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‘Brazen Partisan Power Grab’: Florida Supreme Court Defies State Constitution to Give GOP Another Redistricting Win
Florida's constitution explicitly bans partisan gerrymandering. But a court full of DeSantis appointees just upheld maps that give the GOP 24 of the state's 28 seats with no time to reverse it before November.
Jun 11, 2026
In defiance of state law and the will of voters, the Florida Supreme Court has handed Republicans another major win in the redistricting wars in time for this year’s midterms, approving a ruthlessly gerrymandered map that could hand another four US House seats to the GOP.
Florida’s state constitution is unusually explicit in its ban on partisan gerrymandering; the Fair Districts Amendment (FDA) approved in 2010 by 63% of voters expressly states that maps may not be drawn “with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent.” The court has struck down previous attempts by Republicans to draw more favorable maps on these grounds as recently as 2015.
But six of the seven justices that make up the current court have been appointed by Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. And when voting rights groups challenged a new map signed by the governor last month that is projected to give Republicans an advantage in 24 of the state’s 28 House districts, the right-wing court gave DeSantis what he wanted.
By a 6-1 ruling, the court on Wednesday declined to rule on the merits of the case, denying opponents' request for an emergency injunction, with the majority arguing that, despite the rapidly approaching election, this was not enough of a reason to rule on it while it's still being reviewed by a lower court.
The lone dissenter, Justice Jorge Labarga, who happens to be the only justice not appointed by DeSantis, argued that the case could be reviewed under the court's "pass-through" provision, which allows the court to expedite rulings on matters of great public importance.
"Surely," he said, "the upcoming 2026 congressional elections affecting the representation of millions of Floridians meet that threshold.”
With the state’s primaries set for August 18, this virtually guarantees that, despite its unconstitutionality, the map will be in place come November, as Republicans across the nation try to "pack and crack" enough Democratic strongholds to cling to control of the House in 2026.
In a post to social media, Florida's Republican Attorney General, James Uthmeier, celebrated the order as a “COMPLETE AND TOTAL VICTORY.”
The Florida Supreme Court has REJECTED the challenge to the state’s redistricting plan and new map.
This assures that the recently enacted map will be in place for the 2026 election.
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) June 10, 2026
Opponents of the map—including Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, and the League of United Latin American Citizens—have said that the governor has made no effort to hide the overtly partisan nature of his redistricting push, which he carried out rapidly under an emergency session of the state legislature without public input.
In their lawsuit last month, they pointed out that the governor himself provided a color-coded version of the map to Fox News to highlight projected GOP gains—although Republicans won just under 57% of votes in House elections across Florida in 2024, they’d be expected to control nearly 86% of seats under the new maps.
Meanwhile, Jason Poreda, a senior DeSantis adviser who has described himself as the map's "drawer" has acknowledged that he used "partisan data" to draw the map in spite of the FDA.
As is the case with many of the maps drawn to maximize GOP power, DeSantis' cracks up majority-minority districts, including one predominantly Black district in Palm Beach and Broward County, and splinters the Orlando-Kissimmee area's Latino community across four districts.
And here is the new Florida congressional map in Dave's Redistricting: https://t.co/fTqDHjncwz pic.twitter.com/UTxflFazT0
— The Redistrict Network (@RedistrictNet) June 10, 2026
“The fact that this is a partisan gerrymander is as obvious as it is unconstitutional,” said Bradley Heard, deputy legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which represented the plaintiffs last month. “And while this unnecessary map is egregious in how it advantages Republicans and disadvantages Democrats, the people who will suffer the most if it is allowed to stand are once again Black and Brown communities, whose voices are consistently silenced in these redistricting battles."
Florida Circuit Judge Joshua Hawkes, a DeSantis appointee who upheld the maps last month, declined to weigh in substantively on the question of whether the new map violated the FDA, but said it was more in line with the maps favored by the US Supreme Court in the recent Louisiana v. Callais decision, which struck at the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by effectively ending protections for districts drawn to give representation to nonwhite voters.
While Hawkes also did not weigh in on Republican arguments that the entire FDA should be thrown out because of Callais, he said it was ultimately fine for the court to defer ruling on DeSantis' map because "to the extent the court has to balance Florida’s FDA prohibition of improper partisan intent and the United States Constitution’s Equal Protection guarantees, it seems clear that the potential partisan intent is the lesser of the two evils."
The Callais decision has given Republicans a decisive upper hand in the redistricting wars that were kicked off last year when President Donald Trump called on red states to enact unprecedented hyperpartisan gerrymanders in an effort to beat back an expected Democratic wave in 2026.
An aggressive and explicitly racial gerrymander in Texas enacted without voter approval was upheld by the US Supreme Court last month, netting the GOP an expected five seats, and six other red states have redrawn maps to likely squeeze in one new Republican seat apiece.
And while GOP gains have been somewhat offset by California voters' approval of an amendment to allow Democrats to draw their own hyperpartisan maps, the US Supreme Court's refusal to stop the Virginia state supreme court from striking down of a voter-approved Democratic gerrymander dealt a critical blow to efforts to even the score, and Democrats have vanishingly few opportunities to make up ground before the coming midterms.
Florida Republicans blatantly violate their constitution and brutally gerrymander their map without a single vote = 100% legal.
Virginians vote to change their constitution so they can temporarily offset right wing gerrymandering = 100% illegal.
America is a banana republic. https://t.co/vTer29RSqQ
— Micah Erfan (@micah_erfan) June 11, 2026
Florida represents yet another notch in the win column for Republicans, but opponents say they will attempt to fight the gerrymander ahead of future elections.
"The Florida Supreme Court's failure to stop this brazen partisan power grab is not only an assault on democracy, but an abdication of its duty to the people of Florida," said Genesis Robinson, the executive director of the voting rights group Equal Ground. "Courts are meant to serve as a check on government overreach and a safeguard against constitutional violations, but, once again, when Floridians needed that protection most, the court declined to intervene."
"The time to protect voters from irreparable harm is before another election takes place under this map," he added. "And while we remain committed to ensuring that Florida's constitutional protections are fully upheld, Florida voters deserve fair maps, fair representation, and a democracy that works for everyone now."
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Travelling the Winding River of History to the Sea of Justice
Despite Donald Trump and all the other horrors of this century, I still believe that the essential human trajectory is upwards: We continue to widen the circle of beings that matter; we continue to become braver, and maybe even a bit wiser.
Jun 01, 2026
This is my last article for TomDispatch. For over a decade, Tom Engelhardt has given me a platform to write about pretty much anything that grabs my—I’ll admit it, easily attracted—attention. It’s been a wonderful partnership for me, offering not just a place to publish, but a chance to think, talk, and often argue with the best editor I’ve ever worked with.
A rarity in the age of Internet insta-publishing, TomDispatch subjects every article to the scrutiny of three separate proofreaders. Not for Tom the misplaced apostrophe or the confusion between “their” and “they’re.” Unlike The New York Times in a May 12, 2026 headline, no article appearing in TomDispatch would ever go rogue and ask the question, “Did the Fifth Circuit Go Rouge With Its Abortion Pills Ruling?” (The face of the copyeditor who let that one pass should have looked as if some blusher had been applied.)
While over the last 12 years, I’ve written about a wide variety of subjects, a number of themes stand out to me for their recurrence: racial justice, war (and US military misadventures), and the insistence of women on claiming our humanity. Mostly, I’ve tried to reflect the many ways that we human beings continue to struggle for a good life in a just world, despite all the forces ranged against us. More than once I’ve had recourse to a sentiment frequently attributed to the Reverend Martin Luther King (though it didn’t originate with him): the idea that the arc of the moral universe is long, but invariably bends toward justice.
One Recurrent Theme
A couple of weeks ago, I had a conversation with a woman I’d met a few times before. She’s a Black veteran in her 90s, the newish lover of an old friend of mine. We were reflecting on the fact that so much of what we’ve fought for in our lifetimes—civil rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights—has been all but demolished in the first year of Donald Trump’s second term. “People died for those victories,” she said to me, “and now they’ve been undone so fast.”
After all these years, it feels like the arc of the moral universe is bending not toward justice, but in the opposite direction, toward inequality and fascism, nationally and globally.
It was the Sunday after the Supreme Court finished dismembering the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) with its decision in Louisiana v. Callais. That prolonged judicial murder by the Roberts court began with its 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which snuffed out a key provision of the VRA. Prior to Shelby County, jurisdictions identified in the VRA as having a history of suppressing the vote in Black, Latino, or Native American communities had to obtain federal “preclearance” before changing their voting laws. In the Shelby decision, however, the court’s conservative majority held that the passage of time had made such preclearance unnecessary, because voter suppression was no longer a problem in such places. In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously described that position as “throwing out your umbrella in a rainstorm because you’re not getting wet.”
As the Brennan Center for Justice put it 10 years later, it was clear that Ginsberg had been right—that it was still raining in the Southern states. “The effects of the ruling were immediate. The same day, Texas officials announced that they would implement the nation’s most restrictive voter ID law, which had previously been blocked in the preclearance process.” In fact, “without that ‘preclearance’ regime, the revival of discriminatory tactics was immediate: In the last 10 years, at least 29 states have passed 94 laws that make it more difficult to vote, particularly for communities of color.”
Then, in its next major attack on the VRA, the court gave two of Arizona’s laws its stamp of approval. As I wrote in 2022, a year earlier, a court that was by then already significantly shaped by Donald Trump “issued a ruling in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee upholding Arizona’s right to pass laws requiring people to vote only in precincts where they live, while prohibiting anyone who wasn’t a relative of the voter from hand delivering mail-in ballots to the polls. The court held that, even though in practice such measures would have a disproportionate effect on non-White voters, as long as a law was technically the same for all voters, it didn’t matter that, in practice, it would become harder for some groups to vote.”
Now, in 2026, the court has essentially finished the job with its decision in Callais, which allows states to redraw their voting maps to eliminate majority-minority districts. Not a month later, Southern states (including Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Tennessee) have rushed to redistrict. Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, and Texas are likely to follow suit between now and the 2028 general election. As The Guardian reports, Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center, observed that “this is a five-alarm fire for Black representation in the south.”
I’m glad that congressman and civil rights hero John Lewis didn’t live to see this day.
It turns out that white racism has been a consistent theme of my writing for TomDispatch, which is hardly surprising, given what a constant reality it’s proven to be in 21st-century America (especially in the Trump years). In 2025, I described how the Department of Government Efficiency’s decimation of the federal workforce constituted a direct attack on the Black middle class, and especially Black women. In “No More Dog Whistles,” I wrote that, under Trump, “racism isn’t just the subtext, it’s the text.” A decade earlier, I was examining race and police violence in my home city of San Francisco, which had seen a spate of police murders of Black and Latino residents. And so it went, and so it still goes.
The Ethics of War, Torture, and Terrorism
That subhead is actually the title of a college course I used to teach. It’s also been the focus of my “scholarly” work since the 9/11 attacks shocked the world and pushed the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney administration over to “the dark side.” My first piece for TomDispatch described how, a decade and a half after the 9/11 attacks and the launching of the Global War on Terror, the United States was still torturing people. President Barack Obama might have closed the CIA’s infamous black sites—its global chain of secret torture bases—but the practice continued, including at the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Subsequent articles of mine covered torture here at home, including at police stations and in our jails and prisons.
Now, we’re seeing a new kind of black site: hundreds of Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, many already established, some still in the planning stage, strung out across the country as our own American gulag archipelago. And like the Soviet gulag, some of those sites are intended not just as holding pens, but as labor camps. As Public Citizen reported this month, “Working for $1 a day in the government’s so-called Voluntary Work Program (VWP) while detained is the only option available to earn any money for the more than 60,000 immigrants held in hundreds of active detention centers across the United States by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.” It seems that the program is “voluntary” in name only, as it’s the only way detainees can get money for basic hygiene items like toothpaste, and because refusal risks retaliation, such as being placed in solitary confinement.
I’ve labeled such centers “black sites” because, like the ones run by the CIA during the “war on terror,” they remain opaque to ordinary US citizens—or even many members of our federal and local governments. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which administers the ICE detention camps nationwide, has made a show of not permitting local officials or members of Congress to enter them. Like the CIA’s black sites, those camps represent an elaborate version of homeland security theater, designed to remind Americans of just how dangerous unauthorized immigrants supposedly are, as evidenced by how harshly DHS must treat them. They function both as a direct form of repression and as a warning to the rest of us about what could happen to anyone who resists the Trump regime. In that sense, such concentration camps (for that’s indeed what they are and what I’ve called them) are very much like another tool of repression, institutionalized state torture, about which (some years ago) I wrote a book called Mainstreaming Torture.
Another continuity between the Bush torture program and today’s ICE concentration camps is the outsourcing of the work of imprisonment and interrogation to private contractors. In the “war on terror,” private contractors—operatives from private outfits like Erik Prince’s oft-renamed Blackwater—engaged in such “interrogations.” Today’s ICE centers are also run by private contractors: the country’s two main for-profit prison companies, the GEO Group and CORE-Civic. The latter is responsible for the infamous Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas. ICE cemented its status as a public-private partnership in May 2026 when David Venturella was appointed its acting director. He left a job at GEO Group to take the post (after leaving ICE to join GEO in the first place). Some things are beyond irony.
War! What Is It Good For?
Other war-related themes have recurred in my writing for TomDispatch. I’ve written about US military interventions in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. And now we’ve witnessed perhaps the ultimate pointless intervention—Trump’s war on Iran, which, if it doesn’t end up frying us all, seems likely to wreck the world economy and plunge millions into starvation.
When unpiloted aircraft were still new, I wrote about how the Obama administration had used drones for assassinations in places like Yemen. Today, we’ve become jaded by their use—and by extrajudicial killings in general. Now, there’s hardly a journalistic ripple when the Trump administration sinks yet another tiny boat allegedly carrying drugs—and occasionally just carrying fish—in the Caribbean Sea or Eastern Pacific Ocean. Almost 200 people had died that way by the first week of May 2026.
I’ve long thought that liberation is sort of like an imprisoned genie: Once it escapes, it’s awfully hard to get back in the bottle.
The exponential rise of artificial intelligence has refueled a discussion I entered back in 2022 with an article on LAWS (lethal autonomous weapons systems). The United States has been pursuing its dream of deploying an “automated battlefield” since the Vietnam War. One major AI company, Anthropic, seems to have taken itself out of the running to assist the Department of Defense (still its name, despite Trump’s proclamations to the contrary) in fully automated kill decisions. However, Peter Thiel’s Palantir will undoubtedly be happy to step in to fill the spot. It has, after all, already been helping Israel in its genocide in Gaza. Palantir will likely be ready as well to assist in another realm Anthropic refused to enter: using AI for mass domestic surveillance. After all, this is what its flagship program, Gotham, is for.
It’s All About Hatred of Women
I didn’t grow up in a religious household. My father, though raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, had abandoned most religious practice by the time he and my mother got together. She was a lapsed Episcopalian, so I suppose it’s not entirely weird that I call myself a nice Jewish girl who goes to an Episcopal church. The point is, there was no reason for me to be praying as a six-year-old, but I often did, asking God to let me wake up the next morning as a boy. As second-wave feminists used to say, I didn’t envy the penis. I envied what it could get you: opportunity, freedom, and most of all, respect.
I lived through the movement for women’s liberation, which saved my life. It brought me the right to control my own body; to decide if and when I would have sex; to decide if and when I would have children; to decide if and when—and whom—I would marry. In truth, I never wanted to do that last one, but the vagaries of US tax law made married life much easier than a California domestic partnership. Still, I used to wonder why my gay leaders thought the two things I wanted most in the world were to join the army and get married.
So, it’s not surprising that I’ve used my TomDispatch platform to write about feminist concerns like abortion rights, my own experience of abortion, and staring down misogyny in the aftermath of Trump’s second election victory. Now, of course, his administration is advised by men who want to repeal women’s suffrage and follow up on the Supreme Court’s rollback of Roe v. Wade with white natalist dreams like an end to no-fault divorce and restrictions on birth control.
A Simple Arc?
So much of what I’ve written about over the last 12 years is now at least as bad as it ever was and possibly significantly worse. We’ve lost so much with the rise of Trump. After all these years, it feels like the arc of the moral universe is bending not toward justice, but in the opposite direction, toward inequality and fascism, nationally and globally. And yet…
All over the country, people are indeed fighting back. Minnesotans inspired a nation with their resistance to an occupying ICE army. Local communities are mobilizing to try to keep energy-eating AI data centers and detention camps out. (Just recently, ordinary people in Florida forced the closure of the notorious Alligator Alcatraz detention center.) Millions have turned out for No Kings demonstrations. And maybe it was fear of a growing backlash that kept the Supreme Court from allowing Louisiana to outlaw the abortion medication Mifepristone. I’ve long thought that liberation is sort of like an imprisoned genie: Once it escapes, it’s awfully hard to get back in the bottle.
So, about that arc of the moral universe: Maybe it’s not a single curve but something more like a river winding its way toward a great ocean. Or maybe it’s like a sine wave on a slant. It has both peaks and valleys, and we’re definitely sitting in one of those valleys right now. Nonetheless, despite Donald Trump and all the other horrors of this century, I still believe that the essential human trajectory is upwards. We continue to widen the circle of beings that matter. We continue to become braver, and maybe even a bit wiser.
That’s been my story all these years and, dire as things seem today, I’m sticking to it.
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The Supreme Court’s Whites-First Reasoning on Gerrymandering
Conservative justices’ excuses for eviscerating the Voting Rights Act embody an indefensible indifference to the rights of Black voters.
May 27, 2026
Will the Supreme Court’s evident desire to assist the GOP before the midterms override a decision by three Republican-appointed judges to spare Black-majority districts in Alabama from being gerrymandered out of existence?
This is the question posed by possible Supreme Court review of the finding by an Alabama judicial panel that Alabama could not use a congressional district map that deliberately discriminated against Black voters.
Two of the three judges on the panel, which found race-based discrimination, had been appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump; one, by President Ronald Reagan. The issue now is whether the conservative justices of the Supreme Court will upend the panel’s racial discrimination finding, notwithstanding that the Alabama judges had followed legal standards set in the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais.
If they allow the Alabama decision stand, it will be a rare exception to the flood of Supreme Court-encouraged gerrymandering prompted by the Callais decision. Those Republican gerrymanders are likely to purge one-third of African-American representatives from Congress by destroying the Black-majority districts that elected them.
For the Supreme Court to say there is no remedy because the racial wrong is politically advantageous to a party whose politics rest on racial ideology is a travesty of reason and justice.
Nonetheless, the six justices of the Supreme Court who caused this political bloodbath along racial lines claim that Republican gerrymandering does not violate the voting rights of African Americans. The purge is lawful under the Voting Rights Act, say the justices, because the GOP has partisan reasons to eliminate the Black districts that cannot be “disentangled” from racial motives.
Through a convoluted logic we explore below, and in the supposed interests of a “color-blind” Constitution, the right-winger justices have emasculated the Voting Rights Act. The majority insists we ignore the reality of race relations in America and ignore the link between Republican partisanship and Republican racial politics. But judicial ignorance cannot yield justice.
Partisanship and race have always been inextricably linked in Southern politics. Since party identification for white people in the South has, first and foremost, been driven by race, any “disentanglement” requirement makes it impossible for the Voting Rights Act to protect the voting rights of Black and other minority citizens.
The 15th Amendment to the Constitution, adopted in 1870, recognized that the right to vote serves as the great protector of civil and human rights. The amendment prohibits states from denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race. But for nearly a century, the former Confederate states in effect suspended the 15th Amendment. Decade after decade, they prevented Black people from voting through legal chicanery, violence, and economic intimidation.
The long civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s against Jim Crow and for racial equality reached its culmination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Voting Rights Act recalled the 15th Amendment to life by giving federal courts broad and flexible authority to protect African-American voting rights. Overwhelming majorities of both parties supported the act, with 80% of senators and 80% of congresspeople voting for it.
Among other protections, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibits states from imposing any electoral “practice or procedure... in a manner which results in a denial or abridgement” of the right to vote “on account of race or color.” Notably, it does not require proving the racial intentions behind supposedly neutral voting requirements or election practices. The Voting Rights Act was passed precisely to protect the Black franchise even when those who oppose Black voting rights don’t say so out loud. Consequently Section 2 bars a practice if it “results in... abridgement” of voting rights.
In an effort to avoid any ambiguity, the act was amended in 1982 to specifically confirm that Section 2 is violated if a political processes gives racial minorities “less opportunity than other members of the electorate... to elect representatives of their choice.”
For decades federal courts applied this provision to protect African-American voters from racial gerrymandering. But in last month’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, the Supreme Court deleted those protections and turned the Voting Rights Act upside down. What was the supposed logic behind the decision?
Callais expanded on the court’s 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, which unleashed states to engage in unlimited gerrymandering. “Partisan” gerrymandering represents a majority party power grab. With gerrymandered districts, a slight majority of voters could elect a supermajority in a state legislature. Or, as President Trump hopes this year, multistate gerrymandering might give the GOP enough purloined congressional seats to retain their hold on Congress even if most voters, nationwide, vote against Republicans.
Gerrymandering defies the fundamental principles of America constitutional democracy; nonetheless the Rucho majority held that courts could not restrain the practice.
Bad enough. But in this anti-democracy decision, the conservative justices also found an excuse for gutting the Voting Rights Act.
Disempowering Democratic voters and disempowering African-American voters commonly go together, and the court’s right-wingers saw a danger: Disadvantaged voters might try to “evade” Rucho’s green-lighting of gerrymandering by “repackaging a partisan-gerrymandering claim as a racial-gerrymandering claim.”
This stands reality on its head. The real danger is packaging (and therefore excusing) a racial gerrymander as a partisan one. Of the two “risks,” why did the right-wingers choose to privilege the one that de facto enhances white voting power, not the voting rights of citizens of color?
The “danger” in thwarting partisan gerrymandering is that a white majority won’t be allowed to unfairly magnify its power beyond its actual level of voter support. The danger in racial gerrymandering is that voters of color will, once again, be denied a meaningful voice in the political process because of race. In a multiracial democracy with a history of white racial oppression, it is obvious which concern should matter more. Except to white nationalists and their allies.
In order to put a state’s supposed “right” to gerrymander first, the conservative justices held that African-American voters who attack gerrymandering as racially discriminatory have a “‘special’ burden to overcome.”
“Courts must treat partisan advantage like any other race-neutral aim,” so an African-American plaintiff must “disentangle race from politics” and prove racial considerations drove a decision to eliminate Black majority districts.
“If either politics or race could explain a district’s contours, the plaintiff has not cleared its bar,” the Callais majority held, and the state is free to gerrymander away African-American congressional districts.
The right-wing justices have not interpreted the Voting Rights Act. They have interred it.
The unexamined premise of disentanglement is that partisan advantage is a “race-neutral aim.” But how can partisan advantage be deemed “race neutral” when the very identity of the political party seeking advantage rests on racial ideology?
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote, “A page of history is worth a volume of logic.” So it is here.
Following the Civil War, white Southerners became the “Solid South” of the Democratic Party. The politics of the Democratic Party were grounded, before all else, on white supremacy. But in the 1960s, as the national Democratic Party became the party of civil rights, Southern support of Democrats eroded, then washed away.
White segregationist voters fled to the GOP, pushed by President John F. Kennedy’s and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s support for civil rights and pulled by Republican support for resistance to integration. The GOP’s Southern Strategy was employed by Richard Nixon in 1968 and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Reagan’s presidential campaign launch in Philadelphia, Mississippi, notorious as the site of the murder of three civil rights workers, made unmistakable that Reagan was making a racial appeal to anti-integration white Southerners.
The racially motivated movement of white voters transformed the South from Democratic stronghold to Republican bastion. The GOP’s stance on race also found a sympathetic audience among whites outside the South, who often fought to preserve de facto segregation and white advantages.
In short, the Republican Party of the last 56 years was constructed on white resistance to integration and opposition to African-American rights. When, consequently, Republican politicians attack African-American political participation, the attacks advance GOP partisan interests by invoking voter-perceived racial concerns.
There can be no disentangling of race and politics when the means of attaining partisan advantage is racial politics—any more than you can “disentangle” cream from coffee after you’d poured it in. The mixture of race and politics is the Republican flavor.
By imposing a “disentanglement burden” on those seeking the protection of the Voting Rights Act, conservative justices made it impossible for the act to ever provide a remedy for the denial or abridgement of minority voting rights. What is true of redistricting applies to any other electoral practice that impairs minority voting effectiveness: Its discriminatory impact must always confer partisan advantage on a political party whose underlying ideological appeal is white resentment and white supremacy.
Consider what this means for people of color in our multinational, multiracial society.
Discrimination, past and present, in housing, zoning, employment, education, policing, and community resources, along with inequalities in wealth and income, have contributed to concentrating African Americans and of other people of color in America’s inner cities.
Although racial minorities are inevitably vulnerable in a larger society that disdains them, the existence of population centers in which minorities are the majority should at least mean that those non-white majorities can elect representatives to the tables of power. In the language of the Voting Rights Act itself, they are entitled to equal “opportunity... to elect representatives of their choice.” Redistricting that is simultaneously racial and partisan denies that right.
Tennessee’s post-Callais redistricting divided Memphis, a city with a 63% African-American majority, into three pieces, which were then distributed to three majority white districts. What could be more obvious than that this is precisely the kind of political practice Congress intended to outlaw in passing the Voting Rights Act? But the court’s “disentanglement burden” likely makes this legal atrocity untouchable.
For the Supreme Court to say there is no remedy because the racial wrong is politically advantageous to a party whose politics rest on racial ideology is a travesty of reason and justice. The Republican Party’s entanglement of politics with race is no reason for the Supreme Court to deprive minorities of the opportunity to elect representatives of their choice.
The right-wing justices have not interpreted the Voting Rights Act. They have interred it. Since their timely promotion of Republican political advantage cannot be disentangled from the GOP’s racial politics, we can fairly conclude that Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are intentionally advancing white supremacy.
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