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Republicans Can’t Contain Their Glee Over the Death of the VRA

In this week’s Elie v. US, our justice correspondent explores the GOP’s glee over the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights decision. Plus: Elie’s take on Musk v. Altman.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts.

I’ve spent most of the last 48 hours doomscrolling through people’s reactions to the destruction of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court. The people I follow most regularly have split into predictable camps. There are people like me and Adam Serwer who are trying to put the court’s decision into the larger context of the long-standing white hostility to Black voting rights and Black political power. There are the folks like Ian Millhiser who have tried to explain the immediate legal effects of the court’s unconscionable decision. The activist set is taking some time to digest what has happened and plan for next steps, with some vowing to “fight” and ultimately “win” in some fashion.

Predictable, too, has been the reaction from the right. White supremacists and, to the extent there’s a difference, Republicans have been giddy. I read one particularly risible piece of trash in National Review crowing about how the Supreme Court’s decision will allow Republicans to gerrymander away Black political power while stopping Democrats from restoring that power. I think that legal analysis is wrong. But what struck me was not the stupidity of the argument but how happy they were to make it.

That happiness, from whites, is something that most of the articles and analyses, including mine, have failed to capture sufficiently. It is as distressing to me as the actual decision and the terrible results that will result from it.

The Voting Rights Act was once considered a pillar of American democracy—so much so that it was extended and expanded in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan. It was reauthorized in 2006 by President George W. Bush, and that reauthorization passed the Senate 98–0. In just 20 years, the VRA has gone from being such a mainstay of the democratic project that even dyed-in-the-wool conservatives didn’t dare vote against it to something that barely hooded mouthbreathers at National Review are happy to trash.

I don’t really know how to process that information. It’s not just that we’re going back to a Jim Crow state of affairs—it’s that white people are happy about it. As if the 60 years of post-apartheid America that were ushered in by the VRA were just an unfortunate detour, and now white people can get back to their preferred route.

Republicans always want you to believe that they’re not racist “in their hearts,” that they just happen to prefer a set of policies that coincidentally result in inequality, oppression, and less opportunity for non-white Americans. But this reaction to the death of the VRA proves they’re lying. They hate Black people, and they hate Black people who have political power most of all.

And now, they’re happy to finally be able to take that political power away.

A man named Cole Thomas Allen allegedly tried to assassinate Donald Trump on Saturday. Since Trump is not an American elementary school student, people seem to care.

The Supreme Court ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act came right before the court heard oral arguments in Trump’s attempt to take away temporary protected status from Haitian immigrants. The Republican supermajority seemed inclined to ignore Trump’s vile and racist statements and treat him as a normal president who is allowed to do whatever he wants, which in this case seems to be to throw Haitians into the ocean.

Just hours after the Supreme Court destroyed the VRA, Florida’s state legislature approved Governor Ron DeSantis’s new congressional map, which should help the GOP pick up four House seats in the upcoming midterms. At this........

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