The constitutional crisis both parties created

The redistricting that fractures representation. The erosion of voting protections. The precarious status of rights we have treated as settled for two generations. We are living inside the consequence of a choice made in 1964, between the emotionally righteous path and the structurally permanent one. We chose emotion. 

The civil rights movement won its greatest victories through moral force and legislative will. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These were triumphs. But they were triumphs of statute, not of constitution. Laws that Congress could pass were laws Congress could also limit, narrow, repeal or let lapse. The movement secured the moral high ground. It did not secure the constitutional ground.

Women’s rights advocates understood this earlier. The Equal Rights Amendment, first introduced in Congress in 1923 and passed by Congress in 1972, was an explicit push for constitutional entrenchment. It has never been ratified. The forces that benefit from statutory vulnerability blocked it then and block it now.

The distinction matters, because we are watching it collapse. The Shelby County v. Holder decision stripped the Voting Rights Act of its enforcement mechanism. Redistricting maps are being redrawn by majorities desperate to extract maximum power before demographic mathematics render that extraction impossible. Protected classes, a category we invented through statute rather than constitutional amendment, exist only as long as legislatures choose to protect them. When that choice changes, so does everything. 

The 14th Amendment granted citizenship to formerly enslaved people. It did not grant them the right to vote. It did not grant them equal access to public accommodations, or protection from discrimination in employment, housing and........

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