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Last week, the Supreme Court gutted what remained of the 1968 Voting Rights Act.
The right-wing majority ruled that gerrymanders disenfranchising Black people and other minorities can only be ruled unconstitutional if they can be shown to be intentionally racist. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent, the focus on intent rather than outcome creates “an almost insurmountable barrier for challenges to any voting rights issues to prove discrimination.”
When Republicans disenfranchise Black people and brown people, they can now simply claim they are doing so for partisan reasons. In fact, since the Court ruled that intentionally creating minority-minority districts is unconstitutional, states can claim they must prevent Black people from being elected to abide by the law.
The Supreme Court has, intentionally, reestablished the regime of white supremacy and Jim Crow.
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It is difficult to overstate how bleak this decision is. The US was only a true multiracial Democracy for 58 years, but that period has ended. Black and Latino representation at the national level, but even more at the state and local level, is likely to be devastated. There are currently 61 Black representatives in the House. It could be decades before we reach that level again, if ever.
The “could be” here is important, though. Nothing is set in stone. Democrats do not need to acquiesce to fascism. In fact, they have many tools to resist the white supremacists who control state governments in the South and the reactionary majority on the Supreme Court.
They can, and must, fight back.
Republicans turn back the clock 60 years
Following the Supreme Court decision, white Republicans in the South have rushed to disenfranchise Black people and reestablish white power.
Louisiana immediately suspended its House primary elections so it could redraw maps. The GOP no doubt plans to gerrymander Troy Carter and Cleo Fields — the state’s two Black Democrats members of Congress — out of their seats. Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi are also discussing redrawing their maps to prevent the election of the five Democratic representatives in those states. Florida was already in process of drawing a new map to create four new Republican districts.