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Welcome to it could happen here a podcast where the thin veneer of democracy that has hitherto veiled the settler colony of the United States in the mask of humanity is being increasingly ripped away, leaving behind. I think calling it a new Jim Crow is that title has already been used for something else. But it's a return overtly to some of the worst discrimination of the Jim Crow era. So I'm your host, Miya Wong. Let's talk about what is actually at issue here, and that is a recent
Supreme Court ruling called Louisiana v. Kalay. On a sort of micro level, this is about the question of can Louisiana just eliminate the two majority black districts that it had in its congressional map in twenty twenty four. Getting to this map in the first place was a subject of really intense civil rights litigation to get to the point where there were two majority black districts in twenty
twenty four. On a macro level, what is that stake here is can a state create an electoral map where they spread all of the black voters across different districts in order to make them a minority in every district, thus making it impossible for black voters select the candidate if they're choosing. Until now, the answer was no, because this is specifically what the Voting Rights Act was passed to stop. Like this, specifically like this, This is one
of the very specific things. I cannot emphasize this enough, this specific thing which is spread out the black vote across a whole bunch of districts where everyone else is white, so that black people cannot choose who they want to elect. This is like one of the specific things it was designed to stop. Again, up until now, you have not been allowed to do this, and this has led to
the creation of what are called minority majority districts. This is a long and complicated history that frankly could be its own. It probably is like multiple people's doctoral dissertations. The short, short version of what a minority majority district is is it's a district where the majority of voters are from a minority group, thus allowing people from a
minority group to select a candidate of their choosing. There are a lot of these districts in the South, specifically to prevent Republican politicians from making it impossible for black voters to elect anyone they chose. And fundamentally, what's at stake here, right, is the constitutional right to elect the candidates of your choosing if you are part of a
minority group. Right. This is why all of this stuff was passed in the first place, because under what we call Jim Crow, it was extremely easy for a white majority to simply effectively deny the rights of black people. And this is other non white people too, but like this is primarily black people. It was it was very, very easy to simply deny them from ever getting to elect anyone by just drawing maps where a candidate they would vote for can never be elected. This is one
of the basis of Jim Crow over discrimination. The Supreme Court has decided no, Actually, what they decided is that if the Republican party that controls the legislature draws a map that does the thing we've been talking about, where they spread out all of the like specifically the black vote into a bunch of districts, so that black people
can't elect a representative. In order to challenge this as violation of your voting rights, you have to prove definitively prove that the intent was racism and not literally anything else.
So for example, and this is this is the thing that's really at issue here, right, you have to prove that they specifically wanted to do this out of racism and not just because they want to elect Republicans by jerrymandering it partisan lee, which is amazingly a thing that's legal to do in the United States for reasons that are incredibly baffling. And also you have to be able to prove that they created this map specifically out of
the intention to disenfranchise a minority group. And also you have to create a map that would allow them to achieve whatever other goals they supposedly want, like, for example, again making sure that Republicans have all the seats in a state, but also would not be racist. So you have to create a map for them that would allow them to do this in order to prove that there could be another map that achieves their goals of like
partisan jerrymandering that isn't also racist. It's completely unhinged legally, this this is a shambles. We have covered some downright like hideous nonsense on this show in terms of Supreme Court decisions, right, Like this Supreme Court has just the lowest level of legal literacy in like living memory of any Supreme Court. It is astounding the kinds of just absolute horseshit they are popping out with this. This is maybe their worst ruling, which is difficult to prove because
there have been so many abhorrent ones. Even just from a pure legal perspective, this one is so bad it defies belief. So, okay, one of the main issues here
is Section two of the Voting Rights Act. I'm just gonna read what it says, Quote, No voting qualifications or prerequisite to voting, or standard practice or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any state or political subdivision in a manner which results keep that in mind later, which results in a denial or a bridge of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color, or in contravention of the
guarantees set forth in section nineteen seventy three B. So again, I kind of emphasize this enough, right, So, the way this is written is that it says that you can't apply qualification or prerequisite to voting, or have any standard or practice or procedure cannot be imposed by the state, or any other political subdivision that results in the denial or abridgment of the rights of citizens, vote and account of race. Right.
It specifically says results. It does not say intent. Now this is incredibly important because Alito is like, no, fuck that, Actually, you have to proven intent.
I'm going to quote from a piece of Scotus blog by Edward Foley, who has an extremely long title of the Charles b Ever Sold in Florence Whitcomb Ever Sold share and constitutional law. As the director of Election at Law at Ohio State University, You're written a book on like poral law. He is a constitutional law professor who specifically does election law. He is like, by no means a leftist. He's coming into the right of Justice Jackson in her dissent in this case. Right, but even he
I'm going to quote what he writes about this. He calls this ruling an abomination, which is like a thing that you don't really get from like legal people. They don't say shit like that. I'm going to quote what he says about this quote. The ruling purports to interpret the Voting Rights Section two, but it destroys the central meaning of the section, converting it into the exact opposite of what Congress meant for it to do.
The one thing that is unambiguous about Section two is that the nineteen eighty two amendment to the section's test creates a quote results test for determining whether there is liability under the section, replacing the intent test that the Supreme Court had previously adopted for Section two claims, as the tech states, quote, no standard practice or procedure shall be imposed which results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen to.
Vote on account of race. Yet the case defiantly converts Section two back to an intention inquiry rather than a results analysis. So what happened here, right, To make this extremely clear, is that Congress in nineteen eighty two had amended this. They amended what this thing said, right because Supreme Court had been adopting a standard of intent, right, which means that you have to prove that, like these people were like mustache whirling saying the N word in
fucking clan robes, doing Nazi solutions. You have to like prove that they intentionally did this for racist reasons and not any other reason. And Congress went back and went, no, fuck that if the result of it is racist, then you can't do it, even if, like nominally, what you're saying out loud is that you're doing this for non racist reasons. If the result is racism, then you have
to not do it. And Alito goes, yeah, no, fuck that, We're just like flipping it back to an intent standard for no reason other than I want to be able to do racism and help Republican Party win seats. The other thing that fully talks about is the Court is arguing that, like, Congress can't draw from the fifteenth Amendment in order in order to like have the Voting Rice Act work in the first place, I'm going to quote
him again. Yeah, the Court in this decision did not need to consider the question of Congressional power to enforce the fifteenth Amendment. That is because the power of Congress to enact Section two with the Voting Rights Amendment for the purposes of the case could have been sustained not under the Fifteenth Amendment, but under Article one, Section four of the Constitution. Congress has full power under Article one, section four to enact laws governing the quote, time, place,
and manner of congressional elections. Thus, Congress can enact a prohibition against minority vote dilution for congres national districts under a dispriat impact theory without any consideration of discriminatory attent, and not rely on the Fifteenth Amendment at all. So, okay, what does this mean? Right? What Alito is saying is that, like, oh well, actually, Congress doesn't have the authority to like
write the secution of the Voting Rights Amendment. They don't have the authority to do it under the fifteenth Amendment because it like oversteps the rights of states to you know, like run their own elections. Right, So I'm gonna do the thing I did last time with Fully's thing, and just read the full Article one, section four of the Constitution.
By the way, when something says like Article one, section four, you have to remember that all of the amendments, right, the amendment that got rid of slavery, even like the first Amendment, right, the freedom of speech, that's an amendment that's not in the original text that had to be added onto it. And obviously we have something called the Bill of Rights that like you know, was like the
first ten amendments that was passed with the Constitution. But that's not stuff that was like put like a freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship that was not in the original texts of the Constitution. That was
the amendments put on. This is something that the people who were at the Constitution were like, fuck if this is gonna be in the original thing, right, So Article one, Session four, this is from like the original fucking body of text of the Constitution says, quote, the times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives shall
be prescribed in each state by the Legislature thereof. But the Congress may at any time, by law, make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing senators.
So yes, obviously they could fucking do the Voting Rights Amendment. They literally have the ability, Like it says in Section on, Congress may at any time, by law, make or alter such regulations. By such regulations they mean the times, places and manner of holding elections. They could just do this, right, So obviously they can fucking do the Voting Rights Amendment. It's it's literally just there in the cunstumitation. It just says that if.
All like this, it's gibberish.
It's like, oh my god, you can just read the text of the Constitution and it says you can do this.
It's God holy shit.
Even from the.
Perspective of like if you treat the law as real, this is just pure Calvin Ball shit, Like I mean, it's just Jesus Christ. Okay, you know what's real and not Calvin Ball. It's it's these products and services we are back. So, okay, what has the result of this been. It's been about two weeks since the Court did this decision. The Court immediately followed this up by allowing Alabama to
jerrymander the shit out of their upcoming election. They're doing this via again, the shadow docket, which is their ability to just be like, no, fuck you, we're not ruling on this case out actually issuing a decision, an unsigned, one paragraph thing from the court can just dictate what the law is. It's great, it's amazing, and by amazing, I mean Jesus fucking Christ. This happens about a week
after the original screw Court decision. This shadow docket allows Alabama to put in place a map that was already found to.
Be explicitly racially motivated, a thing Alito said in a decision that he wouldn't do right. Alito says in a decision that he won't overturn a cases that are like avert discrimination and b that he wouldn't.
Overturn this exact case, and then they did it.
Anyways, It's like Jesus Christ, I're.
Just like, oh my God. So the short version of the Alabama conflict I'm drawing here from Slat's story on this thing is that Alabama tried to do a map that would let them get rid of like both of the congressional black Congression candidates in the states by jerymandering the black vote. There's a whole bunch of court cases about this. In twenty twenty three, the Supreme Court said that they couldn't do this and they had to make fairer districts that didn't like violate the Voting Rights Act.
So this was three years ago. This, like the Supreme Court said they had to do this. Here's some Slate quote. Alabama, however, refused to comply with that order.
Again, like they got an order from the Supreme Court and refused to do it.
Quote. So the lower court imposed its own map featuring two districts where black voters had a real shot at choosing their representative. The court also found that, in defying its previous mandate, the Alabama legislature had engaged in intentional racial discrimination, violating the Fourteenth Amendments Equal Protection Clause in
addition to the Voting Rights Act. Up until Monday, this decision had prevented the legislature from joining the former Confederate States now racing to eliminate black representatives from their congressional delegations. Alabama Republicans pressed the Dish Act Court to lift its bar, but it refused, so they filed an emergency request at the Supreme Court asking permission to read jerrymander black communities in light of this decision. Now, I can't emphasize enough
this vote from when they were granted this position. This vote is in like eight days, right, people had already started voting for candidates and primaries, right, And Streme Court was like, yeah, sure, yeah, you can. You can fucking rejerrymander this thing eight days before the election. That's absolutely fine. Even though again I canna emphasize this enough in the ruling, Alito specifically said in the majority opinion that they wouldn't overturn this exact case, and then they did it. It's
mind boggling. It used to be, like it really truly did. Used to be that if you were going to do shit like this, you had to like sort of like pretend that you were following some kind of legal order. And now you just don't. You can just fucking do Calvin ballshit. You can just literally lie about what you're doing and you're just saying and then just fucking do whatever you want about it. And obviously, you know, as Slave points on. This has been pointed out by a
whole bunch of different outlets. The Supreme Court also had used another legal principle to prevent states that would have we're trying to like make more democratic maps, both in the sense of like not being racist and also that would elect more democratic politicians. And even though it was three months before the election, the court was like, well, it's actually too soon, like it's too close the election
for you to be changing this stuff. But then also now they're just letting Alabama do one of these like eight days before an election. So it's so incredibly clear about what's happening here is that the Court is trying to allow Republican politicians to just straight up rig elections. For them by doing gerrymandered districts in a way that lets them eliminate the ability of non white people to vote.
And this is a huge fucking deal. Getting the nineteen sixty five Voting Rights Act was one of the major achievements of the Civil rights movement. Right, It's like, one of the biggest goals of the moderate wing of the movement was to have elections in which black people got to actually fucking vote and not have their vote intentionally diluted so they could never actually elect a candidate. And that's what's being done here, right, And this has been
pointed out. It's like anyone who's read any kind of
analysis of racial politics in the US. One of the consistent themes of the sort of you know what you would call, I guess like the era of black uprising, right, the sort of modern era stretching from roughly Ferguson I thought, I guess you could talk about the stuff in the Bay before that, or roughly from Ferguson through twenty twenty, was that the US was not a democracy before the nineteen sixty five Voting Rights Act because the principle of one person, one vote was not real because you could
simply disenfranchise anyone from a minority group, and that was the status quo of the South, and also like a lot of other parts of the country too, was this very overtability of these people to you know, not only just like this is this is one of the components of segregation. Right. It's not just like imposing segregation legally in public spaces, right, it's also you know, like preventing it's preventing black people from voting. And this is the
thing that the Supreme Court ruling has just effectively destroyed. Right, It's the thing that like made it possible to even sort of like in the loosest sense possible, called this country a democracy. And it's gone. It's just gone. And now you know, it's like okay, like what what fucking is this now? And you know, I don't know, it's like it's it's an even more just extremely overt Jim Crow state, this is what the goal of the Republican
Party has always been, Like they want resegregation. It's been the basis of modern Republican politics forever. Right, It's you know, dating back to you if you want to look at like what trump Ism dessentdsful We've talked about this at length on the show. The thing that became the sort of religious right was originally born out of like the school choice movement. And the thing about the school choice
movement was that it was an anti integration thing. After losing their fight to be able to have whites on these schools, a bunch of these sort of right wingers were like, Okay, well, we'll just do private schools where we can do that. And that's the basis of modern Republican politics, right, you know, sort of both evangelicalism and sort of the Bush administration and trump Ism and Reagan too. Is this shit, and this has been what the Republicans
have done when they've been in power. Right, this is a lot a lot of the Trump administration, like what they're doing, like all of the stuff about DEI, all this stuff about wokeness like this is also a lot of what doche is doing was trying to make it so that black people like couldn't work for the US government. Right. It was a huge purge of black women from the
US government. And you know, now we're seeing this on the level of elections and on this level what Republicans are trying to do with these gerrymandered maps, is remove non white people and especially black people from Congress so they can just have untrammeled white supremacist rule. And they're doing it by claiming both that it's actually partisan. It's just partisan jerrymandering, which is legal to disenfranchise black vetters because black vetters won't openly vote for the party of
white supremacy. And they're also claiming that like, not doing this is like infringing on the civil rights of white people, a thing that like is completely you know, just gibberish world turned upside down nonsense. But if they can just do that now because they're in power, because the court
will just let them do this shit. And so I think in a way that really has not been conveyed in the media in the discourse, like this is one of Bleak's moments of this administration, right you know, on top of just the multiple gedocides they're committing, right on top of you know, just like the ethnic cleansing of no white people from the US that ICE is doing. They're what they're doing right now is attempting to end
multi racial democracy in the US. And obviously, politically, I have my critiques of like electoral democracy as a concept, but having it just revert back to only white people get to decide who politicians are is something even worse than what we've had so far. You know, it's a seismic shift in just literally what this country is towards something that unbelievably an unfathomably weak state of pure white rule.
And the people who are talking about this think that it can be reversed just by voting more, but no, it can't. The whole point of this right is to make sure that elections and you know, whatever the will of the people is is incapable of actually affecting the white supremacist state because not white people just don't get votes. You can't just vote harder your way through all of
this shit. You have to actually do things. And you know, if we don't want to live in a white supremacist society, we're going to have to actually take action to combat and actually resist the fact that this is like this is just a pure white supremacist Jim Crow state. Now, yeah,
so this has been cold happened here. I don't have a nonbleaque way to end this, but the common refrain is if you've ever asked yourself what you would be doing in Nazi Germany, it's right now, and I think you can also add to that right if you've ever asked yourself what would you be doing during Jim Crow, The answer is whatever the fuck you're doing now, and if if you're not happy with that answer, then it's time to move. It Could Happen Here is a production
of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here, listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.