In light of yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, the status of the U.S. House primaries is now in limbo. Governor Landry is expected to suspend the primary, saying the state is now restricted from using the current congressional map that the Supreme Court has ruled an unconstitutional gerrymander. Political analyst Scott Hughes says if Landry follows through on that, that means the qualifying process would have to start all over again, because the districts would have changed and there are specific qualifying rules.
“One of which says you can qualify by petition. So you have to give someone so many months to go out and get signatures on a petition, so the clock becomes a huge issue,” Hughes explained.
Hughes says if Landry does indeed suspend the U.S. House primary, that would leave only six months to essentially hold an election from square one, which could make a closed primary untenable.
“The closed primaries present a May 2nd problem. They have to run three rounds. And so, if there’s only two rounds, it’s no problem. If it’s just two rounds, they could say, ‘We’ll go November-December, the historical round, and we’ll be done,"” Hughes said.
Hughes says if the process is not completed by January 3rd, when the next Congress is sworn in, Louisiana would be left with no representation at all in the House, so it might be in the legislature’s best interest to scrap the closed primary for the U.S. House race if Landry suspends next month’s primary.
“They would want to amend that and say, ‘We’re going to do these in open primaries in order to get the race done for this one cycle.’ I believe, since that was a legislative act, they would have that power to effectively waive their own rule for closed primaries,” Hughes noted.