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The Democrats Are 5 Years Too Late to the Voting Rights Fight

Virginia Democrats’ appeal to the Supreme Court to save their state’s new congressional map is a sad case in point.

The Democratic Party is reeling. The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which functionally disabled the Voting Rights Act, has spurred a new wave of Jim Crow gerrymandering all throughout the South. Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Tennessse are all moving quickly to redraw their maps ahead of the midterm elections and make sure that Black people who live in those states have no opportunity to elect a representative of their choosing.

Democrats had hoped to offset the loss of Black representation by heavily gerrymandering states where they control the legislature, but a ruling from the Virginia State Supreme Court struck down one of those aggressive Democratic gerrymanders. That ruling was unhinged: By a 4–3 majority, the state Supreme Court ruled that the Virginia legislature didn’t follow proper procedures for amending the state Constitution to create a new map. Not only was the court’s reasoning spurious, but it also blithely overlooked the fact that this new map was recently approved by a voter referendum.

As unconscionable as the ruling was, it seems to have finally delivered a long overdue memo to Democratic politicians: Republican-controlled courts will allow Republicans to gerrymander their way to victory but won’t allow Democrats to do the same thing.

It’s a memo Democrats should have received at least 26 years ago, after Bush v. Gore, when the Supreme Court installed George W. Bush as president without even bothering to count all of the ballots in the state of Florida. Republican-controlled courts are against the idea of Democrats and especially Black people holding political power, and they will do everything in their considerable power to prevent that from happening. Republican judges are not concerned with laws or precedents or facts or fairness. They are concerned with winning. There is no intellectual consistency to Republican court rulings beyond one maxim: Republicans Always Win.

Watching the Democrats attempt to internalize this reality over the past week has been like watching Wile E. Coyote suddenly realize he’s run off a cliff. There’s a lot of flapping and thrashing but nothing that amounts to a real plan.

Virginia Democrats have provided a particularly good illustration of this arm-flapping. They’ve put forward a couple of ideas and acted on one: On Monday, they filed a lawsuit asking the US Supreme Court to overrule the decision of the state Supreme Court. The case amounts to a request for the Supreme Court to rule that the........

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