Air Date: 5-12-2026

Full Show Notes

[00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

Today we examine the redistricting scramble unleashed by the Supreme Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act. We'll hear how Southern states moved within days to crack majority-Black districts, how Tennessee banned public input to rush through new maps, and why every governor's race, state legislative seat, and secretary of state contest in 2026 is now a redistricting fight.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today include

PBS NewsHour

Boom! Lawyered

The Dean Obeidallah Show

Pod Save America

Southside

Ana Cabrera Reports

and Democracy Now!

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 4 sections;

Section A, THE RULING & THE LAW

Section B, HOW WE GOT HERE

Section C, THE STATES SCRAMBLE

Section D, WHAT COMES NEXT

And now, on to the show.

Immediately after that Supreme Court decision last week, which made it much harder [00:01:00] to challenge alleged racially gerrymandered congressional maps, we've seen a number of states make moves in their own territories. Let's take a quick look at the map here. Louisiana quickly suspended its House primaries, but early voting was already underway so lawmakers could approve new maps there.

In Alabama, there's a special legislative session today to redraw maps. Tennessee will have the same tomorrow. Mississippi considering the same move. For context, before the Supreme Court decision, the states shown here in red had already redrawn maps to benefit Republicans. States in blue had done the same for Democrats.

States were already considering changes in yellow there, though Florida was weighing a new map before the Supreme Court ruling. Amy, when you look at this whole picture, what maps are we gonna end up with? Who are they gonna benefit? Well, they're gonna benefit incumbents. We're gonna have fewer and fewer, , com- really, truly competitive seats because the goal here is to make as many safe districts for, for one party or the other.

Today, if you look at those seats that you mentioned in Louisiana, [00:02:00] Alabama, , and maybe Mississippi, but definitely Tennessee, the potential there is for at least three African American Democrats to be drawn out of their districts across those three states. If we think about this more broadly though, and get past the 2026 election- Mm-hmm

into '28 and '30 and beyond, I think the, one of the biggest questions now is in front of Democrats. Because what we're seeing is a war right now on partisanship. Who is going to come out ahead in terms of the number of seats they have in the House? How many Democratic seats? How many Republican seats?

Democrats can get into this, continue to do this tit for tat, but in order to get more seats, they have to take districts that right now are held by Black or Latino lawmakers who are Democrats- Mm-hmm ... and basically open them up, dilute those districts, move those Black and Latino voters into other areas of the state to make those more Democratic.

And [00:03:00] that's going to be a really big question mark for Democrats going forward because if they're defending, if what they're saying is the dilution of the influence of Black and Latino voices is a problem, and we need to ensure that those voices remain here, can you go into some of these states in order to get a partisan advantage by also diluting- Those voters Meanwhile, Tam- Those votes

you have been reporting on a Republican effort in Indiana where the Republican state senators there defied President Trump, did not redistrict there. Trump-aligned groups we know are now pouring in a lot of money to try to oust them. Tomorrow is the primary election. Here is what one of those state lawmakers, Senator James Buck, told you.

I represent Senate District 21. , I don't represent Washington's wishes. , If that's the case, , everybody after me would be looking over their shoulder, , "If I vote with my district, is Washington gonna try to crucify [00:04:00] me?" And, , you can't, you can't let that happen. You gotta, you gotta have a spine.

You gotta stand up for your constituents. You have to do what's right and let the chips fall where they may. Yeah. It's a fascinating dynamic, Tam. What's, how is this gonna play out? Yeah, tho- those chips are falling. We, we don't know how ultimately these races will turn out. We'll know late tomorrow night.

, What we do know is that people like Jim Buck and, , State Senator Spencer Deery and the other Republican state senators who are generally very Republican but just crossed the president on this one thing, they are facing the full weight of President Trump's political machine coming down on them, and it is painful.

It is... They are, they are facing- Millions of dollars in negative campaign ads. They are then raising money and trying to fight back. They're definitely, , being outspent in a significant way. And, , , this is a true test of President Trump's power of political retribution. And [00:05:00] one Trump advisor I spoke to said, , that these incumbents are headed for their, quote, "political slaughter."

When I pressed on, "Why are you spending money on Republican primaries in a red state?" Mm-hmm. , He said, "There is more than enough money to send a message in Indiana and then defend the Republican majorities in the fall." We're gonna continue to follow your reporting on that.

IMANI: So last week, the Supreme Court's conservatives shanked what was left of the Voting Rights Act right in the kidney. And I'm, I'm honestly gonna lose my mind. If I don't lose my mind in this segment, someone should send me s- cookies or something, 'cause this is just m- more than I can bear.

When I say the conservative jamokes on the Supreme Court shanked Section 2, I don't mean that in a vague, "Oh, this is bad for voting rights" kind of way. No. I mean that they took the core legal standard that has governed voter dilution cases for 40 years and just rewrote it. Conservatives looked at [00:06:00] the redrawn map in Louisiana that Black voters fought for, litigated, and won, and said, "Actually, nope.

Remedying racism in voting by accounting for race is itself racist." So let's get into actually what happened in Louisiana. Louisiana was forced to draw a map including a second majority Black district in 2024 pursuant to a court order. 

JESSICA: Mm-hmm. 

IMANI: Then a group of white voters got all in their feelings and sued to kill that map, not under Section 2, but under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

These white voters said that the map, which again drew a second majority Black district in a state where over one-third of the residents are Black, these white- ... voters said that that map is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. They claim that [00:07:00] Louisiana had used race too prominently in drawing the district, which if you think about it, makes no goddamn sense because how in the fuck are you supposed to draw a majority Black district without finding out where the Black people are at?

Right? We've 

JESSICA: talked about this. Where do we have 

IMANI: maps? You can't do it. You literally can't draw a map to remedy racism in districting without taking race into account. This is yet another example, as Jess mentioned earlier, of the 14th Amendment being rewritten to protect white people. I've talked about this a lot on the pod, on social media, to literally anyone who will listen.

JESSICA: It's true. 

IMANI: The same amendment that was ratified to protect Black people from state-sponsored racial discrimination was wielded by white voters to kill a majority Black district that a court ordered Louisiana to draw in order to [00:08:00] remedy discrimination under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. It is infuriating.

JESSICA: Boom! Lawyered family, if it feels like you're on a hamster wheel right now, that's on purpose by the conservative legal movement. The court is saying that the fix for discrimination is actually the problem, right? That you cannot consider race when fixing racism. Because why would you? Why would you? 

IMANI: Yeah.

JESSICA: We don't need to know where the Black folks in Louisiana are. We don't. Just 

IMANI: vibes. 

JESSICA: It's just vibes. 

IMANI: Yeah. 

JESSICA: It's just vibes. And the idea that Clay is a 14th Amendment case doing damage to the Voting Rights Act, but a 14th Amendment case in line with all the other 14th Amendment stuff happening from this court right now is exactly why we talked about this [00:09:00] season as the deconstruction era in- Absolutely

the Roberts Court. 

IMANI: Absolutely. 

JESSICA: Just is. 

IMANI: Okay. So here's what was supposed to happen under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Congress amended Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in 1982 specifically so that plaintiffs did not have to prove racist intent on the part of lawmakers drawing those maps. Mm-hmm.

Because lawmakers learned a lesson. States aren't dumb, right? They don't walk into court twirling a mustache saying, "Oh, no, we did a racism on purpose." Right? They draw maps And they pass race neutral rules, and those rules just happen to dilute Black people's votes. They didn't do it on purpose, it's just, it just happened.

Who'd have thunk? Who'd have thunk? So Congress saw this- 

JESSICA: Yeah ... 

IMANI: and they amended Section 2 to be a results test. Why? Because Congress got tired of states [00:10:00] race neutral, yet still racist voting fuckery. 

JESSICA: Yep. 

IMANI: Right? Mm-hmm. They said you're supposed to look at a map and look at reality, and you ask if Black voters have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.

And if the answer to that question is no, because their votes are being diluted, right, Black people are being cracked and packed into districts, right, you got a huge district and then you just split them up and you put Black people in this white district and Black people in that white district, and then Black people can never elect someone that represents them, that's a violation of Section 2 

JESSICA: I'm sorry, I was just chuckling at the idea that Congress was like, "Well, so look at reality, and if the Black folks aren't able to vote effectively, guess what?

That's voter dilution." And it is. And the other thing, this fix for Section 2 that happened is so important because it also put the VRA in line with other civil rights statutes that have an impact [00:11:00] analysis, right? So again, you don't have to prove anyone was sitting around and being racist, you just have to show that the system doesn't work the same way for Black voters.

It doesn't have to have an intent, it can have an effect. And that's how civil rights laws have treated systemic baked in discrimination historically, up until the conservative legal movement went on a project to rewrite those tests. 

IMANI: Imagine having a Congress now that's "Hey, let's look at the impact of racism on Black people and fix it."

Imagine having that Congress right now. 

JESSICA: Instead of a Congress that says DEI is racist. 

IMANI: Right. And if you're white, please sue your employer- ... because you've been discriminated 

JESSICA: against. Go to the EEOC website and it's like, "Are you white? Are your feelings hurt? Sue. Sue." Right. "Sue." It's just 

IMANI: absurd. 

And to be clear, it wasn't easy, right? The Gingles framework for Section 2 was not easy. Courts threw [00:12:00] out plenty of lawsuits, but it was possible, right? It was possible to succeed in these lawsuits. The thing that Section 2 promised, an equal opportunity to elect candidates of your choice, the Gingles framework told courts how to do it.

JESSICA: So that Gingles-Jingles framework is how courts have been analyzing Section 2 cases for decades. 

IMANI: For decades, precisely. That framework has been reaffirmed over and over, most recently three goddamn years ago in Allen versus Milligan in 2023. And when I say, I said earlier that that case is almost exactly the same as Louisiana v.

Cali, I'm not kidding. 

JESSICA: No. 

IMANI: Allen v. Milligan was a case about Alabama redistricting. Alabama, I think, is 27% Black. They had one majority Black district, right? And, and Alabama was required to draw a [00:13:00] second majority Black district after some map drawers proved that it could be done. It was the same issue: Black voters challenged a diluted map.

Roberts, Roberts wrote the majority. Kavanaugh concurred and said that the Gingles framework, quote, "effectuates the delicate legislative bargain that Section 2 embodies," right? Mm-hmm. Congress had never disturbed it, and stare decisis, which used to be a thing, right, the principle that you don't throw out your own statutory interpretation without an extraordinary reason, stare decisis counseled strongly against touching the Gingles framework.

That's what Roberts said, and Kavanaugh concurred. Now, would it surprise you that Alito dissented in Allen, proposing almost exactly what he just did in Cali? 

JESSICA: Mm-hmm. 

IMANI: The Court looked at Alito's argument [00:14:00] three years ago and said, "Nah, bitch." Right? Mm-hmm. And now it's three years later, and he's writing the majority opinion.

Nothing changed- No ... between 2023 and 2026, right? The statute didn't change. The Constitution didn't change. The fact that both Alabama and Louisiana are states with nearly a third population of Black people didn't change. The only thing that changed is who's holding the pen writing the majority. 

DEAN: There is a hostility that has long simmered by the white right. The year after the Voting Rights Act, the case did go to the Supreme Court challenging the le- the constitutionality. S- the State of South Carolina had brought a lawsuit right away, like, "How dare you allow Black people to vote?"

And that was, Supreme Court said, "Nope, it's legal," and it was constitutional. Yep. So then the group that took it back was the Shelby 

ELIE: County- 

DEAN: The, the year 

ELIE: before, in 1964, the year before the Voting Rights Act was passed, there were four Black people in Congress, right? Four. Right. , The year af- the, the 1968, so the Congressional election [00:15:00] after, , the Voting Rights Act ha- has been passed and is legal and is upheld, there were nine Black people in Congress.

So, like, you literally doubled the amount of Black representation in Congress- In a cycle after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and today there are 67 Black members of Congress. That's the highest in American history, and there are 56 Latino Americans in Congress. That's the highest in American history.

The other thing that the Voting Rights Act did, and a lot of people don't think of it 'cause they think of it as, as a purely racial act, but it also opened up the aperture for women to vote, especially Black women and Hispanic women, right? So before the Voting Rights Act, the 19th Amendment meant nothing for Black women.

The 19th Amendment was some white feminism that they were on that even the people who were, who... The white suffragettes who were fighting for it weren't really fighting for the rights of Black women to vote. But the Voting Rights Act changed then. , Cha- ch- change, changed the ability for women to represent themselves in Congress as well.

Before the Voting [00:16:00] Rights Act, 13 women in Congress. Today, 154. Wow. This has been the most important and the most successful piece of legislation in American history, and that's why they hate it. 'Cause it works. 'Cause it actually works. It actually gives political power to non-white, non-cis-hetero males, and that's why they hate it, and that's why they've, they've destroyed it.

DEAN: So , Elie, is it, is it overly simplistic to say that the goal of the white right on the Supreme Court and also in the GOP is the idea of taking us back to a time where white male Christian power was unchallenged? 

ELIE: Look at the maps, Dean. Look at the... , you, you, you, you... We were talking offline about The New York Times projection maps in the wake of this, this decision.

Look at the... Look at what the people who are in favor of this, this decision immediately wanna do. The first thing they wanna do is go through every majority-minority [00:17:00] district in the South and take it away. Take it away. So I don't s- I, you don't, some, you don't even have to believe me. You can just look at what they're doing with this new power that the Supreme Court has given them.

The first thing they did on the first day after their decision is put plans in place to take away Black and brown congresspeople throughout the South. 

DEAN: Mm-hmm. And, , going back to Shelby County versus Holder, the 2013 Supreme Court decision which was born from a case brought in Alabama a year and a half into President Obama in the White House.

Like, "This is too much. There's a Black guy in the White House. We have to do something." Shelby County, as soon as it's decided and they end pre-clearance, Texas and other states instantaneously, , apply voter ID laws and other things they could not do before. So it's the same mirror of that. So that, so, and they knew this was gonna happen.

The members- 

ELIE: Trump doesn't win in 2016 without Shelby County v. Holder in 2013. He just doesn't Well, Trump, Trump does not get elected [00:18:00] in 2016 without the Supreme Court helping, allowing white people to suppress the Black vote, thanks to Shelby County v. Holder. It is, it's, it's a linear progression here.

It's a, , you don't even, it, you don't have to connect the dots because you can just look at what they're doing and what they're saying. They're, they're not hiding the ball. They don't want Black people to vote, and every time they have a, they have the opportunity to deny Black people the right to vote, they do.

And then Republicans win. So it all works out for them. Like, they're not, they're not ashamed of it. And I, and I just, I haven't published this yet, but I, I wrote in my newsletter, , for this week, Dean, that the happiness from the Right about this, it, is, is the proof in the pudding. It is the proof of their racism, because even if you wanna say that they had a, a, a, a true legal reason to stand on, which they didn't, but even if you wanna give them [00:19:00] that, you're happy about this?

You're, you, you're, you're happy about the destruction of, again, the most important, the most successful civil rights piece of legislation in American history? You're gleeful about it? You're, you're, you're, you're high-fiving and, and back slapping and, and already putting out maps to take away people's, , , , representation.

Like, it, they're, they're telling on themselves, right? And what they're telling us is whites win again, and that's all they care about. 

DEAN: Another win for Whitey. That's what we're gonna call this segment. Another win for Whitey. I'm chatting with Elie Mystal. So E- Elie, let's go back for a second here. What leads up to the Voting Rights Act, and I went through yesterday the history of what took place with, you, I played Martin Luther King from 1957, give us the ballot, and, and all, but also during the era of Jim Crow, the efforts used to oppress Black people from voting, literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clause, and of course violence, rampant violence that was going on.

So the Voting Rights Act, a [00:20:00] lot of it was at that focus. Do you think there's any chance that with the Voting Rights Act being gutted now, that we see something like that? Now poll tax is barred by the 24th Amendment, that's the only thing. But could there be some new version of a literacy t- literacy test imposed?

Something by Repub- 'cause everything they do is go backwards. They're not original, they just look backwards and go backwards, and they're gonna try to find some new modern-day version of that, I think. 

ELIE: Literacy tests, these other things that you're ta- talking about, what the Supreme Court said as, as a legal proposition is two... There are two important things, and one doesn't even come from this case. One comes from a case a couple of years ago. Kagan laid this all out in her dissent, but one comes from a case a couple of years ago, , called Brnovich, , versus Arizona, or Arizona v Brnovich.

And what they said was that the Voting Rights Act couldn't be used to support basically an individual claim against, of discrimination. So I can't go to the court as an individual person who's been denied or had my vote oppressed or suppressed and say like, "Hey, Voting Rights [00:21:00] Act, that's supposed to help me."

No, no, no. Brnovich says I can't file that lawsuit, right? Now, with this decision on, on, on, on Wednesday, they're saying that the Voting Rights Act cannot be used to show what the l- lawyers call disparate impact, right? So disparate impact means, like, here's a law. It's facially race neutral, but it just so happens coincidentally, who can tell how, to disproportionately affect Black and brown people, or disproportionately affect poor people.

Doesn't say we hate Negroes. It just happens to only affect Negroes, right? Like, that, what the court said on Wednesday was that the Voting Rights Can't Act can't be used, , , in cases of disparate impact, right? So that to prove a violation of what remains of the zombie Voting Rights Act, you have to be able to show intentional discrimination, which basically means that the racists have to say, "We are doing this because we hate Black [00:22:00] people.

Ew. Icky." And if they don't say that, then guess what? You can't prove it, and you can't prove that they were trying to be racist in, in their law, right? So if you say there's a literacy test, and you say that that is facially racist, everybody has to take it. It just so happens- Right ... black people have to take it more, that that's, that apparently is okay now.

So tho- so at a legal level, what they've done is make racism unprovable, right? I can't sue for it, and even if I could sue, I can't prove that it, it exists. I can't prove racism unless Hulk Hogan, like, spray paints the N-word on a trailer. Anything short of that, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm SOL. And, and that is the...

That is going to be the going forward problem, not just in the, in the category of voting, but across all of our politics 

HOST 2: There's so much to say about this ruling, and I'll get to the political impacts in a second. But John Roberts, who has gotten a bit of a, [00:23:00] um, improved reputation over the years about some of the, the rulings in the tariff case, a couple other anti-Trump ones.

But long before Trump, John Roberts' main project as chief justice was the dismantling of the Voting, Voting Rights Act. Through these decisions, Shelby County versus Holder, there's Brnovich, there is now this one. This is destroying one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation in American history.

Like, in this, all the headlines are like, they hollowed out, which I, I said here. They limited. That is, that is maybe true in the words that Alito used, but in actual practice, they struck down Section 2 as we understand it. The ability to... Like, what was left here is they allowed partisan gerrymandering as a principle in Shelby County.

Now what they have done is essentially said that The last possible way in which you could stop, prevent gerrymandering, which was designed and inherently always will dilute the power of Black voters, if you were trying to dilute the power of [00:24:00] Democratic v- voters in a state, the way in which you do that is you dilute the population that votes at 80, 90% for Democrats.

And so they say, they're now saying, "That is okay. That is what is happening here." It has dramatic implications. As you say, Louisiana, 30% of its st- of its population is Black. They're gonna only have one representative at best when this is over. In several states, like Arkansas- like Alabama and Mississippi, are gonna, after this is all said and done, at some point in the future, will have no Black represent- representatives, even though they have 30% of their population is Black.

They are going to eliminate the Democratic delegations in most Southern states because of this. They are going to cut down the number of Black members in, uh, places like North Carolina and elsewhere. And, you know, by some estimates, 30% of the Congressional Black Caucus would be gone if the Republicans push forward but to maximum advantage on a, uh, with gerrymandering with these new laws.

So the question is, in this midterm, what is the actual impact? [00:25:00] The Republicans are gonna get one more seat out of Louisiana. I think they're, the, we're gonna talk in a minute about the map in Florida, but this is going, this gives more legal cover to what's a pretty illegal map in Florida. And then in Tennessee, there are a handful of states, because this is coming so late in the cycle, there's limits of what Republicans can do.

Many, the filing deadlines have passed in all 50 states. Many states have held their primaries. Other states have held their, have not held their primaries, but early voting has already started. Um, and so it's very, like it would create mass chaos to do, to redraw the maps at this late stage of the game, but there are some places where they could do it.

Tennessee is one of those places. There is one Democratic district in Tennessee. Steve Cohen in the Memphis area, I believe, hosts it, or represents it. The, uh, Trump spoke to the governor of Tennessee today to get, try to encourage him to redraw the maps before the election. Marsha Blackburn, who is the senator from Tennessee who's running for governor in Tennessee, called for this.

You could see that happening here. They could do something similar [00:26:00] in Missouri, in South Carolina. I'm not sure they'll be able to do that. In Georgia, where early voting has started, it started this week, I believe, the, there are some Republicans calling for a special session to redraw the maps. Would Brian Kemp do that?

I don't know. But you can sort of s- it's gonna help Republicans in this election, but the longer term consequence is a House that's gonna be less democratic, small D, less Democratic, big D. It's gonna be much whiter, which one of my Substack subscribers said would be like adding white food coloring to mayonnaise.

So, which I thought was great. Very funny. Um- And not 

GUEST: aioli. We're not talking aioli. Yes, not, not- We're talking about Hellmann's 

HOST 2: Yes, we were talking about super white Hellmann's mayonnaise. Um, and it's just, it's, like this is terrible for democracy, and it's going to mean going forward a structural ad- advantage for Republicans in the House that is akin to the one they currently hold in the Senate.

Can Democrats take the majority under that scenario? Absolutely, and we might win enough seats this time to do that even under the, under a post-Supreme Court decision [00:27:00] map, but it's gonna b- you're gonna need a bigger wave every time to do it. It is... This is a, this is a very, very bad decision in the long run.

I don't think, it's not gonna cost us the House this election, but it's definitely, but it's gonna hurt in the long run. 

GUEST: Can I ask, I mean, 'cause I'm- Hmm ... a loyal Messagebox subscriber- 

HOST 2: Yep ... 

GUEST: uh, a paid subscriber as all true Americans should be. Yes, all true Americans. And as, a- a- and, and years, you said it, um, I'll quote you, Dan.

Oh, please. "Pretending we're still playing- Legal 

HOST 2: documents and Messagebox in the same episode. 

GUEST: Listen, I came with fucking receipts, dude. You did. What do you think? You think I'm gonna Favreau my way through this? It's- I show up when Dan Pfeiffer asks me to be his guest on Pod Save America. Yes. "Pretending we're still playing the old game is how we lose the House for a generation.

Every governor's race, every state legislative chamber, every secretary of state contest in 2026 is now a redistricting fight. Act accordingly." Mic drop. Okay, those are good marching orders. If you weren't fired up about a secretary of state contest in your, in your state, get fucking excited 'cause it matters.

And 

HOST 2: it's, and [00:28:00] this is gonna mean that Democrats across the country are gonna have to do what Democrats in Virginia and California did, which is they're going to have to redraw their maps to maximum effect. That's gonna mean Illinois, New York, Maryland, where there was resistance this time. In states that have redistr- anti-gerrymandering ballot initiatives or constitutional amendments, we should try to undo those if they were in blue states.

Like this is- Sad ... and look- The 

GUEST: high road, 

HOST 2: gone ... I, I think gerrymandering, gerrymandering is bad. 

GUEST: It is. 

HOST 2: But we have to do this up until the moment where we have enough power to pass a national ban on partisan gerrymandering. Like, and just worth remembering, every single Democrat voted for a bill that would ban national gerrymandering, and every single Republican voted against a national ban on gerrymandering, so.

GUEST: Can I ask something even more explosive then, Dan? Yes, 

HOST 2: of course. 

GUEST: I know you're looking at Republican, uh, state houses, but what about the Republican Supreme Court? Isn't it time to think about this body of... This body is so underco- I, I understand they are [00:29:00] constitutionally outlined to have these powers, but what the court is doing is so undemocratic, and I think Alito and Thomas, or Alito or Thomas could retire at the end of this, uh, court term and allow Trump to appoint two zygotes and solidify- Jesus

a conservative majority, six. Again, s- zygotes are, are human beings. Um, and like should there not be a conversation if Democrats retake power around court reform? 

HOST 2: Yes, 100%. I have, I thought that we should have undertaken that effort when we had power in 2021. Now, we didn't have enough- Uh, Democrats to get rid of the filibuster to do that, and there certainly wasn't support for court expansion.

But I- there, like this is one of those things that I don't think we need to run on, but when- once we do win, we should do it, which is, like there should, we should look at term limits, we should look at court expansion. There should obviously be a code of ethics for these corrupt assholes who are doing things.

Like, like yes, like there, this is a gigantic [00:30:00] problem. And long after Trump has moved on to, uh, work full-time on ballrooms and home reno projects at Mar-a-Lago, the, his legacy for decades afterwards is going to haunt us because of this court. And so every option should be on the table to deal with that.

HOST: So I'm here in Washington State in Seattle. Help me understand why this matters, this is a case in Louisiana, why this matters all the way up here. You wrote that once such horrible maps are in place, reversing them is extraordinarily difficult. Can you tell us why? 

STACEY: Sure. We live in a country of 50 states, and we have determined that we have bound ourselves in outcome, which means that part of the congressional makeup has to reflect the needs of all Americans.

When minority populations are isolated from power, it has an effect upstream, but also across the country. That means extremist legislation becomes easier to pass. It [00:31:00] becomes easier to rig maps everywhere else, and it limits accountability across the country. Often, it, the challenges start in the South, but we are both an incubator, but we are also a carrier.

And what happens is what starts in the South tends to move across the country. Hmm. We have to fight for the whole map because we have to fight for the entire country. This is not a Southern problem alone. The erosion of voting rights affects communities across the country. And when we diminish full participation in our voting, we diminish the pluralism of our democracy.

And so I would urge anyone, irrespective of where you live, to be deeply concerned when your fellow citizens are told their votes do not matter, and when politicians are allowed to draw the lines to cherry-pick their voters. 

HOST: And a, a quick question to follow that on what a map based on the ruling would look like.

Would they be blocks of [00:32:00] geography? 

STACEY: It would actually gut the members of Congress who currently represent communities of color. Hmm. So right now you have 67 members in the Congressional Black Caucus. Mm-hmm. And that has taken 60 years to achieve. Now, let's remember, Congress is f- 435 members in the House.

There are only 67 Black members. 65, I think 64 in the House itself. Under the new ruling, we know that up to 20 of those, 19 of those seats could be eviscerated. The Latino caucus could lose five seats, and then across the country at the state legislative level, the state legislators who draw those congressional maps could see 191 members lose their seats.

That means that if you care about affordable housing, if you care about healthcare, if you have any concerns about social justice in this country, if we lose those members of Congress, we also lose those [00:33:00] values being represented in Congress. Hmm. That's the problem for every American, that we're not just losing seats, we are losing political power for there being a debate in Congress about what's possible.

HOST: Hmm. To pivot a little bit, after establishing a national profile following your runs for Georgia governor in 2018 and 2022, you seem to have stepped back from the spotlight. Why? 

STACEY: Well, I would say this. When you're running for governor, especially when You have a candidacy like mine, which was unusual since I was the first Black woman in American history to stand for that o- to make it- Mm-hmm

that far in standing for that office. , The spotlight goes where it wants, but the work remains. And while the spotlight may have shifted, I have not stopped doing the work. I founded Fair Fight to fight for voting rights. I fou- founded Fair Count to fight for a census that fairly reflects America. I founded, , the American Pride Rises Network to defend diversity, equity, and inclusion.

[00:34:00] I recently launched the 10 Steps campaign to fight back against the authoritarian regime that is trying to strip us of our democracy. And to bring it back to the Callais decision, that is a pillar of doing so because when you can reshape Congress without having to actually compete in the valley of ideas, what you accomplish is a step towards what Viktor Orbán did in Hungary- Hmm

and what Russia does every day with its Duma. Hmm. When you can create any opportunity to limit the voice of the people, you are eroding democracy. And so while the attention may have shifted, the work has never stopped. 

Steve Cohen, the state's lone Democratic member of Congress, whose Memphis seat is on the line in this Republican redistricting push. Congressman, thank you for being with us. As your state lawmakers plow forward on redrawing Tennessee's congressional map, what's at stake if this Black majority district is broken up?

Well, it destroys what was some of the highlights of the '60s, one of the greatest [00:35:00] legislative accomplishments of Lyndon Johnson and Congress in the 20th century of passing the Voting Rights Act, with Martin Luther King and John Lewis there to fight for it, among others, , the people who died for that right to vote, John Lewis' march across the E- Edmund Pettus Bridge, and the march to Montgomery, and it's all wiped out.

This was to make up for years of slavery and Jim Crow, and give African Americans voting districts where they had the opportunity to elect the candidate of their choice. And they've done that in a wonderful way. Black people are very engaged in politics. It's an important part of their, of their livelihoods, and their success, and, and their advancements in America.

This is a great turnaround, and a turn back to Jim Crow-era politics of the '50s. And the southern legislatures, like the one in Tennessee that wrought the lines in T- in the South and all over the country, won't be able to raise e- racial arguments, even when they are obvious. Mm-hmm. It is obvious as the shoe on your foot that this is a racially d- d- d- ba- based [00:36:00] gerrymandering to eliminate the Black vote, which is a core Democratic vote.

But that's why they're being eliminated. This district was not a voting rights district, it was a district of compactness, of community of interest, of Memphians who live together. It's a large Black population, and they've had that district. I've represented it 20 years, and I feel like I'm going to my own funeral.

I, I, I, I hear what you're saying. Can you explain why you feel that Black voices and Black votes won't be heard or won't be counted in the same way? And what options, if any, do you and your Democratic colleagues have to fight back? African Americans have been a majority of this district, 61% in the general, , District 9, and in a primary, 80%.

80% in a Democratic primary where the candidate's basically chosen. And, and I've won that district nine times and reelect with 80% d- Black vote, and never lost a precinct. African American voters don't vote on race, they vote on the candidate who they want [00:37:00] to deliver services, to deliver to Memphis, and deliver constituent services.

And they've done it. With this district the way it is, divided Memphis in three different maps that stretch out up close to y- , to the Kentucky line and over towards Nashville, on the Mississippi line and, and towards Chattanooga, and then in the center going out, drawn for one particular man, a man named Brett Taylor, who's a House member.

He drew that map for himself. Those districts will make the Black voting population of Memphis a tail of a comet. They will not get any regards from the people who, who running in the Republican primaries who will be the winner, 'cause these are majority, big-time majority Republican districts, and the Black vote will not be sought, and it will not be listened to.

And there will not be offices in Memphis to deal with constituent services, Social Security, Medicaid, VA issues, whatever, and there won't be community projects that Memphis needs. Memphis is a big city, the second-biggest city in Tennessee, an iconic city in America. I have delivered. My predecessors, Harold Ford Jr.

and Sr., delivered. Nobody will deliver because it's [00:38:00] not gonna be an important part of that voting bloc. They will not get community projects. They will not get the needs they want. And one thing that shows how foolish this is, you have a baseball team, nine players. We have nine congressmen. You have nine players who play nine different positions and can help you different ways.

When we needed a bridge built across the Mississippi River, one of the biggest projects this state's ever saw, they came to me, the lone Democrat, to lobby Pete Buttigieg under, un- under Biden. I was able to get Buttigieg and the Biden administration to give $450 million, million dollars to this project.

There will be a new bridge built over the Mississippi River because the Republican governor and the Republican team came to the Democrat, the only Democrat they had who could deliver. They asked me to deliver, and I delivered. There's gonna be a Democratic president in 2028. There will be nobody to deliver.

They're doing all this for Donald Trump for one reason, to stop oversight of him in the Congress next term. We can oversee his [00:39:00] kleptomania, his cryp- cryptocracy and the money he's made, his emoluments violations, his pardon violations. They don't want that. For one man, the most heinous criminal man ever to hold the White House, ever, they're turning Tennessee around, they're turning Black votes around, they're turning Memphis around.

Killing a city- Congressman- ... a great American city. Congressman, Congressman Steve Cohen, I appreciate your passion. Thank you so much.

AMY: So put that, back talk, , against- The Voting Rights Act and what has happened with it. Mm-hmm. And, , for people who don't understand what exactly has happened, and if you can also talk about the Supreme Court finding that Louisiana's current congressional map is unconstitutional, - Mm-hmm

which followed Governor Landry suspending the state's primaries for the US House of Representatives. 

KIMBERLE: Absolutely. Well, , the Voting Rights Act was the [00:40:00] crown jewel of the civil rights movement, in part because it said, look, it doesn't matter the specific thing that you're doing to undermine the voting strength, , of traditionally excluded, , populations.

The Voting Rights Act protects against intentional or effective, , disenfranchisement of, , protected groups. Well, what this Supreme Court has now said is that if you take race into account in trying to address racism in the, , voting rights system, that you are the one that is guilty of creating, , a racialized system.

So what they're effectively saying is that if you draw a district in order to protect an incumbent, , that's okay. If you draw a district in order to maximize minority voting strength, that's not okay. Now let's be clear about one thing. , Incumbency is often the product of racial power. , Incumbency, particularly in Louisiana, i- is, is, is, , [00:41:00] made and reinforced by packing, cracking, stacking, , African American voters.

What they're basically saying is you, you, you have to take the baseline as is, , even though that's a product of race discrimination. If you try to r- if you try to remedy the racial discrimination that's built into incumbency, that's when you're being racist. That's the problem. So it's turning reality completely on its head and destroying the Voting Rights Act.

while they're doing so. 

AMY: Talk about what exactly intersectionality is, , and critical race theory.

Mm-hmm. And what it means today under President Trump. The- Yeah ... vicious attack, and how that was really the underpinning of DEI. 

KIMBERLE: Yeah. Well, intersectionality just refers to the idea, , that disadvantage, discrimination, marginalization, , often is based on more than one axis of inequality. Those often, , [00:42:00] overlap.

They reinforce each other. So I began to write in this arena when I was trying to understand how Black women who sometimes sued employers because they were subject to gender discrimination and race discrimination, , many times Black jobs were for men, and women's jobs were for white women, which meant that there was precious little space for African American women.

But courts couldn't really understand that. They were saying, , , "How can you claim race discrimination because we hire Black people? They just happen to be men. How can you claim gender discrimination? We hire women. They just happen to be white." And I couldn't understand what the courts couldn't understand.

So I, I was looking for a metaphor, a way that would allow judges to understand that discrimination isn't just a- along one axis or another, but just like intersections, they might crisscross each other. So intersectionality was a really a remedial [00:43:00] framework for judges that are supposed to be very smart, but they weren't that smart at all when it came to understanding what Black women were experiencing 

AMY: Hmm.

Can you talk about Clarence Thomas and the tensions around his confirmation as justice of the Supreme Court? Yeah. You write a lot about this. 

KIMBERLE: Yeah. So when, , , when Clarence Thomas was, , , nominated for- Mm-hmm ... , to take over the, the, the seat that, , Thurgood Marshall had occupied, the great civil rights giant, my initial thought was, "This isn't gonna work.

Everybody knows there's a difference between Clarence Thomas and Thurgood Marshall." , And to my surprise and disillusionment, a lot of people didn't understand the difference between the two. , Eventually, there became a, a moment when it was known that there was someone, a for- former employee who, , had told someone that she'd been sexually harassed by him.

That person turned out to be Anita Hill. Turned out I [00:44:00] knew Anita. There weren't a whole, a whole lot of Black women law professors, , so I contacted her. I offered support. Before I knew it, I was on my way to Washington, D.C. to support her. , But the shocking thing that happened was when Clarence Thomas denounced the entire, , inquiry as a high-tech lynching, and what that did was it provided a metaphor for him to speak to the history of anti-Blackness, to place himself in the middle of that narrative, and to draw a support of large numbers of African Americans to his side, and she had nothing equivalent that she could say.

I 

AMY: wanted to turn to then senator, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Joe Biden- Joe Biden, 

KIMBERLE: yes ... 

AMY: questioning Anita Hill back in 1991. 

CLIP: Can you tell the committee what was the most embarrassing of all the incidences that you have alleged? I think [00:45:00] the one that was the most embarrassing was his discussion of, of pornography involving these women with large breasts and, and ha- engaged in variety of sex with different people or, or animals.

That was the thing that embarrassed me the most and made me feel the most humiliated. 

AMY: Law professor Anita Hill testifying at the confirmation hearing of Clarence Thomas. , Professor Crenshaw, the lessons you draw from what happened there and what it means for today. 

KIMBERLE: , Amy, I wanna take you to the moment that Clarence Thomas was finally confirmed.

My, , co-founder of AAPF, Luke Harris, and I were sitting on the stairs of the Supreme Court. , At that moment I said, "This is gonna change the rest of our lives." Luke said, "All because they refuse to believe [00:46:00] a Black woman." , I call this a massive intersectional failure. , A coalition of, , civil rights groups, feminist groups, they successfully blocked Bork.

Clarence Thomas was basically an acolyte of Bork. There wasn't really much daylight between them. What was different was Clarence Thomas was able to wrap himself in a sympathetic, , framework as someone who was being unfairly treated by the testimony, and Anita Hill, partly because the history of Black women, the experiences that they've had with sexual harassment off, , really since we arrived here, and the fact that Black women were some of the first plaintiffs in sexual harassment cases, that just wasn't part of the common knowledge.

So she was framed as someone who was complaining about something that Black women, , don't complain about. There was a op-ed in The New York Times that said that what Clarence Thomas had done to Anita was just basically down-home courting. [00:47:00] So there was a cultural defense that was being made, , to block the significance of her testimony.

So what we often say now is when we look at some of the consequences of that failure, some of the, , long-term, , , results of that, we've lost, , campaign finance reform on a 5-4 vote. We lost, , , Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, 5-4 votes. We look at all the 5-4 votes that were made possible by that failure to believe Anita Hill, and we have to recognize that this intersectional failure not only impacts Black women, not only impacts communities of color, it undermined the security and the democracy of the entire nation 

HOST: Democrats are often criticized for at least a perceived lack of values, for being milquetoast, poll-tested, boilerplate candidates, , reciting the party line, and that's part of why they're not winning.

What do you make of that [00:48:00] critique? 

STACEY: I, I would also remind folks that over the last 20 years, we have basically held power almost as often as the other side has. Hmm. The issue is what do we do with that power when we have it, and that's why I am so bullish about voting rights. They borrow our power.

Elected officials borrow power, but the people have to remember that it is borrowed, and we can take it back. Democrats have values. We believe in shared success. We believe that everyone has the right to do their best, but that we should remove barriers. The right has a similar set of conditionalities, but they have a different composition.

We are the most diverse party, which means we've gotta try to meet the needs of a broader coalition. But we can meet those needs by understanding and recognizing that identity matters and outcome matters. And if we are working on both of those things, fighting for a voting rights act that actually guarantees that your [00:49:00] identity does not diminish your access to democracy, but also delivering on affordability, delivering on the needs of the people to make progress possible in their lives, that's how Democrats win.

HOST: Stacey Abrams, what would you say to someone who thinks, "I haven't been able to vote, to individually vote the US out of an extremely unpopular war with Iran. My vote has not guaranteed my prices are going down. The structure of the Senate means that voters in more populous states have more diluted power."

My producer and I are hearing our, our friends and colleagues say, "It's just hard to even watch the news. , You wanna turn it off." What do you tell them when you ask them to lock in? 

STACEY: Because that's the point of what they're doing. The reason we have seen this aggressive destruction of our democracy is to create the sense that we can't do a thing about it, and I point to Hungary very intentionally.

For [00:50:00] 16 years, Viktor Orbán ruled a country that had emerged from communist rule in 1989, had finally come close to a functioning democracy, and then you had Viktor Orbán, who, , Donald Trump and JD Vance have lauded. This is a man who attacked the media and basically took control of public media. He attacked the legislature and basically sh- reshifted it and reshaped it so that only his party could be heard.

He attacked the judiciary and made them a puppet. He did all of the things we are watching happen in America. But what happened two weeks ago in Hungary was that 78% of the population said, "No more." They said after 16 years of watching their prices go up and their values be crushed, watching corruption run amok, they were refusing to do it any longer, and it worked.

They not only over, they not only removed him as the president, they flipped both chambers. They changed the [00:51:00] composition of their legislature, and now they are on the path to restoring full and participatory democracy, which is how we get the things we need. I am the daughter of the South. My parents were born During Jim Crow, my parents weren't a- able to vote.

, My grandparents were in their 40s before they were full legal citizens of this country- Hmm ... even though they were born here. And so I know how slow and plodding and hard it can feel, but I also know how we can win because we've done it before. Every time we win, they come back and they try to take more power.

We have to meet them on the battlefield of voting, on the battlefield of democracy, and believe more in our democracy than we believe in their right to deny it. 

We've just heard clips starting with

The PBS NewsHour examining the redistricting free-for-all and last week's Supreme Court decision, warning that fewer competitive seats and the potential erasure of Black Democratic districts could define [00:52:00] elections through 2030 and beyond.

Boom! Lawyered traced how the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, abandoning the results test they had unanimously reaffirmed just three years earlier.

The Dean Obeidallah Show connected Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 to Trump's 2016 win and the latest Supreme Court ruling, arguing the destruction of the Voting Rights Act follows a clear, linear progression.

Pod Save America broke down how the Supreme Court's latest Voting Rights ruling effectively legalizes racial gerrymandering, threatening Black representation in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana and building a structural House advantage for Republicans.

Southside in two parts spotlighted Stacey Abrams pointing to Hungary's recent ouster of Viktor Orban as a direct answer to Americans tempted to give up on voting as a meaningful tool for change.

Ana Cabrera Reports hosted Congressman Steve Cohen, who called Tennessee's redistricting push a return to Jim Crow and a naked [00:53:00] racial gerrymander designed to eliminate Democratic oversight of Donald Trump

And Democracy Now! presented Kimberlé Crenshaw arguing that refusing to believe Anita Hill in 1991 enabled decades of 5-4 rulings that dismantled the Voting Rights Act and undermined American democracy.

And those were just the top takes, there's lots more in the deeper dives sections,

But first, speaking of injustices of historical proportions, I’m just repeating the sad news about our new show, SOLVED! We’ve suffered a dramatic cut in ad revenue largely driven by widespread economic instability and we’re being forced us to put SOLVED! on indefinite hiatus. We were already stretching ourselves quite thin trying to build something new and so when Trump threw the world into chaos and marketing dollars dried up in response, we were extremely vulnerable to those shockwaves. Right now, I am getting back to basics and focusing on building Best of the Left to be the best it can be with the greatest reach it can. So, that’s where my [00:54:00] focus is going to be and I’ll be keeping you posted on our progress as it develops. 

Regarding members supporting the show, you really are more and more of what’s getting us through right now so thanks to everyone who is a member or has made one-time donations. 

If you haven’t signed up yet, it’s important to remind you that each episode of Best of the Left takes about 25 hours of human labor to produce.

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or you can simply email me to [email protected]

As for today's topic,

The thing about being a progressive is that we’re very often [00:55:00] right too soon. On almost any issue you can name, civil rights, women's suffrage, marriage equality, healthcare as a basic human right, the position that eventually becomes the obvious consensus is the position progressives held a generation or two earlier, back when the moderates were calling us radicals for holding it. Which means a lot of the actual work of political progress in this country is the work of dragging people who would eventually agree with us along behind us. That takes years, sometimes decades, and the path to progress is always paved in injustice, sometimes in blood.

Given the makeup of our politics, the Democratic Party is the institution where this dynamic between progressives and moderates plays out, over and over again. So the question of how progress actually happens in this country keeps coming back to the question of how the Democratic Party gets moved.

Right now we're in the middle of a particularly [00:56:00] painful round of this. The Voting Rights Act is being dismantled in real time. The Supreme Court's decision in Louisiana v. Callais, handed down on April 29th, basically eviscerated Section 2 of the Act, the part that lets voters challenge racially discriminatory maps. Justice Kagan, writing in dissent, said the ruling renders Section 2 "all but a dead letter." And the states moved within days, with primaries getting suspended, emergency redistricting sessions called, and Black-majority districts being eliminated across multiple Southern states, all of which this show is covering in detail.

We had a chance to defend voting rights against exactly this, four years ago. In January 2022, the Senate held a vote on a package called the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act, which would have restored the pre-clearance protections the Court gutted in the Shelby County case back in 2013 and set baseline national standards for elections that would have made Callais much [00:57:00] less catastrophic. Every Democrat in the Senate supported the substance of that bill, including Joe Manchin, who co-sponsored it himself. What they were fighting over wasn't whether to pass it, it was whether to change a Senate procedural rule, the filibuster, to actually let it get to a vote.

Two Senate Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, refused. They both said they supported voting rights, they just couldn't support changing a Senate rule to pass them. The vote on the rule change was 48 to 52. Manchin and Sinema voted with all 50 Republicans, the carve-out died, the bills died, and five months later the Supreme Court overturned Roe. Four years after that, the Court handed down Callais.

But the real argument here isn't whether Manchin and Sinema made the wrong call on one specific procedural vote, it's that the filibuster itself is fundamentally undemocratic and shouldn't exist, particularly not in its [00:58:00] current form. The Senate is already the least democratic institution in the federal government by design. Every state gets two senators regardless of population, which means Wyoming, with about 600,000 people, has the same voting power as California, with 39 million. The Senate already heavily over-represents small, rural, disproportionately white states. The filibuster takes that structural tilt and makes it dramatically worse. Right now, 41 senators can block any major piece of legislation, and those 41 senators can represent as little as 11 or 12 percent of the country. So we have a body where a minority can already win most of the time, and on top of that we've layered a rule that lets an even smaller minority block whatever they want. That gives a small minority a veto over democracy itself, held by the same people whose interests are already the [00:59:00] most over-represented in the system to begin with.

The argument for the filibuster is that it helps force compromise and bipartisanship. It could still do that if it ran under the old rules that force senators to actually get up and speak to hold a filibuster. But when it acts as an effortless method to block nearly any legislation, it tips over from encouraging compromise to breaking democracy itself.

And this is a big part of what's driving polarization. When people can't actually get the legislation passed that they believe in, even when their side wins elections, they don't conclude the system is working. They conclude the system is broken or rigged, that the other side is illegitimate, that voting doesn't matter. Polarization isn't just a cultural disease, it's the predictable consequence of a political system that's been engineered to make sure majorities can't govern. The filibuster is one of the central pieces of that engineering.

[01:00:00] And in 2022, the undemocratic filibuster at the heart of our undemocratic system was used to thwart the best attempt in years to protect voting rights and return some modicum of power to the people and it has to stop.

So when Manchin gave his floor speech in 2022 about how curtailing the filibuster would "pour fuel on the fire of political whiplash" and tear the country apart, he had it backwards. The fuel on the fire is the filibuster itself, and every time it gets used to block popular, broadly supported legislation, that fire burns hotter.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that the 2022 failure was a procedural failure, not an ideological one, and procedural failures are easier to fix. The Democratic Party isn't secretly opposed to voting rights, progressives already won that battle, the problem is an unwillingness, in a specific moment, to break one Senate rule to [01:01:00] pass them. 

And now the political conditions have changed too. The 2022 fight happened when redistricting was abstract for most voters, the consequences of Shelby County hadn't fully metastasized, and Callais was still hypothetical. That's not the situation anymore, since the redistricting battles happening right now have moved voting rights out of the wonk category and into the category of things people can see on the news actively affecting their representation.

And the state-level battles aren't just news to process, it's also an organizing pathway. State legislators in every affected state are fighting back and they could use help. Some states are running ballot measures to take redistricting out of the legislature's hands entirely and hand it to independent commissions. State supreme court races have suddenly become major battlegrounds, since that's now where voting rights cases get fought after Callais. Finding the local group working on any of this where you live and giving them time or money, or just showing up to a public hearing, makes a real [01:02:00] difference at a level where Democrats actually do have power right now.

The federal piece can't get dropped though, because the filibuster isn't going away on its own. Don’t bother asking Democratic candidates whether they support voting rights, because every single one of them already does. The question that matters now is whether they'll commit, on the record, to circumventing the filibuster on day one of the next Democratic trifecta in order to institute protections for those voting rights. Make that the litmus test every time you talk to anyone running for federal office, and get the commitment in a form you can hold them to later. 

Being right too soon means the work is making everyone else catch up, and there's no rule that says we have to be polite about waiting. The substantive answer on voting rights is already on the record, every Democrat supports voting rights. What's left between us and enforcing that with law is a Senate procedural rule that shouldn't exist in the first place. So make them answer for it.

Note that we've [01:03:00] begun putting my commentaries on YouTube so if you find them insightful, check out our channel and share them! Link in the show notes.

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 4 topics today. First up;

Section A, THE RULING & THE LAW

Followed by Section B, HOW WE GOT HERE

Section C, THE STATES SCRAMBLE

And Section D, WHAT COMES NEXT

HOST: So in this opinion, joined by the other conservatives, Samuel Alito basically holds this. And, and what, what gets me isn't just the effect, it's the gaslighting. He essentially says, "Okay, no, we're not gonna strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act," which is something that they could have done.

They were considering the constitutionality of this section, which, as Joyce said, uses the word opportunity. The, the, consc- conscription, the, the, the... What the Voting Rights Act protects is f- that voters of color have an opportunity to elect the candidate of their choice. Doesn't mean they [01:04:00] get it, doesn't mean there isn't all kinds of other shenanigans that keeps them from get...

Just enough critical mass in a district to even have their votes be as powerful as that of white vo- white, white voters, right? Leveling the playing field. Mm-hmm. So that's what we're trying to get to, and that's what Louisiana did with these two districts, right? Two out of six is a third, so that makes sense that they would do it that way.

So what Alito said is "Okay, well, that, that's not unconstitutional, and it's not even unconstitutional to have the remedy that if you find a violation of the Voting Rights Act, that a state has to redraw its maps. That's all okay. But if in that remedy you consider race, you violated the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, which prohibits," wait for it, "discrimination on the basis of race."

And then he threw in another zinger. In the past, we have talked about, [01:05:00] gerrymandering for political purposes, right? Partisan gerrymandering. And we've talked about how the Supreme Court not only did not rule that partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, they ruled that courts can't even consider partisan gerrymandering m- mandering challenges, right?

Partisan gerrymandering, A-okay. So Alito added in this that not only is it important to guard against the racial discrimination that takes place in rectifying racial discrimination, but especially it's terrible to do when you have, incumbents in Louisiana who may risk losing their seats based on this redistricting.

Excuse me, I did not know that there was a constitutional protection- ... of incumbent Republicans in Louisiana, but apparently Alito does. And how that consideration, protecting the incumbent Republicans of Louisiana, is more important than [01:06:00] the V- Voting Rights Act's 60 years of work in keeping voting suppression from hap- He...

They actually wrote that in the opinion, and five, count 'em, five justices signed on. And to boot, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch were just like, "Yeah, we would've gone further," and just, said that you can never, allow for redistricting as a remedy for, for racial gerrymandering. Th- this is your Supreme Court, ladies and gentlemen.

HOST 3: I have deja vu all over again because w- where you started, Kim, it's so reminiscent of Shelby County versus Holder, where the court didn't say Section 5 was unconstitutional, they just gutted it by saying- Right ... the criteria that were being used to protect voters under Section 5 were unconstitutional.

We have that same monkey business going on- Yeah ... here with Section 2, right? 

HOST: And Brnovich, too. Brnovich, they did that, too. 

HOST 3: Like- With the- How- Yeah ... they just keep pulling the wool over most of Americans' eyes and thinking that they'll get away with it. [01:07:00] They will not get away with that stuff here at hashtag Sisters-in-Law.

We will- Nope ... call it out. Jill, how, how do you react to the majority's opinion? What are your views? 

HOST 4: Well, I would not say I was shocked because, as we all have said, we predicted that this would be, despite whatever hopes we might have had, that this was gonna be the outcome. But I am revolted. I am totally, I, I don't know what other word to use.

It's something, I, I'm the oldest of us, and I was definitely an activist during the Civil Rights Movement, and I never would have predicted that the Civil Rights Movement would be undone by the Supreme Court of the United States, and that's what's happened. Even though they said, "Well, we're not undoing it, we're just updating the requirements."

- 

HOST 4: Update No, they're not. That's- Need to 

HOST: update- Just 

HOST 4: in- It's time for an update. President- It is time- Voting Rights Act version 13.2 Turns and turns and keeps on going and update, right? Right. And it always makes me wonder- Turning to Jim Crow and 

HOST 3: update. I [01:08:00] just 

HOST 4: don't get it. The decision makes me wonder really how many ways MAGA has around the Constitution, especially when the court and Congress are doing nothing to stop it from happening.

But the Court, the Court is supposed to be the court of last resort, the court that will stop unconstitutional acts, and, it's, it's-- I wanna just say the Voting Rights Act was not only passed in '65, it's been re-upped multiple times, and it was amended to specifically make sure that you didn't need to prove intent.

All you needed to prove was that it affected your opportunity to vote. That's right. And now they've gone, "Eh, no, not so much." So they're completely obliterating the act and everything that Congress... if congressional intent ever meant anything, it would have ruled here that no, it cannot be undone in the way they have.

So I'm, I'm really, I'm just, I'm revolted and [01:09:00] upset and concerned about our democracy. 

HOST 3: I think that's all fair. Barb, what's your reaction to the majority opinion? 

HOST 2: Yeah, very much in line with what we've heard so far, but I think one of the things I, I wanna add is this distinction between intent and effect.

Right. I think it is so important here- Mm-hmm ... and in all other contexts about how we think about race in the law and in society. Keep in mind that in 1982, in response to a Supreme Court opinion, Congress specifically renewed the Voting Rights Act and clarified that it was enough to show discriminatory effect without showing discriminatory intent.

Because after all, who, what are, who are we thinking about here? The people whose rights are violated or the, the hurt feelings of those who violated them? And I really- Right ... think so much of the discussions around race come around to this. People say, "How can [01:10:00] this be racism when I didn't intend racism?

How can this be discrimination when I didn't intend discrimination?" It isn't about you It's about the people whose rights are being restricted. And that's the whole concept of systemic racism or systemic discrimination. It is that in Louisiana, where a third of the state are African American, of its six districts, only one is majority minority.

Right? I don't care if it was intentional, and frankly, it's hard to avoid concluding that it is, that it's not intentional when you end up- Right ... with five majority white dis- But be that as it may, it can be very difficult to prove intent to discriminate. Why do we need it? Congress said we don't. And if we're trying to improve and truly have a colorblind society, as Chief Justice Roberts likes to say, then why do we need to talk about whether there was this intent?

I hear this in conversations with white friends and white colleagues from time to time [01:11:00] about this argument that why should there be, a, a remedy if there's no intent to discriminate? That, that's what it is. It's because we want to equalize the playing field. And there's also, I think, this idea that the worst thing you can call me is racist.

Yep. I can think of some worse things that people are called by racists. Ah. Get over yourself, right? It isn't about you. It isn't about whether you intend it or not. It's all good. Whatever happened, we're all doing our best here, maybe. But regardless of what you intended, what matters is the outcome.

I also sometimes hear people say this: "Look, it's 2026. My ancestors came from, Yugoslavia, Poland," wherever it is. "I did not in any way, participate in racism or Jim Crow or any discrimination against Black people. Why is it being held against me?" It's not being held against you. You are benefiting from a system that favors white people.

We are trying to have a [01:12:00] system where all are equal, and that's this, this distinction between intent and effect that I think it g- gets missed so often by even people of good faith. And I most certainly don't think that Justice Alito is a person of good faith. Right. But that's what matters t- i-in my view, and I think that because it's so difficult to ever prove intent, that as a result of this case, it will essentially eviscerate Section Two of the Voting Rights Act.

LEEJA: But of course, white people weren't ready to go quietly into the night and accept that maybe they would have to cede some of their power. So the backlash against the amendments and against the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was swift.

And today, the common conservative argument against the Voting Rights Act and protections against racial gerrymandering is that being race neutral and color blind is the only correct non-discriminatory stance to take. In effect, by taking race into consideration at all, you are discriminating against me, the white person, and that is against the Constitution.

However, [01:13:00] unfortunately, we do not live in a race blind utopia where everyone has gained parity and the only difference in outcomes depends on how hard you work. If you can believe it, a few decades of laws protecting voting rights did not undo a few centuries of literal human bondage, and then 100 years of overtly racist anti-Black laws.

Black people continue to live with the consequences of overt racism in housing, leading to less accumulated generational wealth, concentration into the cities, and low affordable housing stock forcing them to live in less than ideal conditions and then be blamed themselves for the horrible conditions their landlords are responsible for.

Black people continue to live with the proven biases against them in hiring practices, violence against them enacted by police, not to mention the day-to-day racism they have to endure from infancy through to adulthood, whether it's the unconscionably high rates of infant and maternal mortality in Black populations compared to the rest of the population, or just the racist epithets thrown at people as they're trying to navigate the world.

Not to mention intergenerational transmission of trauma, but Lord knows that's too many syllables for your average racist to [01:14:00] understand. The point is, we have not arrived at a place where we can say race is no longer a factor and everyone is equal, therefore any consideration of race at all is racist against the other races.

You don't get to rig the game for 200 years and then claim, "Well, now we've stopped discriminating, so everything is fine. Now if we keep talking about how we rigged the game for 200 years, that's actually discrimination against me." But that's exactly how the MAGA movement thinks. As Ruth Bader Ginsburg quipped in an older case trying to gut parts of the Voting Rights Act, you wouldn't use an umbrella in a rainstorm to stay dry and then get rid of that umbrella because you're dry.

The Voting Rights Act was the thing allowing for some semblance of a pluralistic democracy in this country. You don't throw out the thing that's working. It hasn't solved the problem. It is the solve to the problem.

Next, Section B, HOW WE GOT HERE

JAMELLE: In thinking about all of this, I've also just been thinking about this Supreme Court, the Roberts Court, its larger jurisprudential agenda. And I don't wanna give too much credit. I think you can make a very good case that what [01:15:00] we're seeing is mostly just the actions of a bunch of Republican partisans, and they wanna make sure that the Republican Party does all right in elections.

They do have their particular idiosyncratic interest, and John Roberts and Sam Alito in particular seem, have always seemed almost aggrieved by the existence of the Voting Rights Act. John Roberts, the young lawyer in the Reagan administration, was very much opposed to the congressional bill that strengthened Section Two, and this recent ruling is basically Roberts and Alito, Alito similarly opposed to that, rewriting Section Two to be what they think it ought to have been to begin with, which is to say a nullity.

They've always had this grudge against the Voting Rights Act, always seen it as terribly intrusive, as unfair. Alito in particular is very much on this kick that it's unfair to accuse people of racism, that practically is as bad as racism itself. Not for nothing, Alito joined a group that opposed the admission of women and minorities to Princeton, so he might be a [01:16:00] little sensitive about this.

And so that's their idiosyncratic, right, own views. There is clearly an agenda with regards to aggrandizing presidential power, as I've said before. You have someone like Clarence Thomas, who is very much this, misanthropic figure with his own strange ideas. So that's not to... it's both the case that there are maybe more interesting things going on with some of the justices, and also true that in a lot of ways they're functionally Republican partisans.

But if you're so inclined, there is a story you can tell about what this court is doing. Before the Civil War, as I'm sure states in this country were really the locus of power. The federal government was not weak, and this is a common misconception, this idea that the federal government was exceptionally weak, didn't really do much.

That's not really true. But it is true that it was not nearly as large in its scope as it is today, and it is true that there wasn't the immediate federal supremacy or deference [01:17:00] that we experience today. Rather, the federal government and the states had overlapping spheres of influence, and a lot of the jurisprudence of the era is an attempt to kinda delineate where the federal government's sphere of influence dominates, where the state governments do, where the local governments do.

It's interesting stuff, but that's a general picture of federalism in this period. And the states really are extraordinarily powerful. And in particular, they have wide-ranging what's called police powers. The idea is that a state's police powers are its power to, to use the word, to police its internal affairs.

And police... And that's police in almost all senses of the word. That's police in terms of public safety and law enforcement. That's police in terms of who was allowed into the state to begin with. So plenty of states in the antebellum era had prohibitions on the migration of Black Americans into their states.

There's a great book by an historian, Kate Masur, about this, here it is, [01:18:00] that if you wanna read more about this dynamic, I really recommend it. States could forbid who comes in. They could explicitly forbid pauperism, right? Just being poor. States had control over citizenship, right? You were a citizen of your state first and foremost before you were a citizen of the nation, or rather, state citizenship was the dominant and most important form of the citizenship, and national citizenship was ill-defined.

And there are a number of great books about the quest to define national citizenship, which was really a product of Black Americans and abolitionists who insisted that there was a equal national citizenship and that it included people such as Black Americans and the enslaved. I'm gonna recommend a somewhat older book, just in the last 10 years, from my friend Martha Jones on the subject, as well as a very recent book by my friend Anna Law on the subject.

Highly recommend you check them both out. And most critically to our discussion right now, police powers involve the power to structure electorates, determine who had the right to vote and the [01:19:00] circumstances under which they did vote. What the Civil War did, and in particular what the Reconstruction Amendments did, by establishing clear prohibitions on certain kinds of voting restrictions, for example, the 15th Amendment says you cannot abridge the right to vote on the basis of race, and the 14th Amendment establishes the equal protection of the laws and due process of the laws for people in all states, as well as the privileges and immunities of citizenship.

What those things do is to create a minimum federal baseline, right? There is a- There is a floor beyond which you cannot go below when it comes to structuring the internal affairs of a state. In subsequent jurisprudence, especially in the twentieth century, the rights expansion of the '40s, '50s, '60s, and '70s further establishes baselines below which states cannot go.

And this is important because states were often not the laboratories of democracy, as the cliche goes, but laboratories for autocracy. That's what Jim Crow was, for example. [01:20:00] Chinese exclusion in the 1880s had its roots in efforts to expel and exclude Chinese Americans from Western states. So the Court in the twentieth century does begin to establish these floors for rights, a floor for a right to privacy, a floor for a right to an abortion, a floor for a right to an education, I think through Brown v.

Board of Education, a floor against harmful or invidious discrimination on the basis of race or sex or gender, so on and so forth. And one way you can look at this current court, the Roberts Court, this court which is the product of a fifty-year effort by the conservative movement to capture the Court and turn it into an engine for its own interests, one way you can look at this court is an attempt to tear up that floor, to eliminate that floor, to say that there is no longer a national floor for rights, and rather that the full scope of your rights, from your right to vote, from your right to get an abortion, from your right to travel and move [01:21:00] freely, all of these things are structured by the states and that the federal government cannot really intervene.

Now, I'll note that let's say you're a state and you wanna make sure that there's gender-affirming care for transgender youth, the courts might not be too happy about that. Let's say you wanna regulate gun rights. The courts may not be too happy about that. So this is not really a full expansion of police powers for states to do whatever they please.

Rather, it is establishing for the rights that the conservatives view as most important a minimum floor, and that's gun rights, right to property, a vision of free speech in which money equals speech and there are no limits on speech, and thus no limits on money, and a very narrow and exclusionary vision of religious liberty in which religious liberty means the right to discriminate against people on the basis of religion.

The Court wants to establish a floor for those rights, but then for anything that might enable human flourishing, [01:22:00] that might enable people's ability to live their lives as they see fit, which might enable people to challenge existing hierarchies, whatever it is, the Court is saying, "No more. No minimum floor."

And so if your state wants to obliterate, effectively, your ability to get representation, it can't. If the state wants to obliterate, effectively, your right to bodily autonomy, you can't. And your freedom, such that it is, is a freedom to move, right? If your- fortunate enough, affluent enough, capable enough, able enough to move to a place where those rights are a little more secure.

But then this interacts with the court's jurisprudence when it comes to the presidency. And so in addition to this, they create a situation where the executive branch, or at least Republican-led executive branches, can do whatever they want. And so it's a catch-22 if you believe in rights that extend to ordinary people and aren't just excuses for the wealthy and the powerful to dominate the rest of us.

DEAN: So if you haven't seen it, just breaking news a short time ago, they voted in the state legislature in Tennessee [01:23:00] because the Supreme Court said you can be as racist as you want when you draw your maps, but just don't say you're being racist. That's all they said. "You can't say you're being racist. Just say you're being partisan, and then you can do whatever you want," wink, wink.

In reality, the conservative GOP Supreme Court has legalized discrimination against Blacks, and against brown, and against anybody, but, , based on race, by saying it's just about partisanship. So what happened is the 9th Congressional District in Tennes- in Tennessee is Memphis area. It is the only Black majority district, and the Republicans wanted that to go away, and now they got their chance.

Donald Trump, after the decision last week, calls up Bill Lee, the governor of Tennessee, and says, "You have to have a session to get rid of that seat." And sure enough, that's what they did. Now, they voted on the new map. They have a super majority Republicans in the state legislature in Tennessee, so Democrats can't do much.

They asked some questions yesterday. They were able to protest outside. But Republicans, and get this, not only did they go through at an [01:24:00] expedited process, they banned public input. They did not want the public to comment like they often do on proposed legislation. They banned it because they knew it would get really ugly as people start saying, "What you're doing is Jim Crow era bullshit."

They, so they banned it. No public conduct. So, but the public came, and they cheered, or jeered I should say, in, outsi- in the gallery and outside, and they were chanting, , "Hell no, Jim Crow has to go." People are talking about Jim Crow in 2026 because of the Republican Party. This is where we are. And they're so giddy about it.

Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican who's a leading candidate for governor, she said about this redistricting, she goes, "This is what it means to be America's conservative leader. Let's get it done." So to her, being America's conservative leader is getting rid of the one majority Black district in the entire state.

And the way they fractured it, they broke members down to three different components. So now part of Memphis is also being represented by a, a new member of Congress 100 [01:25:00] miles away in the white, deep red areas, 'cause that's the only way how to do it. You can't keep Memphis together, 'cause it'll then be still a Democratic district.

You break it up, so you literally draw lines, so you connect part of Memphis and draw a line, and then you put it with a whole white, red district. That's how they're doing it. So their voice means nothing. They can vote, but they're not gonna have someone who represents them and their views on it. But a short time ago, I thought this was great, Representative Justin Jones, and he is a Democrat representing Nashville.

He handed to Republican majority leader William Lamberth a Confederate flag on a piece of paper, and he said, "Mr. Speaker, I just handed Representative Lamberth the Confederate flag saying, 'We will not go back,' 'cause you're trying to bring us back to the Confederacy." And, and I wanna get people's comments on this, because it, it really, it's deeply upsetting as we watch the right try to take America backwards in a very conservative, , concerted, strategic effort.

And it's not just voting rights. They did it first with Roe v. Wade. , In [01:26:00] 1973, women had a constitutional right to control your own reproductive freedom. Constitutional right, like any other right. That's what the Supreme Court re- re- recognizing that. Over the years, the GOP clamored to get that overturned, and finally in 2022 they did.

So now, and not coincidentally, the same states who wanted to redistrict right now and erase Black voters and Black members of Congress are the same ones that impose bans on abortion. It's the same right-wing, reactionary idea of racial and gender apartheid. That's what the right wants, racial and gender apartheid, where they control your race and they control your gender.

A- and they're men, white men controlling everybody else. And it's unreal. So you've got... I wanted to, I found this really powerful, and I wanted to read this to people. There was a publication in Memphis, The Capitol Press, and they interviewed Black voters over the last day or two, 'cause there's a primary on Tuesday And I-- [01:27:00] forget the law.

I'm a lawyer. We all know this is horrible. We all know the Voting Rights Act was passed by Congress in nineteen sixty-five, the most important civil rights piece of legislation to end the electoral apartheid we had in our nation, as Elie Mystal made the point on my show last week. But what we have here is very human reaction.

That's what I wanna read to people. And these here... And I'll read the names of the people who told the Capitol Press this. 

Fred Doris, eighty-one, he was voting at the First Baptist Broad Church on Tuesday in the primary. They talked to him there. And this is very painful to read. He says, "I was here when we first fought with the Department of Justice to get this district drawn so the African American community would win it."

He says, "It hurts my heart at almost eighty-one years old to see us lose this again. It hurts my heart," he said. "The same fight we had then back in the late sixties and seventies, we are now fighting in twenty twenty-six. We have to pre-preserve it." Francine Wilson, who's s- in her seventies, voting at Glenview Community Center in the Memphis area, [01:28:00] told a reporter, "I don't like it because I come from the old school.

I feel like they're trying to wipe the Blacks out. I'm gonna say it like that. It's taking us back, way back to the Jim Crow days. I don't like it. My children have to come up behind me, and my grandchildren, and I pray that everything goes well for them, that they don't have to fight as we always have." And then she adds this.

Everyone goes back to The Color Purple, the famous book. She said, "I had to fight all the days of my life," quoting from the book. "I had to fight all the days of my life." Then she said, "So if we had to fight all of our days, why should we have to still continually fight today?" Now, that's the question. It doesn't end.

I'll, I'll read one mo- one more. Joyce Jordan, sixty-nine, voting at the Grace Missionary Baptist Church on Tuesday: "It's taken us back to where our leaders fought, where we as a people fought. People died for these rights, and now it's being taken away, taking us back to the nineteen sixties and beyond. I feel, I feel as though this is very evil, and it is wrong."

I read them because forget the law, I want people to hear the human impact of [01:29:00] people, the pain this is going to cause, how the Black community knows exactly their history, especially older ones who lived through the civil rights movement, saw people march in the streets, bleed- Cry, die for ensure representation.

And this Supreme Court, this GOP Supreme Court, last week gutted the last part of the Voting Rights Act. They get an assist in 2013 by the G Su- GOP Supreme Court, which took the heart and soul of the Voting Rights Act. They got rid of it in the Shelby County versus Holder case, which had to do with pre-clearance.

But now the last part of it is done. So once again, just so everyone knows, you don't need a legal degree to get this. What the Supreme Court said last Wednesday is, "You can redraw maps any way you want as long as you're not saying it's intentionally racist." Like, if you're saying, "We're just drawing this map for political gain," then you could do whatever you want.

You just can't say it's intentionally racist. So it's, again, wink, wink. Of course they're ra- they're gonna cut all... They're [01:30:00] gonna... It's called cracking. They crack the districts and dilute the voice of the Black voters. And last week I wasn't sure where this is gonna go. Now we know exactly where it's going.

It happened in Tennessee. It's gonna pass the Senate probably later today. It passed the State Assembly. Governor's gonna sign it. It's giddy. They get rid of the one Democratic district in Tennessee, in Memphis, so the Black voters have no more say in Congress whatsoever. Louisiana delayed their primary last week so they can get rid of it.

South Carolina, now their legislature's talking about it. Alabama, Mississippi, Florida. What do these states all have in common? All these states I just read to you, South Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, Florida. What do they have in common? These were all Confederate states. These were all states that seceded from the United States.

These are all states that w- took a war against the United States of America. These are all states where their ancestors killed US soldiers. And then after [01:31:00] the Civil War, these are the same states that imposed a brutal, repressive Jim Crow to ensure there was no equality. 

Now, Section C, THE STATES SCRAMBLE

HOST 2: Well, Ben Aguiñaga is the Louisiana solicitor general who argued to strike down the state's majority Black congressional district, the one we're talking about here. He is speaking outside the Supreme Court after oral arguments back in October. 

CLIP: If Louisiana's story, that for the past couple of years, we have been struggling to find a map, a congressional map that satisfies the court's precedence.

It's been extremely difficult. We argued it once earlier this year. We're back here, and what I told the court at the podium is, "Look, at the, at the end of the day, we really need clarity. The states need clarity on how they're supposed to comply with the Voting Rights Act and with the Equal Protection Clause."

HOST 2: So, Kareem laid out the legal reasoning that Justice Samuel, Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, how the legal reasoning goes here. Carrie, the ripple effects of the court ruling here have [01:32:00] been significant. They've been swift. Alabama just today after the decision dropped, the attorney general therel- there, Steve Marshall, and the secretary of state there, both Republicans, filed emergency motions to lift injunctions blocking their 2021 map.

So jurisdictions all across the South are now moving to get rid of districts that before fell under Section 2 of the VRA. Give us a sense of, of, just how quickly districts could fall ahead of the midterms here. 

GUEST 2: Right. So that's a really complicated question at a chaotic moment. I think one thing is, in our reporting, I think what we've realized is states are going to move, as Alabama is, to try and redraw before the midterms.

It's very likely that some of that won't be possible. As you point out, Alabama's options here depend on some more court rulings and some things that are in play. They're gonna need a court to say that they can do this in some [01:33:00] cases. In other cases, states have already held their primaries. People have already voted.

Filing deadlines have passed. Candidates have filed to run under the current district b- boundaries. In some cases, early voting is underway. Now, what we saw in Louisiana was, as early voting was starting, Governor Landry, as, as you pointed out, issued an emergency declaration, said that votes for House candidates on th- this ballot will not count, and there will be another primary for House candidates after this redrawing happens.

There's currently litigation over that, whether he can do that. Either way, I can tell you that what's happening right now is incredibly confusing for voters. Louisiana voters are looking at ballots with House candidates on them, but getting told that if they cast votes in those races, those won't count, and there'll be another primary.

This is hugely- And 

HOST 2: some have already voted. 

GUEST 2: Some have already voted, and this is hugely confusing to voters who have done nothing at all wrong- Right ... show up and get handed ballots, right, or a different ballot. Well, but Carrie, 

HOST: what does it [01:34:00] also mean for those charged with seeing election processes actually happen and happen efficiently for voters?

GUEST 2: So that's a great question that's really important to us at Votebeat that we cover closely, and the answer is this is an enormously difficult question. When people file to be candidates, they have to meet requirements. Election officials have to make sure that that happens, that these people should go on the ballot.

And in addition to that, ballots have to be designed, proofed, printed, and there have to be a bunch of different ballot styles with the right races on there for each voter. Voters have to be assigned to the right district so that they get the right races on their ballots. This is a hugely complicated process that does not happen overnight.

HOST: Complicated and expensive. 

GUEST 2: And the other thing is, I haven't heard anyone from Louisiana talk about how they're gonna pay for this. 

HOST 2: So Kareem, from where you sit, to talk a little bit more about what Carrie is mentioning, there was a redistricting war [01:35:00] that was going on before the Callais ruling that we're talking about, before the, d- the dilution of Black voting power in Louisiana and the South.

Of course, Texas started it. Donald Trump started it when he asked Texas Republicans to give him five seats. They did. Then Democrats in California responded, and now we're off to the races. So from where you sit, where are we at in terms of representation and people's votes counting heading into the midterms?

GUEST: Well, it's important as we talk about this, to distinguish the discussion about partisanship as it's driven, as you describe The fight that has started by the White House asking Texas to jump into the fray mid-decade and all the other states pushing back from the conversation that, began with the Callais decision, which really is about racial fairness.

And while there is connection between the two, I think unfortunately, the Callais decision conflates it. But where are we right [01:36:00] now is, a really complicated question. I think, after Virginia, had its public ballot measure presented to the people and, narrowly passed it to change its districts, I think most people view things as more or less at a standstill.

So there was a lot of effort put into fighting in state legislatures to get these, new districts adopted with all of the confusion and chaos that it, likely will lead to for voters, and basically the numbers are pretty much even. However, now that Callais is on the books, I think there are a lot of states that are looking at this, and they're probably also looking at the nation's politics at present, and I think they're trying to get an edge wherever possible.

So we won't know for all of the legal reasons that were mentioned earlier where this is going to land, but I think at present, I think everyone is being energized to act, largely because of the interest in having, I think an outsized influence in Congress, and we'll just have to [01:37:00] see, after all the legal wrangling is over where things end.

HOST: Well, Kareem, I, I want to pull on this thread a little bit because you said you think people are conflating that, the Callais decision with this larger push to redistrict. And, and why do you think it's important to separate the two? 

GUEST: Well, it's important because the Voting Rights Act itself was always viewed as a bipartisan piece of legislation that was getting at something larger than partisanship.

It was, , trying to make good on America's commitment, long delayed, to g- give meaning to the 14th and 15th Amendment, that people should be able to have, regardless of race, a meaningful and equal vote cast, which would include the ability to be represented. And it's important to note, as much as, again, this is by some being viewed through a partisan lens, the last time the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized was in 2006, and no one less than George W.

Bush, not viewed as the most flaming liberal on the planet, and a [01:38:00] Republican Congress, , a- authorized that act. It had been viewed as a consensus view of the American public. It is unfortunately now, , partly because of our politics at present, but also because I think of some unfortunate misreasoning, offered by Justice Alito, has been folded into a partisan framework, and I think in a very unhelpful way, most unhelpful with respect to the Voting Rights Act, to the very p- communities that the Voting Rights Act was designed to support.

HOST: I, I'm also curious to hear from you, Kerry, what you make of the, the, the speed at which the Voting Rights Act has been really torn apart. I did a little math and realized that my oldest siblings were born before the Voting Rights Act passed. So this is not a law that's been on the books for, , generations and generations.

This is still in, in the larger scope of history, a relatively new law. 

GUEST 2: That's [01:39:00] such an interesting point, and I think we've seen the nation change around the law and the way it thinks about these issues at an, at an incredible speed. And I think that there's more change yet to come. I, I think one thing I would say to that is, Justice Alito's decision really made me think a lot about an, a previous decision that the court had, had made on redistricting in, in a case called Rucho versus Common Cause, in which the court essentially said, federal courts really can't be deciding, and Kareem would, I think, put this more elegantly than, than I would, but federal courts really can't be deciding when partisan gerrymandering crosses the line into too much partisan gerrymandering.

Partisan gerrymandering is distasteful, and we don't love it, but we can't really step in and start arbitrating it. And I thought that the decision that Justice Alito wrote really treated partisan, districting decisions as if they were a much more legitimate reason to draw a district line. It didn't treat it i- [01:40:00] in quite the same distasteful way as the court had in Rucho.

It was recognizing it almost, to my reading, as if it was a legitimate thing for lawmakers to do, a legitimate reason for them to have. And so it, it elevated that, and I thought that it was somewhat reflective of the times that we lived in. To your point, I, I think about the speed at which this law has, has had its life cycle has come to this point.

I think that we're seeing the evolution of our thinking about a lot of things as a society and how that's shifted over time in these decisions and in how this law is being interpreted by the Court. 

HOST: Kareem, anything to add? 

GUEST: Yes. Thank you. I, I appreciate the point about, partisan gerrymandering. I, in a previous job, was, very intimately involved with trying to present to the Court an argument that it should act.

It chose not to. But in fact, it has not just, I think, allowed it to be a legitimate interest, it has incentivized in Callais the [01:41:00] attention to partisanship as a cure-all. That is, the concerns about race discrimination are less important than a state policy that says, "We are," let's just say Republicans, "and we like Republicans, and if we wanna have more Republican districts, and the cost of that business is that we ignore concerns by African Americans because they aren't Republicans, so be it."

That has to be a very anemic understanding of what the Voting Rights Act was intended to do. But for this Court that purports to be standing outside of the space of partisanship, they do a lot of work that seems to encourage it, and that's really unfortunate. 

HOST 2: Also on Wednesday, just to add to the bad news here, Florida advanced its aggressive new congressional map which could net Republicans four seats in the House.

There's been some speculation that this new map will be a, quote, "DeSantis dummy mander." What do you make of that? 

GUEST: , I, I, I, I meant to look, shit, I meant to look up Meatball Ron and whether that was his nickname, and I didn't do it. That, 

HOST 2: that, that was a- , so- It was a pri- I looked it up. It was a [01:42:00] private nickname that Trump u- was reported to use for Ron.

Oh my God. I'm not, I don't know if it ever made it to, through the social, but he, it was- I'm sorry, w- ... reports were reporting. 

GUEST: I expect all bad things to come out of Florida. Are you asking me whether, I, , like, do you think, do, do I think this is going to happen? Yes, I, I think this is going to happen. I think we should expect the worst, craziest shit to emanate from Ron DeSantis' Florida, so this is no exception.

HOST 2: Yeah. So a dummy mander is a term- Oh, sorry ... of art for when... No, it's okay. No, no, I'm happy to jump in here. Du- dummy mander's a term of art for when the new map performs worse than the old map. And so there's some question here, because most experts thought that DeSantis Could add two seats safely. , And once you add four seats, you're at risk of spreading the peanut butter too thin here.

So the math of gerrymandering is, or redistricting, is pretty simple. You have a static number of Republican voters. To make more Republican districts, you must move them out of safe Republican districts and put them into Democratic districts. Then you must take those Democratic voters and move them from Democratic districts and put them into Republican [01:43:00] districts.

And if you do that poorly, then you put a bunch of seats at risk. I don't know if this will be a dummy-mander, but the seats that, the way DeSantis did this is he did not shore up the two most vulnerable Republicans in the, in Southern Florida. And the four new safe seats are probably not even gonna be ranked as safe by the Cook Political Report.

They'll probably lean Republican at best, , or like, maybe likely Republican. But they're, they're gonna end up being about seats that Trump won plus nine in, , 2024. And that's within the realm of what is possible for Democrats. The other thing here that I think is just worth noting is the... We're using the 2024 results in Florida as the baseline for how safe these seats are.

The, Trump won Florida by, like, 13 points, and, but that was because, which is a huge margin, a gigantic margin in what was, like, the prototypical swing state for many, many races, [01:44:00] is Trump won because he won Latinos by 13 points in 2024. To give you a sense of how nuts that is, he only, he lost them by five in 2020, and he lost them by 27 in 2016.

So we're, we, there's a 40-point swing over the last eight years of, among Latinos in Florida. And there's a mountain of evidence, both in polling and in e- election results in Florida and elsewhere, that 2024 was an outlier in terms of Latino support. So if you really do s- and the Latino vote in F- Florida is mu- is incredibly complicated because it's very diverse.

, So it's not, you can't just look at numbers in other parts of the country and transpose them to Florida. But there is, there is risk here that if Latinos really are swinging back to Democrats, if not to 2016 levels, but close to that, then some of these seats Republicans are counting on may turn out to be Democratic.

So there's, there's some risk here for meatball. 

GUEST: [01:45:00] Me- meatball and, , and, and also Mike Johnson. Yes. Another meatball.

And Finally, Section D, WHAT COMES NEXT

JESSICA: Is there any path forward? How do we get out of this? 

IMANI: Well, I wanna agree with you there because at least after Shelby, we still had Section 2. 

JESSICA: Right. Like- Right? ... we don't have fuck all right now. We 

IMANI: have fuck all right now. We have nothing but hoping that legislators will be stupid and go on, Fox News and say, "Yeah, we don't want Black people voting.

That's why we're, we're cracking and packing these districts." They're not gonna do that. They're not that stupid. 

JESSICA: No. 

IMANI: So you asked me is there a path forward. Yeah, there's a path forward. Fucking court reform, man. Court reform. Every voter in this country should hold every Democrat who is running for election to a promise that they will support court reform, and not just bullshit court reform, expansive, wholesale court reform.

And, any time I'm given a chance to talk [01:46:00] about the Ellie Plan, which is basically what I call it now, the Ellie Plan, there are people who say, "Well, no, we should just add a couple more justices. We should have 13 justices to match the 13 circuit courts of appeal." No, no, no, no, no. The problem with these conservatives is that they are unified in thought.

JESSICA: Yes. 

IMANI: All of these Federalist Society judges already have their talking points by the time they reach even a lower federal court- Yeah ... much less the Supreme Court. The Federalist Society learned its lesson from David Souter after David Souter was nominated by a Republican, and then proceeded to vote with the liberals on a whole bunch of shit, right?

Yes. Conservatives are like, "We're not letting that happen again." And so that's how this extreme vetting of these justices began when it came to Republican appointees, right? 

JESSICA: Right. 

IMANI: So the Ellie Plan would say, "Let's add 30 new justices, and we can do it in a bipartisan way by allowing Republicans to have maybe five [01:47:00] or six more justices than the liberals would have."

So maybe you have, 12 liberal justices and 18 conservative justices, but the thing about those 18 conservative justices is it's going to be difficult to find 18 conservatives who all think the same way and can pass nomination, right, can pass the nomination process. So we can get back to a period where there were Republican or conservatives, Republican appointed or conservative justices, who all didn't think the same way, because there is a diversity of thought among conservative jurists.

Mm-hmm. It's just that we're not seeing it at the Supreme Court. So if you wanna issue a ruling that strips Black people of voting power, you gotta get 17 other justices to agree with you, and that's going to be a lot harder to do than getting five other Federalist Society jamokes to agree with you.

Right. Right. That's one thing. I was talking about this on social media, and someone was like, "Well, you're missing that if court reform legislation were passed, [01:48:00] then it would go to the Supreme Court, and then the Supreme Court could strike it down." And I was like, "Goddamn, that is absolutely true," right? So then I'm thinking to myself, "Well, how do we do that?"

And my suggestion, and I know you love when I bring up Marbury versus Madison- Love! This is 

JESSICA: gonna be amazing. 

IMANI: My suggestion is to send Marbury to the wood chipper, 

JESSICA: right? Amazing. 

IMANI: Marbury versus Madison is an 1803 case where Justice Marshall And the other justices at the time made the biggest power grab, the ballsiest power grab It's 

JESSICA: such a baller move, this 

IMANI: decision

in American history. They were like, "Fuck it, we ball." It- They... That's the case that invented, out of whole cloth, judicial review. Yes. Now, in the year of our Lord 2026, we just assume that it's the Supreme Court's job to review acts of Congress. That was not the case before 1803. In 1803, Justice Marshall was like, [01:49:00] "You know what?

We're gonna do this shit." Yeah. "You pass a law, and we're gonna review it to make sure it comports with the Constitution." Yeah. But the difference between the 1803 court and this court is that John Marshall believed in deferring to Congress, and almost always did. 

JESSICA: Mm-hmm. 

IMANI: This court throws up middle fingers to Congress and says, "You know what?

We're gonna take your power for ourselves," as they did in Loper Bright. "We're gonna take agency power for ourselves." This is a Supreme Court that is out of control. 

JESSICA: But we only get to Loper Bright via Marbury versus Madison. This is literally the first case that I read as a law student in constitutional law.

The very first one. 

IMANI: It's the first case every law student reads. I w- mine, too, in my con law ca- class, the first case. Because it established judicial review where there was no judicial review. There is nothing in the Constitution that grants the Supreme Court the right to strike down laws of [01:50:00] Congress.

JESSICA: Talk about a baller move by Marshall, too, because he's "Yeah, I know, folks in Congress, you're subject to elections. Sucks for you." Right. Right. Sucks for you. I am on board with all of this. I just have one little detail to add, which is whatever happens in this court reform vision and, on the podcast we've been talking about this for years under the guise of unpacking the Court, to your point, because it's been so packed with groupthink from the Federalist Society, is I want a real binding code of ethics as well.

I am really tired of these conservative justices es- especially taking in millions, tens of millions of dollars sometimes on the side, whether it's through gifts, donations to family members, businesses, whatever it is. It is just gross. It's 

IMANI: absolutely gross. 

JESSICA: And it's infected everything from Citizens United forward, and it's time that they just play by the same rules as everybody else.

IMANI: But [01:51:00] Jess, it was only a couple of years ago that the Supreme Court did come up with a code of ethics, right? This... They have a code of ethics, so I really think you might be being unreasonable here. 

JESSICA: Yeah. They, they have a code of ethics that nobody can enforce. 

IMANI: Yeah 

JESSICA: So it's a suggestion- 

IMANI: Yeah ... 

JESSICA: of ethics.

IMANI: Just a 

JESSICA: guideline. It's an aspiration- ... to be ethical. Just a whisper of 

IMANI: ethics. 

JESSICA: It is a vision board- ... for future behavior- It's a Pinterest- ... is 

IMANI: what it is of ethics. Oh, for Christ's sake.

ELIE: When you have critical numbers of non-white people involved in making the decisions that run our government, the government gets more fair, more equitable, and more just, and they don't want that to happen. So the way to stop that from happening is having an all-whites, , government. Like, that, that is the simplest way to make [01:52:00] sure that white interests are always protected if white interests are the only ones that can be heard.

DEAN: And so one Black president did all of this. It so freaked them out to this point. You know, I was just looking up while you were speaking, the number of, of the 500 CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies, how many are Black? And it's g- been going down. It's 10 now. Yeah. In this year, 10, 2%. So when they're the one ending DEI, and I was saying this yesterday, the goal of ending DEI to me is really going back to segregation.

It is really the idea, we don't even wanna see you in our workplace. We don't want to have you. We wanna be segregation today, tomorrow, forever. It is the George Wallace mentality. It has not changed among the white right. And not all white people, folks. The white right, the last time a Democratic candidate won, presidential Democratic candidate won the white vote, a majority, 1964, and that's not a coincidence.

You know, LBJ signs the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and that's it. Party realignment begins then in earnest. So [01:53:00] this is the situation. So let's get back to Democratic Party. I didn't wanna cut you off. I was kidding. So what, where did Democrats fail in all of this? 

ELIE: Well, when the Democrats took back, , the House and had the Senate and had, , Joe Biden in the White House, they tried to pass the restoration of the Voting Rights Act, the John Lewis voting rights bill, and Joe Manchin flummoxed it.

Joe Manchin wouldn't go for it. , They wouldn't... They, they were unwilling to break the filibuster to pass it over Republican object- , , objections, and it went nowhere. , That was an era. W- we ... That, that was the point to break the filibuster and break Joe Manchin's knees, if necessary, to pass the restoration of the most important piece of legislation in American history.

That was the time, and they screwed it up. They missed it, right? , Going forward, obviously the Democrats need to retake the House, retake the Senate, and I keep saying, even in the face of this, [01:54:00] this is the best chance, it turns out, that the Democrats are going to have to retake the House and the Senate because it's only gets harder from here thanks to the Supreme Court's ruling and thanks to the destruction of the Voting Rights Act.

So 2026 actually, against all odds, becomes your best opportunity to retake both chambers of Congress. So you need to do that, then you need to stop any further erosion of voting rights, then you need to beat these people in '28, and then if you're very lucky, you get, it, you get to, in 2029, where you were in 2021, which is with a Democratic president, a Democratic senator, and a Democratic House.

At which point you need to restore the Voting Rights Act, just like you should have in 2021. So you're gonna have to spend a long time trying to get back to where you were five years ago, but maybe four years from now or five years from now you'll get there, and then you [01:55:00] have to do what you should've done then.

DEAN: Yeah, and, and for people who don't remember, , the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives from 1994 when they won that election to 2006. So they're... It's not like now where it's flipping back and forth. They could hold the House for 10, 12, 16, 20 years. , Generations. , Right now...

So let's talk about the Supreme Court and reforming it, expanding it, whatever. We've talked before, it takes great urgency. I said yesterday and I'll say it again today, if a Democrat's running in 2028 will not commit to expanding the Supreme Court- I, I say expanding, but at least reforming it. , They have no sincerity, they have no credibility on any issue because this Supreme Court, they know it will overturn anything good that we wanna do.

So- Yeah ... what is your idea now after this decision? Yes, has it changed? We talked about the Super Court before- Yeah ... which I like Super Court. But has anything changed, and if not, what is your proposal? 

ELIE: No, I've always been on we need to expand the court. My current proposal is plus 20 members. I know that number sounds [01:56:00] large, but I've explained it before.

It's actually, , the, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has 29 just- judges. There's no reason the Supreme Court can't have 29 justices. So I am for aggressive court expansion. I think that is necessary, and I've been on that point since before Dobbs, but certainly after Dobbs. That, to me, that is the, that was the moment where court packing should have been adopted by the entire party.

Certainly after the destruction of the Voting Rights Act, again, y- you, you can't pass these laws i- in front of this Supreme Court 'cause they will just overturn them. Again, the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. It was reauthorized in 2006, 98 to zero in the Senate under George W. Bush. Under George W.

Bush, the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized 98 to zero, and the Supreme Court still said, "Yeah, dah, we don't like it." Like- Nobody elected them to do this. So if you [01:57:00] leave these Republicans on the Court, if you leave Republicans with a super majority, n- doesn't matter what you pass, you won't get it through.

But the other thing that I've suggested, Dean, and I suggested this in the article that I wrote in The Nation, is that this is actually the time where we, we need to do jurisdiction stripping. Jurisdiction stripping is the idea that Congress can, by legislation, prevent the Supreme Court from ruling on the constitutionality, , of certain pieces of legislation.

, I al- it blows people's mind who haven't heard me say, or haven't heard somebody say this before, but the word unconstitutional does not appear in the Constitution, and nowhere in the Constitution does it say that the Supreme Court is the final and only arbiter of what is and is not constitutional.

Indeed, in most other countries, it is the legislative branch, the elected branch, that decides what is and is not constitutional, not some egg-headed justices that nobody elected sitting in an ivory tower, right? So the [01:58:00] idea of jurisdiction stripping is that Congress not only passes the law, but says, "We pass the law under this interpretation of the Constitution, and our interpretation of the Constitution is final, Mr.

Supreme Court," thus preventing the Supreme Court from overturning it. Now, I imagine that with this particular Supreme Court, they'll just say, "Actually, jurisdiction stripping," like, it, I, I imagine the Supreme Court- Right ... will resist that interpretation quite strongly. Which again leads back to court packing, which again leads back to court expansion.

You put ... You, you appoint enough justices that agree that jurisdiction stripping is constitutional and agree to stay ... K- k- keep their nose out of the- Interesting ... laws that Congress passes under this, under this, , idea. 

DEAN: Jurisdiction stripping is a really intriguing idea that I've got to do ... I, I saw you touch on it and I, and I have to do more research.

But look at Marbury versus Madison. , You've got the idea of judicial review of, of statutes going all the way back to the, the most famous, first [01:59:00] famous Supreme Court case. Would that ... , under Marbury versus Madison, the Supreme Court can go like, "Well, we can overturn this law that you ... says you have to take our power away.

We're the ultimate arbitra- arbiter." Isn't that where it comes from, that idea that ingrained in us that it was because of Justice Marshall, right? It was Chief Justice 

ELIE: John Marshall. That's the first ... Marbury versus Madison is the first use of judicial review, and all I'm pointing out is that judicial review is not in the Constitution.

That is a power that the Supreme Court- Right. Right ... gave to itself in that case. Chief 

DEAN: Justice Marshall, isn't 

ELIE: it? Right? So if the Supreme Court can give that power to itself, guess what? Congress can take it away, 'cause it's not written down anywhere. It's not textually written down anywhere that the Supreme Court has this authority, and Congress can take it away, and this is, this is the, this is the time where we should use that club in our bag.

DEAN: I- it's interesting, my friend. 

ELIE: So- But what would happen, Dean, what would happen in practicality is that you'd pass the law, , and then the Supreme Court would say, "We don't agree with that law. We don't agree with the jurisdiction stripping. We're gonna make a ruling." [02:00:00] And then the states, the blue states would say, "Well, no, the Supreme Court is out of pocket here.

We're not gonna listen to the Supreme Court." And the red states would say, "No, the Supreme Court actually is correct here, and we're only gonna listen to the Supreme Court and not Congress." And then, a- a- and that becomes the, the, the problem, because then who gets to win in that becomes who, where are you gonna send the troops?

Right? Yeah. Like that, that, that ... It, it, it quickly es- You see how it's, it's a little bit of the Ron Burgundy, it escalates quickly. , W- if the Supreme Court doesn't go for it, , you have a rift between red states and blue states. But I say to that, we have a rift now. The rift is- True ... already there.

We should try to win the rift as opposed to pretending that it doesn't exist.

Yeah, it- 

DEAN: Last thing- Would- 

ELIE: It's bad. Like the ... There, there, there are no g- And, and, a- and I guess, like, it's supposed to be bad. [02:01:00] There are no good solutions. Why should it 

DEAN: be good? 

ELIE: Well, well, , 'cause there are no good solutions when racists win. There are- Right ... no good solutions when racists are given power.

Um, if we wanted good solutions, we need to stop electing racist people. Since we seem unable to do that- We find ourselves in these situations having these kinds of conversations. 

That's going to be it for today.

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