EVANS CUTCHMORE

CIVIC ACCOUNTABILITY

They're Redrawing the Map. Literally.

A week that felt like a slow-motion emergency, and why writers and thinkers cannot afford to look away.

By Kim M. Braud | Evans Cutchmore

Published March 15, 2026 | New Orleans

Last week was not a normal news week. It wasn't even a normal bad news week. It was the kind of week where you keep refreshing the page thinking you've misread something, and you haven't.

Let me break it down.

Here's the number that should stop you cold: 15 states. That's how many are currently in the middle of redrawing their congressional maps - mid-decade, outside the normal post-census cycle, and overwhelmingly in one partisan direction.

Alabama. Florida. Louisiana. Tennessee. Texas. North Carolina. Mississippi. South Carolina. That's eight enacted or near-enacted maps in a single month.

In Tennessee, the legislature passed a redrawn map that eliminates every Democratic-leaning district and leaves no majority-Black districts in the state. And when Memphis Representative Justin Pearson showed up to a redistricting meeting to represent his constituents, he was physically blocked from entering.

That happened. Last week.

In Louisiana, the redistricting fight is playing out in real time both in the courts and in the capitol hallways. The hearing on Louisiana's congressional maps drew testimony from four of the only African-American representatives the state has had since 1877 - U.S. Rep. Cleo Fields, former U.S. Rep. Cedric Richmond, former U.S. Rep. William Jefferson, and former U.S. Rep. Troy Carter. They testified about what is at stake: the survival of a second majority-Black district, currently being challenged in the Supreme Court case Louisiana v. Callais.

The committee hearing itself broke down into a verbal argument on the floor. That is not a metaphor. People were shouting.

The through-line in all of this is the Supreme Court's weakening of the Voting Rights Act. Post-ruling, GOP-led legislatures in state after state have moved quickly, some would say aggressively, to redraw maps in ways that consolidate political power. Analysts estimate this wave could flip five to nine or more House seats. Lawsuits are being filed in nearly every state where maps are being enacted.

While all of that was happening at the national and state level, two women in Baton Rouge, Marian Gbaiwon and Kaitlyn Collins, filed for the recall of Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry and Baton Rouge Mayor Sid Edwards.

That kind of citizen action rarely makes the national headlines. It should. It is exactly the kind of thing that writers, particularly those working in public interest spaces, should be watching closely.

Also in Louisiana: the legislature pushed to remove Calvin Duncan from his elected position as Clerk of Court. The New Orleans City Council responded by scheduling a special hearing, one to appoint an interim clerk to fill the newly created vacancy, and a second to call an election to fill the seat permanently.

The pattern of elected officials being maneuvered out of their positions is worth tracking.

Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is reportedly considering a ban on SSRIs - the class of antidepressants that includes Lexapro, Prozac, Zoloft, Celexa, Paxil, and Luvox.

Let's be plain about what that means. These medications are not fringe treatments. They are among the most widely prescribed drugs in the country, used by people managing depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD, and a range of other conditions. Many people are not managing, they are surviving, because these medications exist.

You cannot frame a policy that strips access to mental health treatment as a wellness initiative. The people most likely to be harmed are not abstract. They are in your community. They may be in your family. They may be you.

If SSRIs are restricted or banned, the downstream effects - on families, on workplaces, on healthcare systems - will be significant and measurable. This is not speculation. It is what happens when people who need medication cannot access it.

President Trump pointed at ABC News correspondent Rachel Scott during a press event and called her “a bitch” - on record, in public - after she asked him about rising gas prices.

This is not normal. And the fact that it is becoming normalized in political coverage is its own story. Journalists, especially women journalists, asking questions in the line of their job should not have to absorb that. Full stop.

The Guardian published a piece citing a study arguing that New Orleans relocation must begin now due to sea level rise. The internet, predictably, decided this meant New Orleans is falling into the ocean tomorrow.

The nuance got lost immediately, as nuance tends to when people are scared and scrolling fast.

The study is serious. The conversation about coastal cities, climate adaptation, and managed retreat is serious. But the panic spiral that followed, particularly for residents who live and work and create here, deserves more careful handling than it got.

New Orleans writers and artists have long documented what it means to build something permanent in a place the world keeps declaring impermanent. That conversation is not over. It is only getting more urgent.

This one is buried in budget documents most people will never read, which is exactly why it matters.

Louisiana's Board of Regents quietly changed the funding formula for public universities - specifically, removing the “underrepresented minority completer” metric from the calculation. The result:

·         Southern University system: $1.5 million gone

·         Grambling State University: $899,000 gone

·         Southern University at New Orleans: $298,000 gone

The change was triggered by Trump administration anti-DEI executive orders. The interim president of the Southern University system said plainly that the new formula “will put us in the red” for the 2026–27 academic year.

These are not abstract numbers. These are scholarships. Faculty positions. Programs. Futures. Students are still walking to class at Southern, Grambling, and SUNO expecting those institutions to be standing when they graduate.

The Board of Regents has been operating on a frozen budget for three years. This is on top of that.

RFK Jr. also fired every single inspector from the CDC's Vessel Sanitation Program - the people responsible for investigating disease outbreaks on cruise ships.

This happened as a deadly hantavirus outbreak was reported on a cruise ship at sea.

The United States has also withdrawn from the World Health Organization.

There is no backup plan in that sentence.

If you are a writer - fiction, nonfiction, memoir, journalism, any of it - you are a person who pays attention to the shape of the world. That is the job, even when you are writing about something that has nothing to do with politics.

What happened last week is not just news. It is texture. It is context. It is the world that your readers are living in when they pick up your book or click on your essay or sit down with your newsletter.

The redistricting maps. The HBCU funding cuts. The medication bans being floated. The fired inspectors. The women in Baton Rouge who got up and filed paperwork anyway. These are all stories about power - who has it, who is trying to hold onto it, and who is -paying the price.

Writers document these moments. Writers give them shape and weight and meaning when the news cycle has already moved on.

That work matters. Even when it is heavy. Especially when it is heavy.