LSU Manship School Statehouse Bureau

Published: May 11, 2026

By: Veronica Camenzuli, Gracie Thomas and Avery White, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE – After a tumultuous day-long hearing Friday, lawmakers will try to break through the tension this week and propose new maps for Louisiana’s six congressional districts.

A Senate panel is expected to resume debate Wednesday, and what it decides could largely carry through both chambers as the Legislature scrambles to draw new maps before the session ends June 1.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently declared that Louisiana’s current mix, with four Republican districts and two Black-majority ones, was unconstitutional. The ruling struck down key parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, with six of the nine justices saying racial factors could no longer play a significant role in drawing the maps.

Noting that one-third of the state’s residents are Black, minority leaders testified in favor of keeping the two majority-Black districts, while dozens of their supporters in the hallways shouted “shut it down” as the Senate and Governmental Affairs committee also considered maps with 5-1 and 6-0 Republican advantages.

“Today, here in Louisiana we’re being tested, and the whole world is watching,” said U.S. Rep Troy Carter, a Democrat from New Orleans. “The question before us is not merely about lines on a map. The question before us is whether we will honor the principle that every citizen deserves equal protection of the law.”

Read more at KATC.

Published: May 8, 2026

By: Veronica Camenzuli, Gracie Thomas and Avery White, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE, La. — A debate over choosing Louisiana’s new congressional district maps grew heated between state senators inside a Senate committee room and as a protest developed in the hallway outside Friday.

The meeting, which included comments from the public criticizing the idea of decreasing Louisiana’s Black majority districts, lasted over eight hours, and the committee had two recesses to ease rising tensions.

There were several overflow rooms for the crowd of people who came to speak in support and opposition of maps that would have two Black majority districts or eliminate one or all minority districts.

The crowd included dozens of people spilling out into the hallways listening in via a Bluetooth speaker brought by a member of the public.

The meeting of the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee centered on whether Louisiana should have six solidly Republican districts, revert to one majority Black Democrat and five Republican districts like the previous congressional map, or keep two majority Black Democrat districts.

Read more at WWLTV.

Published: May 7, 2026

By: Sheridan White, Kylah Babin and Izzy Wollfarth, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE – As Louisiana lawmakers draw new congressional maps, one concern is how the changes might affect the districts of U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and dilute Republican support in other areas, legislators said.

Prodded by President Donald Trump, national Republican leaders have urged lawmakers in politically red states to create as many Republican districts as they can to try to maintain control of the U.S. House.

After the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana map with four Republican and two Democratic districts, the Republican-led state Legislature is facing pressure from some conservative groups to draw new maps that could represent a clean 6-0 Republican sweep.

But some lawmakers, lobbyists and political consultants say that creating six Republican districts could fan racial tensions and leave some districts with a small margin for error and the possibility of Democratic upsets in future elections.

Reverting to a 5-1 map similar to what Louisiana had two years ago, they say, might enable Republicans to create five districts that would be almost impossible for the Democrats to breach.

Read more at WBRZ.

Published: May 7, 2026

By: Izzy Wollfarth, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE — Under a bill that advanced through the Senate Judiciary C Committee Tuesday, the public would be barred from accessing juror information.

The Louisiana Code of Criminal Procedure states that juror names are to be published in each parish’s official journal, local newspaper or on the door of the courthouse.  

Rep. Debbie Villio, R-Kenner, sought to change the current process and protect juror information including jurors’ identities, their telephone numbers, emails, home address and anything related to their image and likeness.

The current bill states that juror information would be disclosed only at the discretion of the court and if a juror list is submitted to local government.

Villio said it is a simple bill and “a measure to protect juror privacy.”

Read more at Daily Advertiser.

Published: May 5, 2026

By: Kylah Babin, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE –  After the discovery of new street-drug variants being used in New Orleans during Super Bowl LIX and Mardi Gras in 2025, an LSU lab is seeking to expand the use of wastewater treatment methods to help identify drug-use patterns across Louisiana.

The LSU Environmental Chemistry Lab is one of the few labs in the country that uses a method of wastewater analysis that allows samples to be run through an instrument so that the drug can be broken down into detectable compounds.

“It provides an early detection,” said Ramesh Sapkota, a graduate student who assisted with the research that centered on New Orleans wastewater during the Super Bowl and Mardi Gras.

Sapkota added that these scientific techniques would help public health officials and immunity services respond sooner to drug issues in an area.

Last year, the lab discovered seven new deadly variants of nitazenes in New Orleans. Nitazenes are manmade drugs and are highly addictive, even more so than other opioids such as morphine and fentanyl. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, some of these nitazenes can be 50 times more potent than fentanyl and 1,000 times more potent than morphine.

Read more at American Press.

Published: May 5, 2026

By: Kylah Babin and Sheridan White, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE –  U.S. Rep. Cleo Fields told the Baton Rouge Press Club Monday that Louisiana voters should vote as normal in elections for the U.S. House of Representatives even though Gov. Jeff Landry suspended voting in those races in the wake of a recent Supreme Court ruling that the state’s congressional districts were unconstitutional due to racial gerrymandering.

“At the end of the day, the Supreme Court did not say, ‘Halt the election,’ nor should it, and we’re going to let the Supreme Court make a decision fairly soon about whether or not Louisiana can do what it did,” Fields said. “That’s why I’m urging voters to actually go out and cast their votes for the whole ticket.”

Fields, a Baton Rouge Democrat, represents the snake-like congressional 6th District that was created by the Legislature in 2024 to give Louisiana a second majority-Black district. It was that district that drew most of the Supreme Court’s attention in its 6-3 vote on April 29 that ordered the state to once again redraw its congressional maps.

After Landry suspended the U.S. House primary elections based on the court’s ruling, Fields joined several other candidates in filing a federal lawsuit challenging the decision to suspend the congressional primary elections after voting had already begun. Election day is May 16, but absentee and early voting has already begun using the original ballot.

Fields and the other plaintiffs said suspending the elections mid-cycle violates the First, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, particularly after some voters had already begun casting ballots.

Read more at Minden Press-Herald.

Published: May 5, 2026

By: Sheldon “Trey” Vice III, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE — The House voted 87-9 to allocate $64 million from excess collections by the Louisiana Citizens Property Insurance Corporation to expand a program that offers $10,000 grants to homeowners who install fortified roofs.

House Bill 1187 by Rep. Paul Sawyer, R-Baton Rouge, would reallocate surplus funds from Citizens’ emergency assessment to spur the installation of more fortified roofs, which Insurance Commissioner Tim Temple said eventually would lower insurance premiums for property owners statewide.

Temple, who worked closely with Sawyer on the bill, explained at a recent hearing why the fortified-roof program is popular and how every dollar allocated from Citizens would go toward reducing premiums statewide.

“They have determined that they will have some surplus money, and we all agreed that the fortified-roof program is the quickest, most assured way to bring premium relief to citizens on their homeowners’ insurance,” Temple said.

Read more at Shreveport Times.

Published: April 30, 2026

By: Peter Finney Jr., LSU Manship School News Service

NEW ORLEANS — So, what’s the big deal?

As a reformed sportswriter who once asked ChatGPT to plot out the best road trip for visiting national parks in Utah – and got what appeared to be a suitably Mormon answer in five seconds – I wondered how long would it take for the free AI analytical tool to create a reasonable redistricting plan for Louisiana that would map out six contiguous, right-sized congressional districts for the state’s 4.6 million residents.

In this case, about 3.7 seconds.

But, as with all things Louisiana, where politics is waged as 4D chess, checkmate is not that easy, says Greg Rigamer, one of those rare people with the ability to decipher and accommodate both the unswerving validity of mathematical equations and the relentless warrior mentality of politicians, for whom this take-no-prisoners game of redistricting comes down to: “Find me one more vote.”

Throw in the bitter divide of race, the bane of the United States for 250 years, and finding a voting solution that satisfies the most Louisiana residents becomes an AI hallucination.

Read more at WBRZ.

Published: May 1, 2026

By: Sheridan White and Courtney Bell, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE – After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Louisiana’s congressional map unconstitutional for racial gerrymandering, candidates in the hotly contested but suddenly delayed 5th District race to replace U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow expressed varying degrees of confidence and exasperation.

One collateral effect of the suspended election timeline is the disruptive impact on low-profile candidates in both parties who have limited resources to get their message out to voters.

“It definitely hurts the little guys like me,” said Austin Magee, a Republican candidate and construction company owner from Franklinton.

Magee supports the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling, but he said he has exhausted his already limited resources in his months-long efforts of campaigning, posting signs and talking to people around the district. Now, he said, these areas may not even be included in the redrawn district.

“It is frustrating that there’s been so much effort and energy and money expended,” Magee said. “It’s just more time for the people that have millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank to spend on this election. But for guys like me, it is a significant additional hill to climb.”

Read more at WBRZ.

Published: April 30, 2026

By: Sheridan White, Courtney Bell and Avery White, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE – Gov. Jeff Landry declared a state of emergency Thursday to temporarily suspend this year’s congressional elections in Louisiana in response to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that maps of the state’s six districts are unconstitutional.

Landry said that the ruling had enjoined the state from going ahead with the election without drawing new maps.

“Accordingly, the State is currently enjoined from carrying out congressional elections under the current map,” Landry and state Atty. Gen. Liz Murrill said in the statement.

But Peter Robins-Brown, the executive director of Louisiana Progress, a progressive advocacy group that has worked on redistricting issues in Louisiana in recent years, disagreed that the state is legally bound to changing the maps during this election cycle.

“There wasn’t anything in the ruling that said these maps are invalid for this election and needed to be changed before it could happen,” Robins-Brown said.

Read more at KATC.