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The battle between Texas and Democrat states over gerrymandering seems likely to touch on the biggest driver of Democrat gerrymandering which fundamentally altered the political balance of power in state after state. Louisiana v. Callais is likely headed for a big Supreme Court decision that will fundamentally change how the Voting Rights Act enforces minority districts.
There’s nothing to celebrate about the 60th anniversary of the VRA, a civil rights era relic which long ago stopped fighting segregation and instead enforced partisan gerrymandering with no end in sight. When the Supreme Court began allowing VRA ‘monitoring’ of elections in some states to sunset, Democrats cried that segregation and slavery were about to come back.
But for all the talk of democracy and racism, Louisiana v. Callais shows what keeping the zombie VRA alive is really about. The case is about whether federal courts can force Louisiana to create two Democrat congressional seats under the guise of creating two black seats. It’s a common form of gerrymandering that uses race as a trojan horse for mandating Dem seats.
When heavily gerrymandered Democrat states like California, New York and Illinois eliminate Republican seats, that’s not seen as a Voting Rights Act violation even though much as Democrat seats are disproportionately minority, Republican seats are disproportionately white.
Democrats are not fighting to keep the VRA alive because they care about black people, but because they care about maintaining the racially gerrymandered seats produced by VRA abuses. A New York Times column by Jamelle Bouie complained that “the current Supreme Court’s vision of a rigidly colorblind Constitution” would lead it to reject the notion that the Constitution mandates majority black and therefore Democrat districts. But if the issue were about racial disenfranchisement, Democrats would try to boost the power of black voters by making them a crucial swing bloc in key races instead of apportioning guaranteed seats to senile members of the Congressional Black Caucus who hardly bother running anymore.
Over in Texas, at the center of a national gerrymandering civil war, did the increasingly demented Rep. Al Green, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who died last year, only to be replaced by Rep. Sylvester Turner, who died this year do any more for black people than their white opposite numbers have done for white people? The amount of scandals, ethics violations and criminal investigations that follow Congressional Black Caucus members is ample evidence of that. The average age of CBC leaders with a lifetime sinecure is in the 70s.
Abusing the VRA to create minority seats for Democrats who couldn’t lose an election unless they were actually locked up for their criminal careers didn’t empower black people, it empowered the Democrats. And that racial gerrymandering gave Democrats guaranteed seats.
The underlying question being asked 60 years later in Louisiana v. Callais is whether black people can be represented by representatives from other races, and whether the same is true for all of America’s other racial, ethnic and religious groups. Despite reams of critical race theory propaganda, the 1619 Project, the career of lucrative literary racists like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi, and the BLM riots, there’s no reason to believe in racially segregated districts.
If having white people represent districts with black voters in it was really unthinkable, how can the Democrats justify the career of Rep. Steve Cohen, who has represented a majority black district, along with Rep. Shri Thanedar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and vice versa, quite a few of the younger black Democrats have been elected from majority white congressional districts.
Democrats don’t actually believe that black districts need black representatives, or they would have long ago booted third world carpetbaggers like Tlaib and Thanedar, along with the loathsome Cohen who once bragged that he was an honorary black man because he was driving a broken down car and dating his own daughter. What they do believe is that black districts are more likely to elect Dems of whatever race and so they gerrymander them.
The Voting Rights Act long ago turned into illegal racial gerrymandering and if more of it is chipped away, it will make it possible for Texas to determine districts for political, not racial reasons, and while gerrymandering may not be ideal, the only thing worse than depriving people of political power, forcing them into laughably shaped districts and denying them representation, for their political views is doing all that because of their race. And that’s what the VRA has been doing.
No one is entitled to a congressional seat on account of their race. That notion is as blatantly racist as the abuses that originally led to measures like the Voting Rights Act. Despite the best effort of a civil rights movement that long soured from opposing segregation to supporting it, the whole point of desegregation is, as Martin Luther King said, is choosing content of character over skin color. And content of character does not have a guaranteed two seats in Louisiana.
Or anywhere else.
There are genuine solutions to gerrymandering. They include outlawing districts shaped like a frightened snail trying to escape from an earthquake. Texas has upped the ante for either escalating gerrymandering or negotiating a compact to end the gerrymandering arms race. And if the Supreme Court rules wisely in Louisiana v. Callais, it can help end racial gerrymandering.
The best way to end racism, segregation, racial discrimination and all the other baskets of racial ills is to stop practicing it. The opposite of racism isn’t anti-racism, it’s non-racism. A multiracial Supreme Court has the opportunity to end one of the final vestiges of actual systemic racism.
And send the message that the right to vote isn’t a racial entitlement, it’s an American one.
Much of the Democrat representation in the House is probably based on Gerrymandering.
There may be some mathematical way of ending Gerrymandering, good point.
I don’t think that racial gerrymandering necessarily increases the Democrat’s representation in the House of Representatives. The way gerrymandering works is for the majority party to funnel the opposing party’s voters into a few districts while partitioning the more numerous remaining districts so as to give the majority a slight edge in the remaining districts.
The use of the Voting Rights Act to create heavily black districts turned the VRA into the black politician protection act rather than its original purpose which was to guarantee blacks access to voting. In 1994, the racial gerrymandering in Georgia actually reduced the number of Democrats and helped pave the way for Republicans to take over the House for the first time in decades. That is why Republicans did not take a position opposing it.
Blacks benefited far more from having all politicians competing for their votes than from aging black office holders delivering fiery speeches to mostly black constituencies and delivering nothing for them in terms of legislation. The use of the VRA to mandate racial gerrymandering turned a critical tool for improving the lives of black people, the right to vote, into a grift enriching an aging group of ineffective politicians.
Are you crazy? Of course districts gerrymandered by D-Bags are meant to increase their House membership. That’s why the Republicans won 40% of the vote here in CA (far more if illegal aliens hadn’t been counted) but only have 9 seats in the State Legislature.
The Dem-O-Rat Party totally opposed Blacks from being able to Vote or of benign a American Citizen that’s why they founded the KKK
And Jim Crow laws on voter registration.
Race, sex, sexual orientation, being gender fluid, non binary or whatever, (who can even keep up with this stuff) is not a talent or a qualification for any political office or job. This is so obvious it should not even have be stated.
It is an insult to black people to believe they all think alike or will vote alike because of their race. There are liberal and conservative black voters just like there are liberal and conservative voters of every race or ethnicity.
It is an insult to black people to think they will only vote for another black candidate. It is an insult to black candidates to think they cannot or should not run for office or represent people in. a district that is not predominately black. It is an insult to white people to believe they will not vote for a black candidate if they believe that person is the best candidate.
Maryland has a black Democratic governor and the black population of Maryland is about 30%. So that governor must have gotten a lot of white votes. The previous Maryland governor was a white Republican elected twice. He must have he had a lot of black voter support, They voted for him because they thought he was the best candidate. That is how all elections should be.
All congressional districts in all states should be divided up geographically with equal populations in each district to the extent that is possible without regard to race at all. Then let the best candidate of whatever race run and let the people in each district vote for the best candidate without regard to race.
Anything else is racist.
You find a lot of things insulting, and I do agree with you, but do you also think it insulting to notice trends and patterns emerging within a racial group?
Like the greatly increased level of black violent crime when compared to all other racial groups?
I know and practice “NAXALT.” Not All X Are Like That. But exceptions do not disprove the rule. One third of black men are convicted felons, but not all black men are like that.
Sorry! I attempted to compose a response to Mike and had a computer glitch, then attempted to re-write my post. I did not mean to post two responses.
I only see one.
Is it fake news that most blacks vote Democrat?
It may, indeed, be “an insult” to believe black people will only vote for black candidates, but they pretty much do, ala all the black big city Mayors.
Can black people be represented by people of another race? Can any race be represented by another race?
The Amicus briefs to Louisiana v. Callais reveals what different racial orginizations believe, especially the Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus and the National Congress of American Indians (and others):
The overwhelming answer of non-whites is “no.”
Apply the question to a “jury of one’s peers” and again the answer is “no.” There is remarkable unwillingness on the part of black juries to convict black defendants of crimes, no matter how overwhelming and beyond reasonable doubt the evidence.
Only whites believe in deracinated, universal, content-of-character men. Everyone else generally prefers his own people, culture, religion and laws.
Surely, in this day and age, there could be a computer algorithm that creates equitable contiguous districts, based on population. And “population” based only citizens.
I’d prefer statewide “districts.”
Gerrymandering is not any different than what the British and French intended to do with the Ottoman Empire via the Sykes–Picot Agreement. They just willy-nilly drew lines on a map and divided this part of the Middle East into artificial spheres of influence that each country would control.
Electoral districts should be drawn in grids, dividing up the population into equal sections and that’s it. Otherwise, you create artificial political partisan tribalism as seen with the creation of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq in contrast with true tribalism as seen with the tribal gulf kingdoms.
Do we really want to continue down the road of political factionalism because in every country that descended down that path, civil disorder was the result. Sometimes ending in a civil war but mainly ending up with a failed state, which allowed a dictatorship to arise to fill in the power vacuum. Entrenched gerrymandering is not the solution for America, it’s the lynchpin for the unraveling of the nation’s representative form of government. If politicians can rig the redistricting process as the British and French did with the former land holdings of the Ottoman Empire then violence will be the resulting factor in the end. You can’t have an unending system of gerrymandering and expect the experiment, which the founder fathers created to remain a sound form of representational government. Something will have to give down the road and unfortunately, it’s already being paved with deep divisions of irrevocable differences.
How about statewide vote apportionment?
What’s sad is that blacks are being quietly marginalized by democrats and yet they continue to vote for them. Worse yet, democrats have tied the interests of black people to the interests of the LGBTQ crowd which goes against their alleged religious beliefs.
I’m not a religious person but my religious friends adamantly believe that you cannot believe in biblical teachings and also support the interests of the LGBTQ crowd. The choice is either you believe the tenets of the Bible or you believe in the devil and the devil is a liar. You cannot do both.
Moreover, they say that churches that acquiesce to the LGBTQ agenda have chosen a liar and deceiver (the devil) over Jesus Christ. I agree.