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voting rights
In Alabama, Organizers Declare 'Day One' of Mass Mobilization to Stop GOP Attacks on Voting Rights
Labor rights and voting rights groups were among those who gathered in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama for the All Roads Lead to the South Day of Action.
May 16, 2026
This is a developing story... Please check back for possible updates...
In a show of resistance to the US Supreme Court's dismantling of the Voting Rights Act and Republicans' efforts to redraw congressional districts across southern states in a bid to retain power despite their party's unpopular agenda, labor and voting rights groups were among those that arrived in Montgomery, Alabama Saturday for "Day One" of a mass mobilization against GOP lawmakers who they said are intent on "resurrecting Jim Crow."
While groups including the Movement for Black Lives and National Jobs With Justice boarded buses in Atlanta Saturday morning to join more than 250 organizations at a rally at the Alabama State Capitol, other organizers began the "All Roads Lead to the South" National Day of Action with a march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama—the same site of the historic 1965 voting rights march that became known as Bloody Sunday.
"We started here because we wanted to stand on sacred ground and consecrate ourselves," said organizer LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the group Black Voters Matter. "You cannot fight hate with hate, you have to stand in the spirit of love, and so look around—this is what love looks like."We’re joining the All Roads Lead to the South coalition in Alabama today to show that We the People will not allow a Jim Crow 2.0.
Today’s march is a powerful reminder: courage and community are how we will get through this.
WATCH: https://t.co/9Z5DOblam1
— Democracy Forward (@DemocracyFwd) May 16, 2026
The march and rally were organized in response to a ramp-up of efforts by the Republican Party and right-wing courts, including the far-right majority on the US Supreme Court, to redraw electoral maps in states including Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee.
The mass mobilization was organized after the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais last month, effectively eviscerating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which has held that voters of color have the right to legally challenge racially discriminatory congressional maps.
The Supreme Court this week allowed Alabama to revert back to an electoral map with just one majority-Black district out of seven, despite that fact that 26% of Alabama residents are Black.
Tennessee Republicans also adopted a new electoral map that splits up the state's only majority-Black district, and the Missouri Supreme Court approved a congressional map that targets the state's 5th District, represented by Rep. Emanuel Cleaver.
Arriving in Montgomery, Tennessee state Rep. Justin Jones (D-52) said voters across the South need "a united front... to take on this new Confederacy... We know what the intent of these governors and state lawmakers are, to dismantle every gain made during the civil rights movement and dismantle the crown jewel of the civil rights movement, which was the Voting Rights Act."
Rep. @brotherjones_ in Montgomery: “We’re here united to take on this new confederacy, 60 years after the Selma March… because we know their intent is to dismantle everything gained during the civil rights movement.” pic.twitter.com/op87I4g8hT
— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) May 16, 2026
"Our parents and grandparents marched, organized, bled, and won," said organizers ahead of the rally. "The Voting Rights Act was theirs. The fight to keep it is ours. Right now, state by state, that law is being dismantled. We know that we cannot fight the same battles the same way. New times demand new tactics—economic pressure, political organizing, community action, culture, and faith. But we know what we know: Organizing works. And we have unfinished business."
At the rally, US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) emphasized the need for solidarity from across the US, with supporters of voting rights mobilizing in states near and far from the South—the current center of the GOP's attacks.
"They think they can draw us out of power. They do not know the sleeping giant they just awakened," said Ocasio-Cortez. "When Black Americans have the right to vote and that vote is protected, our schools get funded. When voting rights are protected, healthcare gets expanded. When voting rights are protected, our country moves forward. And Montgomery, that's what they're actually afraid of."
AOC: “It is time for the North to pull up to the South and let them know exactly what they have uncorked with this injustice. They think they can draw us out of power. They do not know the sleeping giant they just awakened. What they thought was the final blow is actually just… pic.twitter.com/kQvixR2Olv
— Marco Foster (@MarcoFoster_) May 16, 2026
Erica Smiley, executive director of Jobs With Justice, said labor groups joined the mass mobilization because "the bridges we have to cross are not only in Selma."
"Jim Crow didn't just come for the ballot. It came for anyone who tried to organize and have a voice," said Smiley. "Efforts to rollback equality and democracy are happening in the occupied cities, shop floors, and now the halls of the Capitol across the country."
Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.) called for the rally to mark the beginning of a "Freedom Summer," with rallies at "every State House" in the country to pressure state legislators to end the GOP gerrymandering efforts, which President Donald Trump has explicitly called for.
"Let's declare a Freedom Summer and go to every courthouse this summer, to tell those legislators, 'We will not go back,'" said Sewell.
Dozens of satellite events were also taking place across the US on Saturday.
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How to Stop Mega Gerrymandering From Scrambling Democracy
If the Democrats wake up, fire their profiteering consultants, and run on a specific "Compact for America," they could landslide the Trumpitized GOP this November.
May 16, 2026
“Gerrymandering” is the historic term for politicians picking their voters by manipulating congressional and state electoral districts. Redistricting usually happens every 10 years. It is fair to say that most voters don’t want politicians rigging the system to help one party win elections.
Both the Republican and Democratic parties have played this partisan gerrymandering game for years. Recently, the Republicans have become more ruthlessly partisan and have outpaced the Democrats. That is why, for example, in Pennsylvania, Democrats substantially outvote the Republicans but have fewer seats in the House of Representatives.
In the past year, the gerrymandering race has run amok. It was ignited by Tyrant Trump, who told his buddy Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to break with the decennial tradition and get the GOP legislature this year to redistrict Texas to knock out four or five Democrats who are now in Congress.
Then came the tit for tat race. California Gov. Gavin Newsom led a voter referendum that authorized a redistricting that could gain the ruling Democrats an extra four or five seats now held by Republicans. Then more “red states” jumped in along with more “blue states.” The latter mostly did it by voter referendum, such as in Virginia, while the Republicans preferred to do it through GOP-dominated legislatures. Florida’s GOP even disregarded a 2010 state referendum that would have prohibited their recent actions.
The other day, Treacherous Trump emitted this turnoff, “I don’t care about the financial situations of Americans,” as he continues to use the White House to corruptly enrich himself, his family, and cronies.
In Virginia, the state Supreme Court ruled 4 to 3 that the recent redistricting referendum was unconstitutional. The biggest blow came from the six gerrymandering Injustices of the US Supreme Court in the case of Louisiana v. Callais, further gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Their ruling, in effect, outlawed districts drawn to give minority voters a chance to have Black representatives in Congress and in state legislatures. Political pundits are predicting a dramatic decline, as soon as this November’s midterm elections, in the number of Black representatives in the House, presently 59, and Hispanic Representatives, presently 48.
They reflect empirically under-nourished certitude. A couple of them are declaring that the Democrats could win the House of Representatives popular vote by four percentage points and still lose the House to the Republicans in November!
I think these pompous predictors are wrong because they are ignoring too many factors.
First, they are not weighing the prospects of greater voter turnout by minorities due to the indignation they are expressing against the Supreme Court decision and the follow-up by red state legislatures. Many Black voters agree with their leaders that this decision, and others earlier by an unelected court, may drive them back to the Jim Crow years. A 10-20% greater turnout by Black voters could, however, make up for these redrawn districts that favor greater white majorities in the House and state legislatures.
The Hispanic vote was trending toward President Donald Trump because many Hispanic voters believed his lies and fake promises during the 2024 campaign (read the front-page article in The Washington Post, May 11, 2026, by Teo Armus titled “New Congressional Map Draws Ire Among Puerto Rican Voters in Florida.”) There are, however, millions of Latinos in central Florida alone. Many are expressing their anger by saying, “Our voice shouldn’t get diluted” or that their “community is being torn apart.”
Second, the pundits rarely talk about candidates and supporters highlighting long-overdue, highly-popular reforms, agendas, and social safety nets that improve the lives and livelihoods of all voters where they live, work, and raise their families. Mobilizing voters from the right and left around “common ground” advances, such as raising the minimum wage and unfreezing Social Security benefits or providing adequate child tax credits, could break millions of voters out of their knee-jerk attachment to political labels. I’m circulating, for example, a “Winning Compact for America” of 10 proposals backed by a majority of voters, in some cases, a huge majority of left-right voters.
The Winning Compact for America includes:
- Raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to at least $15 per hour, benefiting 25 million workers.
- Raising all the Social Security benefits, frozen for over 45 years, and paying for it by increasing the Social Security tax on the wealthy, benefiting over 60 million elderly. This was supported by about 200 House Democrats in 2022 but was blocked by the Democratic Speaker from going to the floor. Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.), the bill’s champion, can provide additional details.
- Establishing a children’s tax credit, cutting child poverty in half, with over 60 million children benefiting. Very popular with parents regardless of their political party affiliations.
- Instituting Medicare for All, safer, more efficient, and much less stressful than our current approach to healthcare.
- Repealing Trump’s cuts in Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program programs that were benefiting tens of millions of Americans.
- Cracking down on corporate crooks stealing consumer dollars, wages, and worker pensions.
- Adopting social safety nets for families, long available in Western Europe and Canada.
- Passing labor law and campaign finance reforms put forth decades ago.
- Investing in crumbling public services and infrastructures.
- Paying for the above by restoring taxes on the very under-taxed super rich and large corporations (85% approval) and by ending huge corporate welfare giveaways and debloating the runaway, unaudited military budget.
Perhaps the pundits ignore these appealing agendas because the Democratic Party has contracted out too much of their campaigns to corporate-conflicted consultants who subdue such progressive manifestos or "Compacts for America" to avoid upsetting corporate campaign donors.
Another understated factor hails from Trump himself, who every day fuels outrage even among many of his supporters who feel betrayed. The other day, Treacherous Trump emitted this turnoff, “I don’t care about the financial situations of Americans,” as he continues to use the White House to corruptly enrich himself, his family, and cronies. Moreover, going after Pope Leo twice with street language isn’t endearing him to many Catholics. Trump can’t control his fevered mind and mouth.
This entire madness of mega gerrymandering could be ended if members of the House ran at large from their state. Let’s say a state has 10 members of the House. They would run at large, and the top 10 vote-getters would be elected to the House. That is how the first woman elected to Congress in 1916, the great Jeanette Rankin from Montana, won her seat. The two House members ran statewide, and she came in second. Some cities have citywide or at-large elections.
Political scholar Lee Drutman called for Congress to enact a form of proportional representation, which is inherently race-neutral and is operational within other democracies in Western Europe. (See his Substack piece titled, “The Supreme Court Killed Voting Rights and Escalated the Gerrymandering Wars. Here’s What Congress Needs to Do in Response.” May 1, 2026). PR also helps to “break the two-party doom loop that’s driving our insane political death spiral,” he writes.
A more modest existing reform comes from states that have adopted non-partisan electoral commissions, e.g., Iowa and Michigan, by referendum. Voters like this approach better than the politicians’ slicing and dicing their voters to make districts safe for only one party.
Landslide elections—such as Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter in 1980—overwhelmed many gerrymandered districts. If the Democrats wake up, fire their profiteering consultants, and run on a specific "Compact for America," they could landslide the Trumpitized GOP this November.
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MAGA Supreme Court OKs GOP Overthrow of American Democracy
Disenfranching 40% of a state’s citizens cannot be reconciled with representative democracy.
May 14, 2026
Last week the Supreme Court gave a “two-fer” to white supremacists and proponents of Republican autocracy: First, six right-wing justices completed the erasure of the crowning achievement of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, the Voting Rights Act. Second, in the same case, Louisiana v. Callais, the right-winger judges approved of states shaping legislative districts that deny the opposing party any role in government.
In essence, the Supreme Court OK'd the destruction of Congress as an instrument of American democracy.
The 15th Amendment to the Constitution was enacted and ratified five years after the Civil War. The amendment confirmed—in principle—that African-American citizens have the right to vote and to have their votes count.
So said the Constitution. But for almost a century the former Confederate states negated African Americans’ right to vote.
The GOP can achieve its desired result by calling their gerrymandering by another name. Racial gerrymandering, not okay. Partisan gerrymandering (which just happens to negate Black voting power), just fine.
The 15th Amendment also gave Congress the power to enforce its mandate. After years of struggle over civil rights—after peaceful demonstrators in Birmingham confronted snarling police dogs, mass arrests, and lethal bombing; after hundreds of nonviolent students worked for freedom in Mississippi in the face of murder, assaults, and the burning of Black churches; after peaceful marchers for voting rights returned to Selma after being clubbed by state troopers and ridden down by racist possemen—Congress tackled the white supremacist obstacles to African-American voting.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 put an end to the myriad legal schemes that Southern white politicians had used to disenfranchise Black Americans and terminated the ploys used to deny African Americans a fair opportunity to elect representatives of their choice.
The outcome: Even as the segregationist white South moved to the Republican Party, African Americans gained substantial voting power and Black legislators were elected to Congress, state legislatures, and local government offices in meaningful numbers. The promise of the 15th Amendment, that all groups are entitled to a meaningful voting opportunity in a multiracial democracy, was mightily advanced.
But white supremacists and MAGA Republicans never accepted the new reality, so their right-wing agents on the Supreme Court finally throttled the Voting Rights Act for them. When the conservative justices threw out a congressional map that upheld Black voters’ right to have their votes count, they unleashed a new wave of state gerrymandering laws, enacted with extraordinary speed, and designed to make African-American voting futile.
To make things worse, the court justified its decision by affirming the power of states to deny meaningful representation to opposing party voters through gerrymandering.
As the right-wing justices explained, carving congressional districts for the purpose of denying representation to Black people may be forbidden (and good luck proving intent to discriminate, when Republican legislators don’t say so out loud). But doing precisely the same thing is fine when the stated purpose is denying representation to an opposing party’s voters.
Get that? The right-wingers of the United States Supreme Court say that judges must stand by and look, powerless to take action, if a state dominated by Republicans decides to manipulate congressional district maps to weaken or destroy the voting power of Democrats.
In practice it amounts to the same thing. The GOP can achieve its desired result by calling their gerrymandering by another name. Racial gerrymandering, not okay. Partisan gerrymandering (which just happens to negate Black voting power), just fine.
The GOP’s ultimate goal is the same either way: a Congress under MAGA Republican control regardless of voters. A nation in which African-American political influence is crushed.
What does this look like?
After the Supreme Court’s Callais decision, Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature promptly redrew its congressional maps. They sliced up the one district held by a Black Democrat, with the intended outcome that all nine of Tennessee’s representatives will be Republican.
One-third of Tennessee citizens voted for Democrats in 2024. This year that one-third of the population—including the Black voters of Memphis—are to have zero representation in Congress.
South Carolina has begun the same process and anticipates a similar result. Republicans now hold 6 of 7 House seats, and intend to eliminate the one Democrat.
Forty percent of South Carolinians voted Democratic in 2024, and will have zero representation in Congress following redistricting. The one-quarter of South Carolina’s population that are Black will have no district in which their political voice will be heard.
US President Donald Trump has pressed for a similar outcome wherever Republicans control state government. In bright red Indiana (but 38% Democratic), Trump seeks to zero out Democratic representation in Congress.
GOP redistricting is only marginally less extreme elsewhere. In Missouri, for example, 38% of “Show me” state voters are blue, and their representation will be reduced from two to one of the state’s eight congressional seats (12%).
We have separate district elections for Congress so that the range of local communities, with their different racial and ethnic populations, different beliefs, interests, and occupations can have a fair opportunity for representatives of their choosing. Disenfranchisement by gerrymandering thwarts that purpose.
Even more disturbing, Trump’s gerrymandering offensive seeks to flout majority rule by creating a voter-proof Republican Congress.
American voters are increasingly seeing through the failures and the fakery of Donald Trump’s presidency, the broken promises, the corruption, the incompetence, the cruelty. And voters see the price they are paying for Trump’s senseless grandiosity, from inflation to healthcare costs to measles, war, and climate change.
But through it all, congressional Republicans have remained Trump’s loyal, submissive toadies.
Voters will certainly make Republicans pay the price this fall. But Trump—with a big assist from MAGA Justices John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—hopes to keep his hold on Congress, voters be damned. If a solid majority of voters cannot shake a would-be totalitarian’s hold on power, what will be left of our constitutional democracy?
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