Having wrongly already allowed for the unlimited use of raw partisan factors in redistricting, the U.S. Supreme Court is now seemingly poised to forbid the use of racial factors in map making.
While the court may want state legislators to be strictly neutral on race, doing so will lead to even greater political manipulation of the maps and, goaded by President Trump, the GOP will continue to distort maps to their advantage over the desires of the voters.
Fair maps, like those we have in New York, are the best for democracy, but the GOP doesn’t want fair maps.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case involving Louisiana’s efforts to knock down the section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that ensures racial minorities receive congressional representation. Despite having preserved that same section in just mid-2023, the court’s conservative majority seemed open to striking it down; it has, after all, largely stopped caring about precedent, or decency.
We won’t say that the high court is considering gutting the act, one of the foremost legacies of the midcentury Civil Rights movement, if only because it already has. It’s akin to finishing the job, hacking away at one of the landmark legislation’s only remaining planks. The court has already previously allowed explicitly partisan gerrymandering, for example, using tortured reasoning to sign off on what are obviously anti-democratic efforts.
Much of this litigation is predicated on the argument that racism and discriminatory electoral outcomes are effectively a problem that’s been solved, which ignores the fact that much of the progress that’s been made is precisely because of restrictions like the Voting Rights Act.
With such a favorable slate of court rulings and more potentially on the way, Trump’s MAGA Republicans have increasingly dropped even the pretense that they’re not reversing the polarity of the American electoral system, with representatives picking their voters as opposed to the other way around.
Trump, who has a habit of coming out and explicitly saying what the rest of the party was attempting to do surreptitiously, blatantly demanded that the Texas legislature draw in an additional five congressional seats through a heavy-handed redistricting, and that state dutifully complied. In doing so, those legislators opted to strip their own constituents of their electoral voice and take one more step away from our nation’s legacy as a long-running beacon of democracy, no more and no less.
Now North Carolina, a state with a 10 to 4 Republican congressional majority despite being practically evenly split on partisan voter preference, is looking to get in on the action and redistrict to pick up yet another safe GOP seat just for good measure.
These efforts are not just about the individual members who will make up the next Congress, but what Congress itself is even able to do to safeguard its authority as a co-equal branch of government. So far, the House GOP majority under Trump lackey Speaker Mike Johnson has shown itself wholly content to let the president siphon off its constitutional and statutory powers — impounding funds Congress had already appropriated, instituting tariffs that only Congress should have the power to enact, taking military action without even informing Congress of its legal rationale and so on.
In an immediate sense, these redistricting efforts are about keeping it this way: a neutered Congress sitting idly by as Trump strips it of all of its authority and concentrates power on himself. Regardless of any particular political leanings that you might have, this is the exact sort of thing that our three branched government, framed by Founders who had just fought a war against the tyranny of a king, is supposed to prevent.
MAGA lawmakers are already salivating over the prospect of carving up neighborhoods, towns and cities across the nation to cement their power. If it has any integrity left, the high court will say no.
