The Return of Jim Crow  🔗 **Source:** [The Return of Jim Crow](https://share.snipd.com/episode/6587d7b7-16c6-4789-ab69-70564c44dcbe) ## Highlights - **Court Enables Vote Dilution By Packing Black Voters** - The Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais allows states to dilute Black voting power by spreading Black voters across districts. - This undermines the Voting Rights Act's purpose of creating majority-minority districts that enable minority voters to elect their candidates. Transcript: Mia Wong Let's talk about what is actually at issue here, and that is a recent Supreme Court ruling called Louisiana v. Calais. On a sort of micro level, this is about the question of can Louisiana just eliminate the two majority black districts that it had in its congressional map in 2024? Getting to this map in the first place was a subject of really intense civil rights litigation to get to the point where there were two majority Black districts in 2024. On a macro level, what is at stake here is, can a state create an electoral map where they spread all of the Black voters across different districts in order to make them a minority in every District, thus making it impossible for Black voters to select the candidate of their choosing? Until now, the answer was no, because this is specifically what the Voting Rights Act was passed to stop like this specifically. Like this is one of the very specific things. I cannot emphasize this enough. This specific thing, which is spread out the black vote across a whole bunch of districts where everyone else is white so that black people cannot choose who they want to elect. This is like one of the specific things. It was designed to stop. Again, up until now, you have not been allowed to do this. ([Time 0:03:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/25a8937d-1a19-466b-b8f3-b3f10d224e7d)) - **Section Two Was Converted Back To An Intent Test** - The Court now requires plaintiffs to prove discriminatory intent rather than just discriminatory results under Section 2. - That shifts the legal test back to intent, making many vote-dilution challenges far harder to win. Transcript: Mia Wong What they've decided is that if the Republican Party that controls the legislature draws a map that does the thing we've been talking about where they spread out all of the like specifically The black vote into a bunch of districts so that black people can't elect a representative in order to challenge this as violation of your voting rights you have to prove definitively Prove that the intent was racism and not literally anything else. So, for example, and this is this is the thing that's really at issue here, right? You have to prove that they specifically wanted to do this out of racism and not just because they want to elect Republicans by gerrymandering it partisanly, which is amazingly a thing That's legal to do in the United States for reasons that are incredibly baffling. And also, you have to be able to prove that they ([Time 0:06:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/014dc96a-63ce-4ec1-944b-5dcc9802419c)) - **Text Of Section Two Supports A Results Standard** - Section 2's text uses a results test but the Court's majority interprets it as requiring intent. - Congress amended Section 2 in 1982 to adopt a results-based standard precisely to prevent this kind of disenfranchisement. Transcript: Mia Wong I'm just going to read what it says. Quote, no voting qualifications or prerequisite to voting or standard practice or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any state or political subdivision in a manner which results, Keep that in mind later, which results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color or in contravention of the guarantee Set forth in section 1973b so again i can't emphasize this enough right but the way this is written is that it says that you can't apply qualification or prerequisite to voting or have Any standard or practice or procedure cannot be imposed by the state or any other political subdivision that results in the denial or abridgment of the rights to citizens to vote in Account of race, right? It specifically says results. It does not say intent. Now, this is incredibly important because Alito is like, no, fuck that. Actually, you have to prove intent. I'm going to quote from a piece in SCOTUS blog by Edward Foley, who has an extremely long title of the Charles B. Ebersold and Florence Whitcomb Ebersold chair in constitutional law. He's the director of election at law at Ohio State University. He wrote a book on electoral law. He is a constitutional law professor. He specifically does election law. He is like by no means a leftist. He's coming into the right of like Justice Jackson and her dissent in this case. Right? But even he, I'm going to quote what he writes about this. He calls this ruling an abomination, which is like a thing that you don't really get from legal people. They don't say shit like that. I'm going to quote what he says about this. The ruling purports to interpret the Voting Rights Act Section 2, but it destroys the central meaning of the section, converting it into the exact opposite of what Congress meant for It to do. The one thing that is unambiguous about Section 2 is that the 1982 amendment to the section's test creates a, quote, results test for determining whether there is liability under the Section, replacing the intent test that the Supreme Court had previously adopted for Section 2 claims. As the text states, quote, no standard practice or procedure shall be imposed, which results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen to vote on account of race. Yet the case defiantly converts Section 2 back to an intention inquiry rather than a results analysis. So what happened here, right, to make this extremely clear, is that Congress in 1982 had amended this. They amended what this thing said, right, because Supreme Court had been adopting a standard of intent, right, which means that you have to prove that like these people were like mustache Twirling, saying the N word in fucking Klan robes, doing Nazi salutes. You have to like prove that they intentionally did this for racist reasons and not any other reason. And Congress went back and went, no, fuck that. If the result of it is racist, then you can't do it. ([Time 0:08:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/22117905-236d-44c5-a85c-26e25bb1e4a6)) - **Article One Empowers Congress To Regulate Elections** - Congress has Article I, Section 4 authority to regulate times, places, and manner of elections, which supports anti-dilution laws. - The Court's refusal to rely on that text undermines clear constitutional language empowering Congress to act. Transcript: Mia Wong I'm going to quote him again. Yeah, the court in this decision did not need to consider the question of congressional power to enforce the 15th amendment. That is because the power of Congress to enact Section 2 of the Voting Rights Amendment for the purposes of the case could have been sustained not under the 15th amendment, but under Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution. Congress has full power under Article 1, Section 4 to enact laws governing the, quote, time, place, and manner of congressional elections. Thus, Congress can enact a prohibition against minority vote deletion for congressional districts under a disparate impact theory without any consideration of discriminatory Intent and not rely on the 15th Amendment at all. So, okay, what does this mean, right? What Alito is saying is that like oh well actually congress doesn't have the authority to like write the section of the voting rights amendment they don't have the authority to do it Under the 15th amendment because it like oversteps the rights of states to you know like run their own elections right so i'm gonna do the thing i did last time with fully's thing just Read the full article one section four of the constitution by the way when something says like, Section 4, you have to remember that all of the amendments, the amendment that got rid Of slavery, even the First Amendment, the freedom of speech, that's an amendment. That's not in the original text. That had to be added onto it. And obviously, we have something called the Bill of Rights that was the first-hand amendments that was passed with the Constitution. But that's not stuff that was like put like freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship. That was not in the original text of the Constitution. That was the amendments put on. This is something that the people who wrote the Constitution were like, fuck it. This is going to be in the original thing. Right. So Article one, section four, this is from like the original fucking body of text of the Constitution, says, quote, the times, places, and manner of holding elections for senators And representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof, but the Congress may at any time, by law, make or alter such regulations except as to the places of Choosing senators. So yes, obviously they can fucking do the voting rights amendment. They literally have the ability. Like it says in section one, Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations. By such regulations, they mean the times, places and manner of holding elections. They could just do this, right? ([Time 0:12:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5e8f036e-ccac-46c6-bf63-fa04814661ed)) - **Shadow Docket Cleared Way For Alabama Re Gerrymander** - The Court used its shadow docket to allow Alabama to enact a previously struck-down racially motivated map right before an election. - That enabled re-gerrymandering eight days before voting despite prior findings of intentional discrimination. Transcript: Mia Wong So, okay, what has the result of this been? It's been about two weeks since the court did this decision. The court immediately followed this up by allowing Alabama to gerrymander the shit out of their upcoming election. They're doing this via, again, the shadow docket, which is their ability to just be like, no, fuck you, we're not ruling on this case. Without actually issuing a decision. An unsigned one paragraph thing from the court can just dictate what the law is. It's great. It's amazing. And by amazing, I mean Jesus fucking Christ. This happens about a week after the original Supreme Court decision. This shadow docket allows Alabama to put in place a map that was already found to be explicitly racially motivated. A thing Alito said in the decision that he wouldn't do, right? Alito says in the decision that he won't overturn, A, cases that are like overt discrimination, and B, that he wouldn't overturn this exact case. And then they did it anyways. Like, Jesus Christ. I'm just like, oh, my God. So the short version of the Alabama conflict, I'm drawing here from Slate's story on this thing, is that Alabama tried to do a map that would let them get rid of, like, both of the congressional, Black congressional candidates in the state by gerrymandering the black vote. There's a whole bunch of court cases about this. In 2023, the Supreme Court said that they couldn't do this and they had to make fairer districts that didn't violate the Voting Rights Act. So this was three years ago. ([Time 0:19:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a9f13788-7efa-421d-92e4-c699b36c0bc6)) - **Ruling Reverses Core Gains From 1965 Voting Rights Act** - The ruling effectively undoes key gains from the 1965 Voting Rights Act that made one-person-one-vote meaningful for Black citizens. - Removing minority-majority districts restores structural barriers that prevented Black representation under Jim Crow. Transcript: Mia Wong The Supreme Court also had used another legal principle to prevent states that were trying to make more democratic maps, both in the sense of not being racist and also that would elect More democratic politicians. And even though it was three months before the election, the court was like, well, it's actually too soon. It's like it's too close to the election for you to be changing this stuff. But then also now they're just letting Alabama do one of these like eight days before an election. So it's so incredibly clear about what's happening here is that the court is trying to allow Republican politicians to just straight up rig elections for them by doing gerrymandered Districts in a way that lets them eliminate the ability of non-white people to vote. And this is a huge fucking deal. Getting the 1965 Voting Rights Act was one of the major achievements of the civil rights movement, right? It's like one of the biggest goals of the moderate wing of the movement was to have elections in which black people got to actually fucking vote and not have their vote intentionally Diluted so they could never actually elect a candidate. And that's what's being done here, right? ([Time 0:22:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0cf07632-f9b2-45dc-804b-d006953d9476)) - **Partisan Gerrymandering Masks Racial Disenfranchisement** - The Republican strategy of partisan gerrymandering now functions as a proxy for racial disenfranchisement because partisan maps can be used to remove non-white representatives. - Courts treating partisan intent as separate shields racial vote dilution from review. Transcript: Mia Wong This is what the goal of the Republican Party has always been. Like, they want resegregation. It's been the basis of modern Republican politics forever, right? It's dating back to if you want to look at what Trumpism descends for. We've talked about this at length on the show. The thing that became the sort of religious right was originally born out of the school choice movement. And the thing about the school choice movement was that it was an anti- integration thing. After losing their fight to be able to have whites-only schools, a bunch of these sort of right-wingers were like, okay, well, we'll just do private schools or we can do that. And that's the basis of modern Republican politics, right? You know, sort of both evangelicalism and sort of the Bush administration and Trumpism and Reagan, too, is this shit. And this has been what the Republicans have done when they've been in power, right? This is a lot of the Trump administration, like what they were doing, like all the stuff about DEI, all the stuff about wokeness. Like this is also a lot of what Doge was doing was trying to make it so that black people like couldn't work for the US government, right? It was a huge purge of black women from the US government. And, you know, now we're seeing this on the level of elections. And on this level, what Republicans are trying to do with these gerrymandered maps is remove non-white people and especially black people from Congress so they can just have untrammeled White supremacist rule. And they're doing it by claiming both that it's actually partisan. ([Time 0:25:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9912e046-cca2-41be-be48-cfdcf91b4ca1))