This story was produced in partnership with Deep South Today, a network of nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsrooms in Louisiana and Mississippi. 

One of the less noted but still significant collateral costs of the contested 2000 election was that it cemented the “Red State vs. Blue State” metaphor in our national consciousness. This has ossified an almost Civil War–esque way of thinking about politics as battles between states. But in many—if not most—cases, the consequential fights are within states, especially between GOP-dominated state governments and their much more Democratic cities.

A flood of state laws across the country have sought to hamstring or reverse local autonomy, often not to advance sound policy, but to undo local Democratic-leaning policies that are disliked by more conservative suburban and rural voters.

This is playing out again in Louisiana, where Republican Gov. Jeff Landry is pushing a slate of bills through the state Legislature framed as “right-sizing” the state’s judicial system. But they are hard to see as anything more than an effort to punish the majority-Black, majority-Democratic New Orleans voters for making decisions state officials dislike, and to make it easier to punish them for such choices in the future.

The first set of bills proposes a constitutional amendment and supporting legislation to make it easier for the Legislature and the governor to remove judges and other locally elected officials. One of the bills would allow the state Legislature to unseat an elected official for “malfeasance or gross misconduct.” Critics point out that these terms are ill-defined, and a Republican-dominated Legislature could pursue politically motivated removals of electeds.

But we can guess what—or, rather, who—a primary target is: New Orleans’ reform-minded district attorney, Jason Williams. Gov. Landry, a former police officer and sheriff’s deputy, has made his dislike of criminal legal reform central to his politics. Barely a month after assuming office in 2024, he called a special session of the Legislature to roll back a set of criminal legal reforms his Democratic predecessor, John Bel Edwards, pushed through a state Legislature with Republican supermajorities in both chambers.

More recently, after a shooting in a Baton Rouge mall left one person dead and five others wounded, Landry criticized Edwards’ reform policies again and said, “We got 18,000 acres at Angola” as a policy response to violence. A video of Landry’s speech was tweeted by Elon Musk.

Louisiana is not the only state to go down this path: Republican state officials regularly target local reform prosecutors. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has removed two reform prosecutors from office over their policy choices, after his predecessor removed murder cases from one district attorney who refused to seek the death penalty. In 2023, Texas passed a law making it easier for anyone to bring cases in court seeking to remove prosecutors over their charging decisions. In 2024, Georgia established a prosecutorial oversight committee that seems designed not to target overly aggressive misconduct, but reform policies. The same year, articles of impeachment introduced........

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