Published: Feb. 17, 2022
By: Piper Hutchinson, Lura Stabiler and Alex Tirado, LSU Manship School News Service
BATON ROUGE — The only Republican bill that would have increased minority representation through redistricting died on the House floor Wednesday, prompting its author to give his fellow lawmakers a tongue-lashing.
Rep. Barry Ivey, R-Central, authored HB22, a Supreme Court map that would have created a second majority Black district on the state’s seven-member court. The bill made it out of committee on a bipartisan vote but was involuntarily tabled on the House floor, much to the chagrin of its author.
“We’ll just continue to get by here in Louisiana, because we are too stupid to work together,” Ivey said in a no-holds-barred condemnation.
Rep. Mark Wright, R-Covington, moved to table the bill after asking whether it would be better to consider Supreme Court maps during the regular session in March.
Every House Democrat present voted in opposition to tabling the bill, but the motion passed 53-43, with a handful of Republicans, including Rep. Tanner Magee, R-Houma and the second ranking legislator in the House, and Rep. John Stefanski, R-Crowley, chair of the House committee that oversees redistricting voting, against the motion.
Over the last two weeks, Republicans, who hold roughly two-thirds of the seats in the Legislature, have advanced bills to redraw the maps of the state’s six congressional districts, its 105 House districts and its 39 Senate districts without adding any more majority-minority ones.
They have passed bills that maintain the status quo in the racial breakdowns for members of the Public Service Commission and the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, and they advanced a Supreme Court bill that would leave the current district boundaries largely intact.
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LSU Manship School Statehouse Bureau 