Immediately after “their” justices gutted the Voting Rights Act on Wednesday, Republicans in southern states began plotting how they can best minimize the power of Black voters and gerrymander Democrat lawmakers out of office.
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In their recent decisions gutting the Voting Rights Act (VRA), beginning with Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 and ending with Louisiana v. Callais on Wednesday, the conservatives on the Supreme Court argued that racism in the US is just not a factor anymore compared to when the landmark law was passed 60 years ago. It took mere minutes for southern Republicans to prove them wrong.
“Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito for the majority in Callais before citing the Holder decision, in which Chief Justice John Roberts had argued that “things have changed dramatically” since the VRA was passed.
In both cases, the justices cited the turnout in recent elections. In 2013, Roberts noted that data from the (at the time) most recent election showed that “African-American voter turnout exceeded white voter turnout in five of the six States originally covered by [the VRA’s preclearance provision], with a gap in the sixth State of less than one half of one percent.”
For his part, Alito notes that “Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than white voters in two of the five most recent Presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana.”
You don’t have to be a history buff to understand why African-Americans flocked to the polls in 2008 and 2012 when Barack Obama was on the ballot, which are the two elections Roberts and Alito are talking about as though they are the norm and not outliers.
Since then, that turnout gap has increased to more than 10 percent again. Alito must have known this, which makes his argument of greater parity particularly insidious.
Of course, the Holder decision had a lot to do with the reversal of previous gains.
In fact, the Voting Rights Act is the main reason why many of the discriminatory practices of the post-Civil War South ended, and the predictable outcome of decisions like Holder and Callais is that these states will return to their wily ways to keep Black voters away from the polls and out of elected office.
At the time of the ruling in Holder, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote in her dissent that “throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
Well, thanks to the hyper-partisan conservative majority on the Supreme Court, it will soon be pouring once again in the South.
And the inescapable conclusion is that this is what the justices want to achieve. In his opinion, Alito cited Roberts’s words in Holder, in which he noted that African-Americans “attained political office in record numbers.”
That is about to change.
Completely predictably, Callais will lead to an exodus of Black lawmakers across all levels — from Congress to state and local governments — because racist southern politicians will gerrymander them out of existence.
That process began within hours of the decision being handed down.
Top Republicans across the South immediately called for state legislatures to redraw their districts in a way that would render the votes of African-Americans meaningless throughout the region.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), the favorite to become her state’s next governor, giddily envisioned a map in which the last remaining blue district is purged, and her colleague Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), who parlayed his career as a mediocre football coach into a Senate seat, also seemed thrilled about the prospect of disenfranchising his state’s Black residents, which make up nearly 30 percent of the state’s population.
And, according to The Washington Post, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) plans to suspend his state’s primary to first rig the map some more in the GOP’s favor.
While most states will likely not be able to react this quickly, the decision will probably gain Republicans a few more seats in the upcoming midterms and ensure that the mid-decade redistricting war that Donald Trump began will continue into 2028.
That’s neither in the interest of democracy nor the American people, but that’s not who the six Republican operatives masquerading as Supreme Court justices are working for these days.
