One Supreme Court Ruling, Three State Scrambles: How Callais Reshaped the 2026 Midterm Map in Seventeen Days
[Updated May 20, 2026 with correction: HB 842 was in fact signed by Governor Landry on May 14 as Act 7 of the 2026 Regular Session, before this article ran. See the follow-on dispatch linked in the article.] Five days after the Callais cascade article ran, the bills it anticipated have taken shape on the legis.la.gov docket. The Louisiana Senate passed SB 121 on May 14 along party lines, 27 to 10 — a congressional map that reduces the state's majority-Black districts from two to one and absorbs Representative Cleo Fields' Sixth District into surrounding Republican-leaning territory. The same week, both chambers adopted the conference report on HB 842, which voids the May 16 and June 27 U.S. House ballots, returns the 2026 congressional races to a jungle primary, and sets a November 3 open primary with a December 12 runoff. As of Tuesday morning SB 121 sits with the House and Governmental Affairs Committee awaiting hearing. Litigation has not yet been filed.
Correction (May 20, 2026): This article, published May 19, reported that HB 842 had been signed by both chamber presidents but not yet by Governor Landry. In fact, Landry signed HB 842 as Act 7 of the 2026 Regular Session on May 14, five days before this article ran. The error reflected an over-reliance on legis.la.gov's bill-action log, which does not track gubernatorial signatures; the Louisiana Secretary of State announced the signature in a May 14 press release. The body below preserves the original text; Wire's follow-on Act 7 dispatch at /power/louisiana-hb842-act7-signed-landry-may-14-2026 covers the corrected facts. SB 121, the redistricting bill, remained pending in the House and Governmental Affairs Committee as of May 19 and had not been signed by Landry — the article's reporting on SB 121 status holds.
The day after the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais, Governor Jeff Landry suspended the state's U.S. House primaries by executive order and gave the legislature until July 15 to draw a new map. Five days after Wire's overview of the resulting cascade across four states, the Louisiana side of that story has taken concrete legislative form. Two bills now carry the work the executive order deferred: one redraws the congressional districts, the other rebuilds the election calendar around the redraw.
Both bills are on the legis.la.gov docket for the 2026 Regular Session. Neither is yet law.
SB 121: a five-to-one map, one majority-Black district
Senate Bill 121, by Senator Jay Morris, R-West Monroe, passed the Louisiana Senate on May 14 on a 27-10 party-line vote and was reengrossed for the House. The bill replaces the post-Robinson map struck down in Callais with one that keeps a single majority-Black district and redraws the remaining five seats as Republican-leaning.
The Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee heard the bill over a session that ran from 7 p.m. on May 12 to 4:30 a.m. on May 13. The committee advanced SB 121 on a 4-3 party-line vote after rejecting a competing two-majority-Black-district proposal. Floor amendments were adopted before passage on May 14.
The new District 2 — currently held by Representative Troy Carter, D-New Orleans — is built around the Mississippi River corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Per the engrossed bill text, the district is composed of all of St. James Parish plus listed precincts in nine other parishes: Ascension, Assumption, East Baton Rouge, Iberville, Jefferson, Orleans, St. Charles, St. John the Baptist, and West Baton Rouge. The bill's own plan statistics put the district at 776,324 total population and 602,109 voting-age residents, with the largest VAP shares in Orleans (264,789), Jefferson (148,126), and East Baton Rouge (83,800) parishes. December 2025 voter registration in the proposed district is 60.9% Democratic; the remaining five districts each show Democratic registration between 24.6% and 34.1%.