With the Louisiana house expected to vote on new district maps in the coming days, Speaker Johnson is pressuring Republicans in his home state to defy the Supreme Court and push through a map with only one majority Black district.

The Republican-controlled Louisiana senate voted 27 to 11 Wednesday to advance a congressional district map that would create a second majority Black district in the state — likely leading to another Democratic seat among the state’s six House seats.

The map, which enjoys the support of Governor Landry, a Republican, is the result of an order from a federal court from June 2022 that found that the state’s maps violated the Voting Rights Act by illegally diluting Black voting power.

The court’s decision, though, was paused until the Supreme Court could rule on a similar case coming out of Alabama. In June 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that Alabama also had violated the Voting Rights Act, meaning that Louisiana needed to redraw its maps as well.

A special session of the Louisiana legislature was then scheduled to enact maps by the deadline, January 30, meaning the state house will likely take up the maps in the next week.

Mr. Johnson, who represents Louisiana’s Fourth Congressional District is pressuring the Republican-controlled state House to push through the current maps, which were found to be racially gerrymandered in 2022.

“We’ve just seen, and are very concerned with, the proposed Congressional map presented in the Louisiana Legislature,” Mr. Johnson said in a statement. “It remains my position that the existing map is constitutional and that the legal challenge to it should be tried on merits so the State has adequate opportunity to defend its merits.”

Mr. Johnson added that, in his opinion, there are “multiple other map options that are legally compliant and do not require the unnecessary surrender of a Republican seat in Congress.”

While it’s not clear whether pressure from the state’s most prominent elected official will be able to sway the decisions of state legislators, whether the maps go through will depend on the actions of Republicans there, who control 73 of the 105 state house seats.

On Tuesday, Congressman Troy Carter, who is the only Democrat and the only Black member of the House delegation from Louisiana — a state that is 33 percent Black — urged members of the state legislature to “do the right thing.”

Mr. Carter said he is “willing to work with anyone to produce a constitutional map creating two majority-minority districts that give Black candidates a meaningful opportunity to win.”

In the Louisiana house, a proposal different from the senate’s plan has already advanced out of committee. It would make the seat currently occupied by Congressman Garret Graves a Black majority district.

The proposal would create a second Black majority district, though both Black majority districts would have a Black majority accounting for less than 51 percent of the population — one district would be 50.3 percent Black, and the other 50.6 percent Black.

Under that proposal, Black residents would still make up a minority of the voting-age population in the Black majority districts — about 48 percent in both districts. 

While the decisions made in the Louisiana house may only swing a single U.S. House seat to one party or another, redistricting battles in Louisiana, Alabama, and across the country could, in sum, swing control of the House toward either Republicans or Democrats.

After the 2022 midterm election, Republicans commanded a 222-seat majority in the House, a majority that has shrunk to just 218 in recent weeks due to retirements and absences.