Gerrymandered America

Edward Luce, Financial Times -    The latest contortion is last month’s Supreme Court’s Louisiana vs Callais ruling, which all but gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act. For Swampians who prefer their history lessons in Hollywood form, watch Selma. Because of rigged polling tests, millions of African Americans in the Deep South were disenfranchised before the VRA passed. Some scholars argue that the US only became a true democracy in 1965. It should thus be of profound concern that in a 6-3 ruling along predictably partisan lines, the court has in effect dismantled the law that put an end to Jim Crow. With apologies to my Irish friends, I cannot resist the Irish joke about the man who is asked for directions. You wouldn’t want to start from here, he said.

The Callais ruling has two implications, one troubling, the other unnerving. The first is its impact on this year’s midterm congressional elections. Within minutes of the ruling, Louisiana’s governor, Jeff Landry, ripped up his state’s district boundaries in favour of one that expunged minority-majority districts — those with black majorities. This was in spite of the fact that voting had already begun in the primaries. Others, including Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee, followed suit. If you combine their net impact with Florida’s already planned redistricting and the Virginia high court’s decision to overturn last month’s referendum to rig that state in favour of Democrats, the ruling could upend the midterm outcome in November.

At a stroke, the judges have just added about a dozen seats to the Republican column. Republicans now have an estimated four percentage point advantage in House elections. My guess is that the anti-Republican wave in November will be larger than the party’s gerrymandered windfall. But the battle for control of the House will be much closer as a result. Remember this latest skirmish began last year with Donald Trump asking Texas to redraw its boundaries to produce another five Republican districts as though he was ordering dishes from room service. Trump’s great gift is that he says the quiet part out loud. While justices labour to dress up a naked power grab in abstract legalese, Trump makes plain what this is about.

The unnerving effect of the court’s ruling is to bring into question whether US democracy can survive. I strongly sympathise with Jim Clyburn, the South Carolina Democrat, who compares John Roberts’s court to the Roger Taney court. That court’s 7-2 Dredd Scott ruling in 1857 declaring blacks inferior to whites was the opening salvo in the US civil war. That war produced the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, which partially undid the founding framers’ original sin. But the past is not dead; it is not even past. Through Jim Crow, the American south converted defeat on the battlefield into victory in the political arena. Blacks had to await until the 1960s for the fruits of Abraham Lincoln’s union. Now those gains are being flushed away. More