Slate | May 5, 2026
Louisiana 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.
A second set of bills target judicial and prosecutorial staffing in New Orleans and beyond. Two bills aim to cut the number of criminal court judges in New Orleans by reducing the parish’s appellate court from 12 judges to 10, and by cutting the criminal trial court judges from 12 to nine. Proponents of the bills claim that the judicial cuts are based on a recent analysis of caseload studies, but opponents have countered that the analysis relied on flawed metrics.
Another bill takes aim at prosecutorial staffing. In Louisiana, parishes are free to hire as many assistant district attorneys as they like, but the state subsidizes the salaries by $50,000 per position for a fixed number. Currently, the law subsidizes 83 ADA positions for Orleans Parish. The new bill shifts from a fixed number to subsidizing one ADA per 7,500 people in the parish. For New Orleans, this would mean the state funding about 48 ADAs, a cut of 42 percent to the subsidy.
At first blush, gutting the DAs office and hampering the criminal courts seems inconsistent with the tough-on-crime rhetoric of Landry and his fellow Republicans. But it is likely consistent once you realize that tough on crime is far less about public safety and far more about social control of disliked groups.
Source: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/05/louisiana-republicans-new-orleans-voters.html