Last month, we reported that Louisiana Republicans decided to postpone the state’s congressional primaries amid the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision to strip away Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which resulted in the blocking of a Black-majority congressional district in Louisiana just weeks before the election. And in doing so, the Louisiana GOP disregarded some 45,000 ballots that had already been cast.
And now, Louisiana’s Republican governor, Jeff Landry, is playing around in Louisianans’ faces about it — specifically Black Louisianans.
From Democracy Docket:
In an interview airing Sunday on CBS’ 60 Minutes, reporter Cecilia Vega asked Landry what would happen to the votes already cast in the congressional primaries, which Landry suspended in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Callais v. Louisiana, calling it an “election emergency.”
“Oh, those ballots are discarded and, and those voters will vote again in November,” Landry replied.
“You say that like it’s not a big deal,” Vega then remarked.
“Well, it’s not a big de– it’s not my fault,” Landry said. “If anybody has a grievance, take it to the United States Supreme Court.”
First of all, if one has to declare that “it’s not my fault” while defending the thing they’re trying to distance themselves from, that thing is probably indefensible. Secondly, nothing about the SCOTUS decision required Louisiana’s primaries to be postponed. As Democratic state Rep. Kyle Green said in April, “The Court’s decision does not halt the election process on its own, and any attempt to suspend or disrupt an ongoing election at this stage would raise serious constitutional concerns.”
Actually, it was Democratic state Sen. Royce Duplessis, who represents the New Orleans area, who made the more concerning point in response to the Louisiana GOP’s decision to postpone the primaries.
“This is going to cause mass confusion among voters — Democrats, Republicans, white, Black, everybody,” Duplessis said. “What they’re effectively doing is changing the rules of the game in the middle of the game. It’s rigging the system.”
But Landry says it’s “no big deal” that more than 45,000 voters who already voted have had their early-voting rights taken away as a result of the Supreme Court ruling that a majority-Black district was unconstitutional. The ruling essentially made it so that creating majority Black districts is illegal, while breaking up majority Black districts in an intentional effort to dilute Black voting power is perfectly fine.
And Landry, like the rest of his fellow white nationalists, views that as a colorblind approach to gerrymandering.
“You cannot say that we are all created equal…and then allow a law to sort people based upon race,” Landry declared.
My brother in white, fragile and delusional Christ, the founding fathers of this nation said “all men are created equal” while owning enslaved Black people. Stop it.
The fact is, if Republicans were so colorblind, they wouldn’t be aware of how overwhelmingly Black people vote Democrat, and they wouldn’t be letting that information inspire them to redraw their maps with the expressed purpose of making their states’ districts less Black. Hell, Republicans in Tennessee, Alabama, and other red states barely let the ink dry on the SCOTUS decision before they started targeting the few Black districts in their states for redistricting — which they wouldn’t do and couldn’t possibly do if they were truly colorblind.
Of course, Landry’s denial isn’t surprising, considering he still subscribes to the absurd Caucasian conservative narrative that the election of former President Barack Obama proves we live in a post-racial United States of America.
More from Democracy Docket:
In his majority opinion in Callais, Justice Samuel Alito decimated what remained of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), a landmark civil rights law enacted in 1965, relying on faulty data to argue that institutional racism has been relegated to the history books. Landry largely agreed with Alito.
“I mean, think about it. Barack Obama was elected twice as the United States president. We’ve had a number of minorities elected. We’ve seen a rise of Republican candidates who are Black get elected,” Landry said. “I mean, are we really trying to drug [sic] up the past only to continue a failed narrative?”
The failed narrative, he added, was “that people in Louisiana are racist… that basically we won’t elect black people.”
No Black candidate has won a statewide office in Louisiana since Reconstruction. The only four Black congressmen elected in Louisiana all came from majority-black districts created pursuant to the VRA. And all four testified against drawing new maps last week.
White conservatives spent all eight of Obama’s years in office calling him an illegal immigrant, a closeted Muslim (as if there were anything inherently wrong with being an actual Muslim), and an illegitimate president, to the point where he felt compelled to show two forms of his birth certificate to combat racist lies that he was ineligible to be president based entirely on the fact that he’s a Black man with an African name.
Then white conservatives looked at the buffoonish, barely literate, outwardly bigoted white nationalist who became the face of the racist anti-Obama birther movement, and they said, “Yeah, that’s who we should put in the White House next.”
America is every bit the racist country it has always been. Landry knows it. President Donald Trump knows it. The GOP knows it. The conservative justices on the Supreme Court know it. And they’re all denying systemic racism against Black people by simultaneously perpetuating it.
SEE ALSO:
Louisiana Republicans Postpone Primary Elections Following SCOTUS Decision
From George Floyd to Jacques Beauregard: America’s Racist Rebound
Louisiana GOP Passes Bill Eliminating Calvin Duncan’s Office
Louisiana GOP Wants To Pass Bill Preventing Calvin Duncan From Taking Office
