A Daily Reid: the Republican war on democracy
In order to retain power, and continue sucking this country dry, economically, Trump and Republicans have to end our ability to remove them from power through elections.
Today is the 60th anniversary of the U.S. Senate passage of the Voting Rights Act, which President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed into law two days later, on August 6, 1965. There’s a great photo of him sitting in his office with civil rights leaders including James Farmer and John Lewis before the signing. Here it is:
A year after the signing of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, and with 66 sponsors in the nearly all-white U.S. Senate (there had been four Asian-American Senators from 1957 through 1965) — Three Japanese American Democrats representing Hawaii and one Indian-American Democrat, Rep Dalip Singh Saund of California — two of whom were serving at the time), the Voting Rights Act escaped a certain filibuster by notoriously racist Mississippi Senator James Eastland, chair of the Judiciary Committee, and his fellow Dixiecrats. It landed in the committee nearly one month to the day after the horrific beating of civil rights activists, including a young Mr. Lewis, in Selma, Alabama, where of the 15,000 eligible Black citizens, only 335 had been able to get past the Klan and post-Reconstruction tricks and grandfather clauses to be able to register to vote.
Read the full Senate history here (before the Republican Senate majority deletes it on Trump’s orders…)
Here’s a good history of the Voting Rights Act, from Reconstruction on, courtesy of the ACLU
And here’s a good working history of the right to vote in the U.S. from Brittanica (Did you know that indigenous Americans have only had universal suffrage since 1957?)
In short, the history of access to the ballot, and thus to political power in the U.S., is both a long and a short one. White men, propertied or not, have enjoyed such access almost since the founding of this European colony. Everyone else — from explicitly excluded Blacks, Chinese and Native Americans — to women of all races but especially Black women, has had to fight for it. And every single excluded group has done just that, and gotten that hard-won right only in the last generation or two.
Indeed, the Voting Rights Act is only three years older than I am.
It is in that context that we face a president who clearly knows that his regime is failing to deliver on its promises. The economy is weak, battered by Trump's precious tariffs and by constant “TACO uncertainty.” The jobs report wasn’t fake, it was just bad. And anyone who isn’t really, really rich can feel it, including in the grocery costs they’re struggling to meet. It’s the worst time to be a farmer in decades, and many will likely go under this year. Houses aren’t moving. Tourism into the U.S. is in the toilet, thanks to Trump’s viciousness toward immigrants and his mania for putting the military into the streets of American cities; not to mention the fact that the U.S. is one of the few tourist destinations where the chances are pretty good that you’ll get deaded in a gun massacre. Vegas is empty, and attendance at Disney World is down as international visitors steer clear of DeSantistan (for fear of inadvertently winding up in Alligator Alcatraz for having an accent or being a darker shade of tan…) Jobs numbers are so bad, he fired the Labor Department statistician to try and prevent honest data from ever being released to the public again.
And because, whatever his spin, Trump clearly knows that he is unpopular, mainly because most people don’t like militarized, masked, immigration roundups at Home Depot and the economy under his watch is basura, not to mention those pesky Epstein files he refuses to release and that are driving down his numbers with his own supporters and podcast bros … he’s doing what he always does: turn on democracy.
In this iteration, he’s explicitly seeking to disrupt the 2026 midterms, for fear that his party will lose its narrow House and / or Senate majorities, preventing him and his rotten clan of failsons, grifter immigrants slamming the doors behind themselves, and out and out data and tax thieves from continuing to strip our declining empire for parts; distributing what’s left of our GDP amongst themselves while leaving most other Americans broke, struggling, and powerless.
And for those, like me, frankly, who routinely wonder out loud whether there will even be elections next November, the answer is clearly that Trump believes there will be — otherwise he wouldn’t be so focused on messing with Texas.
Texas is a unique target.
It is already a majority non-white state, which unlike fellow majority-minority state California, operates under a system of modern day apartheid, where the majority population exercises precious little statewide authority. Texas’ constantly fleeing junior Senator Raphael “Ted” Cruise only counts as a powerful Hispanic on paper, since he claims his true purpose in the powerful body is to aid his Old Testament-inspired, hallucinatory version of Israel, and not the citizens of his own state, whom he is perfectly content to surrender to the elements, and to the failing power grid, so that he and his family can vacation in style.
Texas also happens to be where the single largest population of Black Americans live. You heard me right. It’s not Alabama, or Georgia (home to the Capitol of Black America, Atlanta) … or South Carolina, or Louisiana or Mississippi where the most concentrated Black population is. It’s Texas.
So when they do apartheid, they do it big.
The anti-voting practices of the ruling Republican Party in Texas almost always target Harris County, where Houston is, and where the state’s effective “Black belt” finds its golden buckle. Texas has one of the lowest voter participation rates in the country, rooted in abysmal turnout among members of its young, Latino majority, combined with the tendency of Texas Latinos who do vote, to side with their oppressor.
And the latest gambit — an emergency session called by Gov. Greg Abbott to redistriet the state on Trump’s orders, to “get him five more congressional seats,” — much like he tried to get Georgia to “get him” eleven thousand odd votes so he wouldn’t have to admit he lost the 2020 election — is so obvious, it’s almost comedy.
The gerrymandering push explicitly targets seats that are currently held by Black or Latino members. Here’s a good rundown of the history, including the upside down logic out of Trump’s Department of Injustice, whose “civil rights” division under an ideologue named Harmeet Dhillon, has reinterpreted its mission as deconstructing anything ever erected in American law or practice that helps nonwhite people achieve opportunity or power. From the Texas Tribune:
Texas’ current maps were drawn by the Republican-dominated Legislature in 2021 with an eye toward protecting incumbents and ensuring that two congressional seats Texas gained due to population growth would be held by the GOP. The maps worked as intended, with Republicans winning 25 of 38 congressional seats in 2022 and 2024.
The map was immediately challenged in court by a group of plaintiffs alleging that it discriminated against Black and Latino voters. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibits election and voting practices that disadvantage minority groups, including drawing boundaries that dilute their ability to elect their preferred candidate by packing them into a single district or dispersing them throughout multiple.
The nearly 4-year-old legal challenge went to trial in May and has yet to be decided.
At trial in El Paso, representatives for the state and its map-drawers repeatedly testified that they were blind to race when crafting the maps and said they did not draw “coalition districts,” where different minority groups are combined to constitute a majority, which the state maintains are unconstitutional.
But in its July 7 letter, the DOJ argued that four of Texas’ districts should be redrawn, three because they are coalition districts and one because it is a majority Hispanic district created as a result of neighboring coalition districts.
All four seats are held by Black or Latino Democrats, or were until recently — Texas’ 18th Congressional District is currently vacant but was previously represented by Sylvester Turner, who died in March.
That seat and the adjacent 9th Congressional District, represented by Rep. Al Green of Houston, are plurality Hispanic districts with sizable Black populations. The letter says those districts gave rise to Rep. Sylvia Garcia’s neighboring 29th District, where a majority of residents are Hispanic. The 33rd District, held by Rep. Marc Veasey of Fort Worth, is also an unconstitutional coalition district, the letter says.
The DOJ cites a 2024 decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which found that the Voting Rights Act’s protections do not apply to racial or ethnic groups that have combined their ranks to form a majority in a district. The case, which involved a challenge to Galveston County’s commissioners court map, reversed years of precedent, including by the 5th Circuit itself, putting the appellate court for Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana at odds with most other circuits.
“Although the state’s interest when configuring these districts was to comply with Fifth Circuit precedent prior to the 2024 … decision, that interest no longer exists,” Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon wrote, adding these districts are “nothing more than vestiges of an unconstitutionally racially based gerrymandering past, which must now be abandoned, and must now be corrected by Texas.”
Well the Dems are having none of it. A group of them has left the state, denying Abbott a quorum in whch he and his maga party can do their dirty business. They’ve left for states like Illinois, where America’s richest governor, Gov. JB Pritzker, is financing their fight and sheltering them from Abbott’s weak threats to jail or fine them. And the Dems had the perfect response to Abbott’s demands that they return and help him gerrymander their state for Trump:
”Come and take it.” Perfect.
Which brings us to the latest threat to our democracy: the Roberts Supreme Court.
VRA 911
John Roberts has never liked the Voting Rights Act.
He hated it when he was a young lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department. He has hated it every day he’s been on the Surpeme Court. And he now enjoys a six person right wing SCOTUS majority who are as eager as he is to eliminate it. To summarize what I believe to be his view, Roberts thinks the Warren era court was too mean to white people; in that it made rulings that were indefinite in nature and therefore in his view, unfair to the good white folks of the American South, who are absolutely and totally not racist anymore ever ever ever. Therefore the remedies they created must have a finite end date — meaning affirmative action, voting protections, and every other piece of civil rights remedial action. Well now he and his Leonard Leo friends, including Ole’ Clarence, have the chance to do something about it. From Slate:
eading the tea leaves from cryptic Supreme Court orders can be perilous business because the justices are not bound by the questions they ask at oral argument, the offhand comments they make at a judicial conference, or even their monumental “shadow docket” rulings on emergency petitions that have become all too common. But a technical briefing order in a long pending case out of Louisiana, posted on the court’s website after 5 p.m. on a Friday in August, was ominous. The order was likely intended to obscure that SCOTUS is ready to consider striking down the last remaining pillar of the Voting Rights Act, known as Section 2. Such a monumental ruling, likely not coming until June 2026, would change the nature of congressional, state, and local elections all across the country, and likely stir major civil rights protests as the midterm election season heats up.
Louisiana v. Callais, the case that was the subject of last Friday’s order, is a voting case over the drawing of the state’s six congressional districts. Louisiana has a one-third Black population, but after the 2020 census the state Legislature drew a districting plan, passed over a Democratic governor’s veto, that created only one district in which Black voters would be likely to elect their candidate of choice. Before Callais, Black voters had successfully sued Louisiana in a case called Robinson v. Ardoin, arguing that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act required drawing a second congressional district giving Black voters that opportunity. Section 2 says minority voters should have the same chance as other voters to elect their candidates of choice, and courts have long used it to require new districts when there is a large and cohesive minority population concentrated in a given area, when white and minority voters choose different candidates, and when the minority has difficulty electing its preferred representatives.
After Robinson and more litigation, the Louisiana Legislature drew up a new plan, which created the second congressional district. The state drew the second district to otherwise favor Republicans in the state overall, including House Speaker Mike Johnson. A new group of voters then sued in the Callais case, arguing that Louisiana’s drawing of the second district violated the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause by being a racial gerrymander. Since 1993’s Shaw v. Reno, the Supreme Court has found racial gerrymanders when race is the central factor in drawing district lines and the state has no compelling interest in drawing such lines.
When the court first held oral argument in the Callais case in March, it appeared to be another in a long series of cases (many out of Louisiana) in which the justices considered whether race or partisanship predominated in the drawing of district lines. I’ve long written that this is an impossible exercise in places like Louisiana, where the factors overlap—most white voters in the state are Republicans and Black voters are Democrats, so when the state discriminates against Democrats, it is also discriminating against Black voters. It appeared from the initial March oral argument that the court was going to once again determine whether race or party predominated.
But instead of deciding the case at the end of June, when the court ordinarily disposes of the cases heard during the term, the court set the case up for reargument. That’s a rare move, but it’s not unheard of. Back in 2010, SCOTUS set the Citizens United case up for reargument the following September. But when the court issued its June order in Citizens United for reargument, the same order informed the parties that the court wanted something new to be briefed and argued on reargument: whether to overrule a line of cases allowing limits on corporate spending in elections. The court the following January then overruled these cases in one of the most consequential election law decisions of our time. It has had significant reverberations for our politics ever since.
Fifteen years later, something similar seems to be happening with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In June of this year, rather than deciding the case it heard in March, the court issued an order in Callais setting the case for reargument and stating, “In due course, the Court will issue an order scheduling argument and specifying any additional questions to be addressed in supplemental briefing.” Justice Clarence Thomas impatiently dissented from the order, saying that this was the time to recognize that Section 2 of the VRA and the court’s racial gerrymandering case are on a collision course and to kill off Section 2 or rewrite it to be toothless.
And while rights groups like the LDF plan to put their foot down and fight, we’ve got to start thinking ahead to what voting and power accumulation looks like in a future with zero federal protections for nonwhitre voters, and full freedom for states like Texas to pursue partisan gerrymandering that is clearly racilized, but wrapped in the language of politics, and “race neutrality.”
That’s the frightening road that maga voters have put us on.
We’ll discuss this tonight on The Joy Reid Show in a special live conversation with the Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., Esq. Endowed Chair in Civil Rights (Vernon E. Jordan) at Howard University, law professor, and former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Sherrilyn Ifill.
If you’re not subscribed, now’s your chance! You can also watch the episode tonight, live on the Substack app.
My opinion is if I have no rights to vote then I and the rest of us who they want to take our right away shouldn’t have to pay taxes. Let the rich who’ve all the money and power pay taxes. I believe the saying No Representation No taxation.
I had a young woman tell me that she would never vote because it did not make a difference, now I'm beginning to understand her. This makes no sense to me, a vote should be counted as such and the candidate with the most votes is the winner.