Video - Gerrymandering Your Vote: Where Does the US Supreme Court Draw the Line Now...
How the US Supreme Court Has Weaponized Partisanship & Race to Permanently Dilute the Power of Voters of Color - Effectively Preventing the People, From Ever Electing the Representatives They Want
In the recent US Supreme ruling: Alexander (representing S. Carolina) v NAACP, the Supreme Court finally put the nail in the coffin to “dilute” the vote of black voters in a way they only slightly nodded to before. Now with this recent ruling, any state legislature can now do so with a straight face - and say, their gerrymandered maps are not based on ‘race’ but on partisanship - even though it just happened to be based on race-based assessments.
This is the recent “majority” ruling of the US Supreme Court, written by the now infamous “justice” who wrote the Dobbs decision dismantling Roe v Wade - Alito, has effectively done it again. This time claiming the court as well as the S. Carolina legislature who created these new gerrymandered district maps - cannot “disentangle” race from partisan gerrymandering - even when the S. Carolina legislature “admittedly” used AI computer modeling of race and partisanship to do it.
In our in-depth discussion, historian and law professor Dr. Daniel Breen and I “disentangle” the facade of Justice Alito’s claim, that race and partisanship are so interrelated that it is futile to attempt to disentangle them - when it is clear that race was part if not predominantly part of the legislative equation. That is, the S. Carolina legislature used “partisanship” as a proxy - a subterfuge to dilute the votes of black minority voters in their state, by pushing them from one district to another to obtain the result the legislature wanted: the same Black Voter Age Population (BVAP) of 17% that allowed US Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace to win in 2021 - the same Congresswoman who is now up for reelection again in 2025.
So what does this US Supreme Court decision do? Provide a literal roadmap for legislatures across the nation to fend off race-based redistricting challenges from virtually ever being considered a “legitimate” issue. That is, if there is an “acceptable” partisan reason for blacks being gerrymandered, this would end any inquiry.
So as long as legislatures claim they may have taken race into account, but it was for a partisan purpose - they are good to go. And there’s not much else to do about it, unless Congress acts and sets some new rules.
Dr. Breen and I discuss some possible “fixes” or remedies to the untenable position the US Supreme Court has taken - where incumbents can be insulated in perpetuity from ever being tossed out of office; and people of color cannot muster enough voting power in these districts, to elect the representatives they want.
To learn more: watch our discussion & Subscribe to The Legal Edition below. To understand how it all come to be, watch our 2017 program Where to Draw the Line, here on Substack!