Republican Congressman Garret Graves, whose district was redrawn to create a majority of Black voters, said he still intends to run for reelection.
Graves criticized lawmakers for passing a map he believes was haphazardly drawn to satisfy only a demographic, versus "communities of interests."
“This looked more like a kid, a two-year-old with a crayon than it looked like an actual deliberate effort to draw new congressional maps that help out or improve the representation of the citizens of Louisiana,” said Graves.
Graves said the map is very similar of the one the courts rejected in the 1990s, and he’s confident it will be rejected again. While some lawmakers say they had no choice but to pass a map with two majority-Black districts, Graves said otherwise.
“Folks kept saying oh well we had to do this, it was a court mandate. That’s not true and if we have attorneys in the state of Louisiana that believed that there was some sort of court mandate, they should be disbarred, that’s ridiculous,” said Graves.
In the meantime, he said he’ll see how it plays out in the courts and because he’s in line to become the new chair of the House Transportation Committee, which oversees funding for roads and bridges, coastal restoration, and FEMA, to name a few.
Graves said he might look at running in another one of the four congressional districts that include Baton Rouge.
“And determining which one of those would make the most sense for us to run in and that way we would be able to continue this pathway of becoming the next Chair of the Transportation Committee,” said Graves.