Transcription
The Supreme Court just did the unthinkable in another 6-3 decision. So, the case is Kalis v. Louisiana, and it will go down as one of the worst decisions of the Roberts court by far, alongside other decisions like Citizens United, because it's really that bad. It's essentially the death blow to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
So, section two was under scrutiny in this case, which is the section of the VRA that prohibited racial gerrymandering that would otherwise dilute the voting power of black and brown voters. And Louisiana Republicans decided to explicitly defy section two, probably so they can challenge it and deny black voters equal representation, even though black people make up a third of the state's population.
At Brett Wilkins of Common Dreams explains, civil and voting rights advocates challenged Louisiana's Republican-drawn and racially rigged congressional map. In 2022, a federal judge agreed that the map likely violated section 2, and the Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that ruling, ordering Louisiana to draw a new map by January 2024. Louisiana complied, but a group of non-black voters challenged the new map, claiming it was a racially rigged creation that violated the 14th Amendment. The Trump administration supported the challengers, arguing that black voters had no right to a second majority-minority district. In other words, white people in Louisiana argued that it was discrimination against them to give black people equal representation. It was discrimination against white people to give black people, which make up a third of the population, just one more majority-minority district. So, they basically weaponized section 2 against itself, to destroy it. And it worked, somehow.
And I say somehow because the Supreme Court bought that argument. They just voted to destroy section two, even though a couple of years ago they voted to uphold section two in the case of Allen v. Milligan. And even though Roberts and Kavanaugh sided with the liberals in that case from 2022, Kavanaugh agreed with a concurring opinion written by Clarence Thomas that argued basically that section 2 would need to go away at some point since racism no longer exists. I'm paraphrasing, but that's the essence of the argument that Kavanaugh agreed with. But little did we know, at some point meant just a couple of years later, because Kavanaugh and Roberts flipped, which means that we're going to go back to the Jim Crow status quo in 2026 as a result of them flipping.
And in a summary for Democracy Docket, Jim Saka explains the ruling effectively invalidates section 2 of the VRA as it has been understood for four decades without explicitly striking down the statute. It now will require proof of intentional discrimination, something Congress did not write into the law. And that's extremely difficult for plaintiffs to show. States may now draw district lines in ways that undercut the political power of minority voters with virtually no limit. While arriving too late in the election cycle to significantly affect November's midterms, the decision gives Republicans an advantage in the fight for control of Congress. By allowing for the dismantling of minority districts currently held by Democrats, the ruling could provide the GOP enough additional seats to lock in the party's control of the House for a generation.
Yeah. So, to be frank, this is really, really, really, really bad. And even though section 2 is technically still in place, it's just not going to actually be able to prevent racial gerrymandering like it was intended to, unless there's concrete evidence of overt racism. So, basically, lawmakers have to get caught explicitly saying that they're redrawing district maps to keep black people out of power because they're racist. And if you don't have that evidence, if there's no smoking gun there, then they can do what they want and get away with it. So, we're supposed to believe that Republicans are gerrymandering black voters into oblivion for non-racist reasons. We're supposed to view it as a mere coincidence that all of the black voters in historically racist southern states are suddenly losing their voting power to white voters because, coincidence, I guess, since racism is over according to this dumbass, illegitimate Supreme Court. It is truly, truly outrageous.
Now, I will note that it's probably too late, and the article pointed this out as well, for this to take effect this cycle. Although, with that being said, Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn is already calling for her state's legislature to hold a special session so that way they can disenfranchise black voters before November's election. So, there's that. But, you know, it seems unlikely that most southern states will be able to get this done in time for November's election. So, Democrats are still probably going to take back the House at the end of the year. But that might actually be the last time they hold control of the House for a very, very long time. And by the 2028 election, I think it's safe to assume that Republicans will have a very big advantage because of what the Supreme Court did, even if by then people are completely fed up with Donald Trump.
Now, a report conducted last year by Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter projected a loss of 25 to 30% of Congressional Black Caucus members and as much as 11% of Congressional Hispanic Caucus members. And this map posted by Newswire shows the difference that the law could make. Democrats currently hold 24 seats across the South, but if Republicans redraw districts to dilute black voting power, they could gain an additional 12 seats by erasing representation across the South for black and brown people.
So, we're quickly moving to one-party rule in this country when it was already the case that our shitty system privileged conservatives. Because think about this, the Electoral College already advantages Republicans in cycle after cycle. They're able to take power even though they got less votes than their opponents. That's not democratic. And the Senate, as an institution, is inherently undemocratic because it gives states like Wyoming with a population of 600,000 people the same amount of senators as states like California, which has a population of 40 million people. That is inherently unfair and undemocratic. But the House is supposed to balance it all out, in theory, until now, because conservatives are going to have an advantage with regard to the House too, since they can, uh, be as racist as they want to be.
So, contrary to popular belief, the founders were not geniuses. They were dumbasses who designed our entire system of governance around the demands of inbred cousin-fucking slave owners. And 250 years later, we can still see how that constitutional design is holding us back by advantaging generations of inbred cousin-fucking conservatives who no longer own slaves but hate black people just as much as their slave-owning ancestors did. And even though we've tried to erase the advantages of racist white people and level the playing field, the system always reverts back to homeostasis.
And I want to be clear, the Supreme Court has been working towards this for a very, very long time. This isn't necessarily a new phenomenon. They have been trying to dismantle our democracy piece by piece. Jim Saka of Democracy Docket explains, "The erosion began in 2013 when Shelby County v. Holder struck down the VRA's pre-clearance provisions, which had required certain jurisdictions with discriminatory pasts to get the federal government's okay before amending election laws." The 5-4 opinion penned by Roberts cleared the way for southern states to implement a host of electoral changes making it harder to cast a ballot, like voter ID laws, as well as more local changes that often flew below the media radar. After falling for decades after the VRA's enactment, the racial turnout gap started increasing again since Shelby, especially in counties once covered by pre-clearance. The dam sprung another leak in 2019 after Sotomayor's decision in Rucho. While the court maintained that partisan gerrymandering was illegal, the majority concluded it was a non-justiciable question that courts were ill-equipped to resolve. By essentially declaring partisan gerrymandering to be beyond the reach of the judiciary, Rucho enabled today's spate of mid-decade redistricting efforts.
And fast forward to today, and Republicans can dilute the voting power of minority voters again, so long as they pinky promise that they're not doing it for racist reasons. That's what it's come to. Now, people will argue that it's technically not being done for racist reasons since they're only disenfranchising black voters because they vote Democrat, and they arguably wouldn't disenfranchise black voters if they voted Republican. But I'd counter that diluting the power of a minority group for any reason, even if it's motivated purely by partisanship, is still inherently fucked up and racist. But the Supreme Court disagrees with me. And since they have power and I don't, logic goes out the window and racism reigns supreme yet again in the United States of America. So surprising.
So, this really is death to democracy by a thousand cuts. And you could already argue that the US never lived up to that democracy label. But the important thing was that we were moving closer and closer towards true democracy, or polyarchy. These days, it's really hard to think of elections in the United States as anything other than window dressing, which is the case in every other authoritarian regime throughout the world that holds elections, but those elections don't really facilitate any meaningful transfers of power. Because think about this, it's already the case now that a handful of billionaires control all of our media and social media. They're also spending more money than ever on elections thanks to Citizens United. So, our voting power has been diluted and our voices are being drowned out by billionaires. And now we've fallen so fucked up far that Jim Crow is making a comeback. It's just so depressing. I wish I had words to encourage you, but it's really, really bleak, guys. And we're forced to live in this dystopia because our stupidly designed system that was designed by fuckwits was designed to perpetually hand power to a racist minority party that wants to rob us of every penny we have until we die. Also, the richest people in the country can get even richer. It's just, it's so sad. And I don't know how you change this. How do you fix this with anything short of a constitutional amendment? But like, how do you get constitutional reform when our so-called democracy is designed to prevent the will of the majority from being implemented? It, it seems like the system is an unfixable system.
But I think in the short term, Democrats at the state level need to completely forego their independent redistricting endeavors and aggressively, I mean aggressively, gerrymander Republicans out of power until every last Republican voter in their state is completely and utterly disenfranchised. That is not the ideal solution. I don't like living in this shit in this situation. Like, I, I don't want this. I've always been against partisan gerrymandering, but this is the world that we have to adapt to. We have no choice. Democrats tried to even the playing field and they've offered legislation to end partisan gerrymandering at the national level, and not a single Republican supported that. So, in the face of partisan and racial gerrymandering, Democrats are left with no choice but to meet rat-fucking with more rat-fucking. It is a race to the bottom, to be sure, but as I said in my video from earlier today, it's a fight for survival at this point. We have to do what we need to do to survive. Democracy, for all intents and purposes, is already dead. And we have to steamroll Republicans before they steamroll us. It's going to be hard because again, they have an institutional advantage baked into the system for them. But in the states where Democrats do have power, they have no choice but to be as ruthless as Republicans are.