. It’s that it was drawn so Speaker Johnson and Rep Scalise got even safer seats and they had to screw one Republican Congressman and they chose one to screw.
This isn’t really a fight over civil rights anymore. The Voting Rights Act requires 2 majority black districts in a state with 6 seats and a 33% black population. It’d be easy enough to make two without it being so weirdly drawn but that would have required two members of the Congressional Republican leadership to make their districts competitive and that wasn’t happening.
In fairness, it’s also fucking hard to draw maps in Louisiana. I work with GIS software to create maps sometimes and you basically need at least a gaming desktop to apply high res water layers to maps without your computer getting so hot for so long, it could be used as a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator on a mission to the outer solar system.
I hear that, I’ve had to install some of this stuff, and sometimes my immediate response is “why are you even trying to put this software on a laptop? You’re going to kill that thing.” Gis, CAD, civil3d, Revit, etc, it’s brutal on hardware.
As someone who lives in Louisiana’s 2nd district, the main problem (some) Republicans have with the map wasn’t that a 2nd black district was drawn. It’s that it was drawn so Speaker Johnson and Rep Scalise got even safer seats and they had to screw one Republican Congressman and they chose one to screw.
This isn’t really a fight over civil rights anymore. The Voting Rights Act requires 2 majority black districts in a state with 6 seats and a 33% black population. It’d be easy enough to make two without it being so weirdly drawn but that would have required two members of the Congressional Republican leadership to make their districts competitive and that wasn’t happening.
In fairness, it’s also fucking hard to draw maps in Louisiana. I work with GIS software to create maps sometimes and you basically need at least a gaming desktop to apply high res water layers to maps without your computer getting so hot for so long, it could be used as a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator on a mission to the outer solar system.
I hear that, I’ve had to install some of this stuff, and sometimes my immediate response is “why are you even trying to put this software on a laptop? You’re going to kill that thing.” Gis, CAD, civil3d, Revit, etc, it’s brutal on hardware.
God Revit makes my sisters new laptop fan sound like it’s a jet about to take off.