DADDY, WHAT WAS DEMOCRACY?

The Supreme Court's decision in Louisiana v. Callais is extraordinarily damaging to American democracy, but while it's the worst blow democracy has suffered in America this month, it's not the only one.

I would have voted for the pro-Democratic gerrymander that passed in Virginia earlier this month, and I would have voted for the one in California before that. I'll support a pro-Democratic gerrymander in New York, if there is one. Our governor favors one:

On Wednesday, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York reiterated her support for drawing new maps.

“I’m working with the Legislature to change New York’s redistricting process so we can fight back against Washington’s attempts to rig our democracy,” Ms. Hochul, a Democrat, said in a statement.

But gerrymanders are bad -- and then Louisiana v. Callais is worse. I don't know how the idea of American democracy survives all this.

First, the Supreme Court decision, which garottes Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Elie Mystal writes:

Congress explicitly intended the VRA to include “disparate impact”—the idea that a law that results in racism is indeed racist whether or not the racists who wrote the law admit to their nefarious plans. Alito’s construction explicitly rejects this concept. Nobody elected Alito or the other Republicans on the court to make this decision for us, but they’ve decided that only Republicans on the Supreme Court know what racism truly is.

The Court's decision, written by Samuel Alito,

means that even if you can show that [a] gerrymander was obviously targeted to dilute the Black vote ... it doesn’t matter unless the white gerrymanderers say something like, “I drew this map because I hate Negroes” or some other similarly vile statement bold enough to get Alito excited. It means that the Voting Rights Act is effectively dead.

Florida was so certain of this outcome that it began gerrymandering its House map even before the decision came down. Louisiana plans to reschedule its May 16 primary in order to redraw its maps.

But the worst is yet to come. The New York Times tells us:

... some Democrats fear 2028 will become a worst-case scenario, with Republican-controlled states across the country redrawing their maps to maximum partisan advantage. An analysis by The New York Times last year found that all told, Democrats would be in danger of losing around a dozen majority-minority districts across the South if the court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act.

And this can happen because the Supreme Court set up this ruling making racial gerrymanders effectively legal by ruling seven years ago that partisan gerrymanders are effectively legal, at least under federal law:

... [a] state can defend their maps by claiming that they were merely engaging in partisan gerrymandering. This move is thanks to what the Supreme Court wrote in the 2019 Rucho case—that though partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, it is out of the Court’s realm to fix.

So when, say, Louisiana goes back and eliminates many black opportunity districts in its state, it can claim it is doing so to help Republicans, not whites. That’s an outrageous proposition given the considerable overlap between those two groups in Louisiana.

I don't want to downplay racism in this country, but I sincerely believe that the partisan impact of this is what the Federal Society Six care the most about. They might hate Black people, but what primarily motivates them is the desire to keep America a tax and regulatory paradise for right-wing billionaires, particularly fossil fuel billionaires. (I'm sure the surviving Koch brother feels his life's work is all but done.) If the partisan voting split among Blacks were 50-50, the Court's Republicans would have been much less likely to do what they've done.

In response:

... Democrats are gearing up for a battle. In Colorado and New York, they have begun to explore the process of changing state laws and redrawing their maps before the next House races in two years....

Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, also a Democrat, hinted at future action in his state during a news conference on Wednesday. “We have options,” he told reporters after the decision from the court had been handed down.

Elsewhere, Democratic strategists have pointed to Oregon and New Jersey as states that could draw new maps for partisan advantage, though they would have to undertake similar processes as Virginia and California and get permission from voters through referendums.

But what we have to look forward to is a future in which members of minority parties in both red and blue states are utterly disenfranchised. A country where most people never vote in a competitive legislative election isn't a democracy. It's a illiberal state of the kind Viktor Orban built temporarily. We appear to be building one permanently. Now that the Supreme Court has effectively made gerrymandering 100% legal, you can't vote out gerrymanderers at the state level because they can gerrymander the state legislatures (as Republicans have already done in states such as North Carolina and Wisconsin) so the pro-gerrymandering majority party stays in power forever.

And all this comes at a time when American democracy was already in a precarious state. We have free and fair elections for the presidency and for statewide offices, and for most legislative bodies, but voters seem fed up. They don't seem to think voting gets them the results they want (apart from MAGA voters who go to the polls hoping to see libs owned). So democracy seems futile even before the next wave of gerrymanders, and soon most states could have all-Republican or all-Democratic House delegations and permanent supermajority control of legislatures. If we can't stop the gerrymandering arms race, why will anyone bother to vote a generation from now?

Mystal writes:

... if Democrats take back the House and the Senate, kill the filibuster, and elect a Democratic president in 2028, Congress can pack the court and fill it with people who do not believe in a white’s-only theory of voting rights. Those new justices could overrule not just Callais, but all of the other voting rights cases the Roberts court has issued to try to destroy minority voting rights. Those new justices could overturn the court’s prior gerrymandering decisions.

I hope it can happen. The howling of Republicans -- and, probably, the mainstream media -- if Democrats attempt this will undoubtedly be audible from space. We'll be told that Democrats campaigned as normies and are now acting like "radical left extremists." But it's our only way out.