Pretty surprising result in the Supreme Court earlier this week.
A win for voting rights with Chief Justice John Roberts and
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, both obviously conservatives,
joining the liberals to strike down what they are saying is an unfairly and
unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered electoral map in Alabama.
They found that Alabama concentrated Black voters in just one district,
while spreading them out among the others to make it much more difficult to elect
more than one candidate of their choice.
We see this everywhere, including racially motivated.
Usually this sort of technique would be used for partisan gain, but it can also be
used to deflate the political power of racial minorities in certain states.
In Alabama, the Black population is large enough and
geographically compact enough to create a second district, according to the judges.
Just one of its seven congressional districts is majority Black,
in a state where more than one in four residents is black.
You can see the now-invalid map right now,
as it currently stands, it will now need to be rewritten.
Bear in mind, there are some other sort of related maps that could now be
challenged based on what the Supreme Court did.
You can see in Georgia a federal judge last year ruled that some of
Georgia's US House and state legislative districts
likely also violated the Voting Rights Act, like we saw here in Alabama.
And you have that in Louisiana as well.
And so in theory, with these three changes, if they happen and if there's not
further gerrymandering shenanigans, then you could have Black voters across
these states electing theoretically three additional congressional candidates.
What do you all think?
>> Yeah, so this is a shockingly positive decision.
Now, the lower courts were unanimous, so it's actually not a hard decision.
But the fact that this Supreme Court that is 6-3 conservative
made a correct decision is what's shocking.
And so credit to them, to Roberts and
Kavanaugh that voted in the factually correct way.
Of course, the other four were like, pfft, facts, who cares, right?
But the other thing that's really important about this, guys, is that it
could apply to other states like Louisiana and Georgia and other places.
And so it could swing a lot of congressional districts.
And that is relevant both as a matter of justice but also as a matter of politics.
And then, look,
I've gotta throw this in because the media doesn't tell you this often.
But ProPublica did a brilliant job with an article recently and
they're independent and God bless them for it.
But a lot of the times,
the Democrats are complicit with the Republicans in this redistricting.
So the great example is James Clyburn in South Carolina.
That's the piece that ProPublica wrote, explaining that he actually worked with
the Republicans to make his district more heavily Black and Democratic.
Now, it was an overwhelming advantage he didn't need.
It might have cost the Democrats extra seats in South Carolina.
He's like, who cares about Democrats, who cares about African American voters?
I want more power, and I want it guaranteed.
And that's why he worked with the Republicans.
So you need courts sometimes,
cuz a lot of the times the Democrats secretly aren't fighting for you at all.
And they're in cahoots with the Republicans to make their own seats safer.
>> Yeah, Joyce Beatty did the same thing in Ohio with Republicans there,
drawing herself a nice seat at the cost of other Democratic seats.
Lacy Clay and Emanuel Cleaver, I believe,
benefited from a similar kinda gerrymandering in Missouri that involved
the kinda Missouri State Black Caucus and the Republicans there.
If you basically added those up, plus the screwups in New York,
that's the majority right there.
And then you add on top of this the fact that they were
unconstitutionally gerrymandering the states in the South.
It'd be a Democratic House if not for
just those small number of things, forget everything else.
And Louisiana is probably gonna see some redrawn districts as a result of this.
So this actually makes it easier for Democrats to take the House back.
And I also think it shows that the Supreme Court
is still operating within some constraints.
They have pushed the political constraints as far as they can.
But clearly, this is not how Roberts, who eviscerated the Voting Rights Act
just a couple years ago, would have liked to have rule.
So if you have a lifetime appointment and
you have an ideological commit and a political commitment and
you stop short of it, it's only because you felt political constraints.
For whatever reason that maybe they're shepherding,
they're keeping their powder dry so
they can fire away at other things in the near future, what it does show is that
they do feel that they have some limits to their power based on public outrage.
And that's at least something.
>> Yeah, and look, Roberts did make comments in his majority opinion,
saying that he still has concerns about overreach in terms of racial dynamics and
gerrymandering and all that.
But we should also bear in mind Clarence Thomas, who wrote the, I believe, 48-page
dissenting opinion, said that he has long been convinced that the Voting Rights Act
should only apply to your ability to get to the ballot and cast it.
Nothing about whether once you cast it,
it is tailor-made to have no effect whatsoever, which is just insane.
Up until, again, as Ryan referenced there,
the Voting Rights Act was defanged, special scrutiny for
racially discriminatory gerrymandering is decades and decades old.
How can you possibly think that that entire time it was only supposed to
apply to whether someone literally put a fence between you and the polling place?
>> Well, Clarence Thomas voting against African American interests, as usual.
On the other hand, Harlan Crow's house is awfully nice.
>> Yeah.