Law, Power, and Justice

The Nation Magazine
— Read on www.thenation.com/article/politics/gerrymandering-supreme-court-race/

excerpts

The case is significant because it’s the first racial gerrymandering case to make its way to the Supreme Court since Chief Justice John Roberts invented an entirely new standard for these kinds of cases in 2019’s Rucho v. Common Cause. In that case, Roberts ruled (and his conservative buddies agreed) that political gerrymanders are “non-justiciable”—meaning federal judges can’t stop states from gerrymandering away political power from one party or another—but that racial gerrymanders are both justiciable and unconstitutional. The gaping and obvious loophole in Roberts’s ruling was the likelihood that every state that unconstitutionally uses race to gerrymander away voting power would claim that they were just being political.

While Roberts was busy pretending that racism was an unknowable thing, alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh deployed a different trope to deny racism exists: the invocation of a Black friend.

That Black friend was Representative Jim Clyburn. As I mentioned, District 1 cuts through the city of Charleston and shoves its majority Black precincts into Clyburn’s District 6. ProPublica reported back in May that this Republican plan was essentially approved by Clyburn, a Democrat, increasing the safety of his district at the expense of making District 1 more competitive.

Where that leaves the future of racial gerrymandering will be exactly where it’s been since Rucho: Republicans are free to do it; they just have to lie about why. And lying comes as easy to Republicans as using antidemocratic institutions to impose minority rule.