Louisiana eliminating this clerk’s office is an attack on Black political power

We’re awaiting the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, a case about how to draw congressional maps that may bring Chief Justice John Roberts’ final blow against a Voting Rights Act he already weakened. But in the meantime, the Louisiana Legislature has been engaged in an even more transparent attempt to diminish Black political strength. In November, 68% of voters in the majority-Black city of New Orleans chose as clerk of criminal district court Calvin Duncan, a jailhouse lawyer who was imprisoned for 28 years for a murder he didn’t commit. In what is the first legislative session since then, white lawmakers far removed from New Orleans (politically if not geographically) both chambers have now voted to eliminate the office that Duncan won before he can occupy it.

This Video Is Trending Right Now →

We can count on the state Senate approving some minor amendments to the bill — perhaps as early as Monday — and Gov. Jeff Landry has promised to sign the bill once it reaches his desk.

For the past two presidential cycles, many Democrats have argued that “democracy is on the ballot.” The implication was that Donald Trump represented a grave threat to the future of our republic. And Trump’s pardoning of Jan. 6 insurrectionists, his vote-throttling SAVE Act, his moves against birthright citizenship, his hypocritical stance against mail-in voting and his administration’s refusal to swear off sending immigration officers to the polls in November are all signs that he is hostile to full participation in democracy. And Roberts, who has had it in for the Voting Rights Act since he worked in the Reagan administration, and the other conservatives on the court appear to be equally hostile.

However, threats to democracy exist outside the White House and the Supreme Court: Plenty of states — and, to a much lesser extent, some local governments — have been choking out democracy themselves.

Preemption, in which a state government overrules the decision of a local government, has been rampant for decades, and it has had the expected effect of weakening Black political strength. Then there are those states that tyrannically strip away the authority of local governments. This week, Tennessee passed a law that will put political appointees, and not the duly elected school board, in charge of the Memphis-Shelby County school system, whose students are more than 70% Black. Mississippi passed a law this month that strips Jackson (the second-Blackest big city in the country) of majority control of its long-troubled water system. In 2023, as Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis, a Black woman, was pursuing a prosecution against Trump, Gov. Brian Kemp signed a bill to stop “rogue or incompetent prosecutors” who “refuse to uphold the law.” That was an attack on the Black voters of Atlanta.

But Duncan may soon be the most recognizable victim of such plantation-style attacks on democracy. Duncan got elected, and all of a sudden his office — which maintains the records used in a busy criminal court — was deemed superfluous. When the bill becomes law, those records are to be handled by the civil court clerk.

Knowing the future of his office was in doubt, Duncan defiantly took the oath of office Tuesday, ahead of the scheduled May 4 start of the term. The Louisiana Legislature is still racing to have Gov. Landry sign the bill eliminating his office before May 4.

State Sen. Jay Morris, a Republican who lives about five hours from New Orleans, says he didn’t talk to anybody in the city before filing his bill: “It wouldn’t have made a difference. There was no point in that.” Morris hasn’t been convincing that his real motivation is saving money. Louisiana’s Republican leaders, especially Attorney General Liz Murrill, who wrongly claims Duncan wasn’t exonerated, have seemed dead set on putting Duncan in his place — and, by extension, putting the voters of New Orleans in theirs.

To be clear, this not the Louisiana Legislature’s first expression of racist paternalism. For more than 10 years after Hurricane Katrina, the state maintained control of New Orleans schools, in the same manner Tennessee is taking control of the schools in Memphis. And when the Crescent City’s elected officials voted to remove a quartet of white supremacist monuments blighting its landscape, members of the Louisiana Legislature tried — unsuccessfully, but still — to strip the city of its power to take them down. Notably, their counterparts in Alabama did succeed in passing a bill protecting Confederate monuments — to keep any uppity cities there from following New Orleans’ lead.

Roberts justified a 2013 ruling weakening the Voting Rights Act with the specious claim that the “blight of racial discrimination in voting” that had “infected the electoral process in parts of our country for nearly a century” no longer existed. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously dissented that Roberts’ thinking was akin to “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” To the extent that there was less apparent discrimination, Ginsburg argued, it was because the Voting Rights Act was there to prevent it.