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AMY GOODMAN: A major victory for President Trump: The Supreme Court has cleared the way for Texas to use a new congressional map designed to help Republicans pick up as many as five House seats in next year’s midterms. A lower court previously ruled the redistricting map was unconstitutional because it had been racially gerrymandered and would likely dilute the political power of Black and Latino voters.
Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent, quote, “This court’s stay ensures that many Texas citizens, for no good reason, will be placed in electoral districts because of their race. And that result, as this court has pronounced year in and year out, is a violation of the constitution,” Justice Kagan wrote.
For more, we’re joined by Ari Berman, voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones magazine. His new piece is headlined “The Roberts Court Just Helped Trump Rig the Midterms.” Ari is the author of Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People — and the Fight to Resist It.
Ari Berman, welcome back to Democracy Now! Talk about the significance of this Supreme Court decision yesterday. And what exactly was Samuel Alito’s role?
ARI BERMAN: Good morning, Amy, and thank you for having me back on the show.
So, the immediate effect is that Texas will now be able to use a congressional map that has already been found to be racially gerrymandered and could allow Republicans to pick up five new seats in the midterms. And remember, Texas started this whole gerrymandering arms race, where state after state is now redrawing their maps ahead of the midterms, essentially normalizing something that is deeply abnormal.
It was an unsigned majority opinion, but Samuel Alito wrote a concurrence, basically saying that the Texas map was a partisan map, pure and simple. And remember, Amy, the Supreme Court has already laid the groundwork for Texas to do this kind of thing by essentially saying that partisan gerrymandering cannot be reviewed in federal court, no matter how egregious it is. They have blocked racial gerrymandering in the past, but now, essentially, what they’re allowing to do is they’re allowing Texas to camouflage a racial gerrymander as a partisan gerrymander, and they’ve given President Trump a huge victory in his war against American democracy.
AMY GOODMAN: This overturned a lower court ruling. What are the role of the courts now, with the Supreme Court ruling again and again on this?
ARI BERMAN: Well, basically, what the Supreme Court has done is it’s given President Trump the power of a king, and it’s given itself the power of a monarchy, because what happens is lower courts keep striking down things that President Trump and his party do, including Trump appointees to the lower courts — the Texas redistricting map was struck down by a Trump appointee, who found that it was racially gerrymandered to discriminate against Black and Latino voters. What the Roberts Court did was overturn that lower court opinion, just as it’s overturned so many other lower court opinions to rule in favor of Donald Trump and his party.
And one of the most staggering things, Amy, is the fact that the Roberts Court has ruled for President Trump 90% of the time in these shadow docket cases. So, in all of these big issues, whether it’s on voting rights or immigration or presidential powers, lower courts are constraining the president, and the Supreme Court repeatedly is saying that the president and his party are essentially above the law.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you have talked about the Supreme Court in 2019 ruling in a case, ordered that courts should stay out of disputes over partisan gerrymandering. Tell us more about that.
ARI BERMAN: It was really a catastrophic ruling for democracy, because what it said is that no matter how egregiously a state gerrymanders to try to target a political party, that those claims not only can’t be struck down in federal court, they can’t even be reviewed in federal court. And what that has done is it said to the Texases of the world, “You can gerrymander as much as you want, as long as you say that you’re doing it for partisan purposes.”
So, this whole exercise made a complete mockery of democracy, because Texas goes out there and says, “We freely admit that we are drawing these districts to pick up five new Republican seats.” President Trump says, “We’re entitled to five new seats.” Now, that would strike the average American as absurd, the idea that you could just redraw maps mid-decade to give more seats to your party. But the Supreme Court has basically laid the groundwork for that to be OK.
And even though racial gerrymandering, discriminating against Black and Hispanic voters, for example, is unconstitutional, which is what the lower court found in Texas, the Roberts Court continually has allowed Republicans to get away with this kind of racial gerrymandering by allowing them to just claim that it’s partisan gerrymandering. And that’s what happened once again in Texas yesterday.
ARI BERMAN: Where does this leave the Voting Rights Act? And for people, especially young people who, you know, weren’t alive in 1965, explain what it says and its importance then.
ARI BERMAN: The Voting Rights Act is the most important piece of civil rights legislation ever passed by the Congress. It quite literally ended the Jim Crow regime in the South by getting rid of the literacy tests and the poll taxes and all the other suppressive devices that had prevented Black people from being able to register and vote in the South for so many years.
It has been repeatedly gutted by the Roberts Court, which has ruled that states with a long history of discrimination, like Texas, no longer have to approve their voting changes with the federal government. The Roberts Court has made it much harder to strike down laws that discriminate against voters of color. And now they are preparing potentially to gut protections that protect people of color from being able to elect candidates of choice.
And I think the Texas ruling is a bad sign, another bad sign, for the Voting Rights Act, because a lower court found that Texas drew these maps to discriminate against Black and Latino voters, that they specifically targeted districts where Black and Latino voters had elected their candidates of choice. And the Supreme Court said, “No, we’re OK with doing it.” So it was yet another example in which the Supreme Court is choosing to protect white power over the power of Black, Latino, Asian American voters.
AMY GOODMAN: So, where does this leave the other cases? You have California’s Prop 50 to redraw the state’s congressional districts, but that was done another way. It was done by a referendum. The people of California voted on it. And then you’ve got North Carolina. You’ve got Missouri. Where does this leave everything before next midterm elections?
ARI BERMAN: Yeah, there’s a lot of activity in the courts so far. A federal court has already upheld North Carolina’s map, which was specifically targeted to dismantle a district of a Black Democrat there. The only district they changed was held by a Black Democrat in the state. In Missouri right now, organizers are trying to get signatures for a referendum to be able to block that district, which also targeted the district of a Black Democrat, Emanuel Cleaver.
California’s law is being challenged by Republicans and by the Justice Department. The Supreme Court did signal, however, in its decision in Texas that they believe that the California map was also a partisan gerrymander, so that that would lead one to believe that if the Supreme Court is going to uphold the Texas map, they would also uphold the California map.
And we’ve also seen repeatedly that there’s double standards for this court, that they allow Republicans to get away with things that they don’t allow Democrats to get away with. They’ve allowed Trump to get away with things that they did not allow Biden to get away with. But generally speaking, it seems like the Supreme Court is going to allow states to gerrymander as much as they want. And that’s going to lead to a situation where American democracy is going to become more rigged and less fair.
AMY GOODMAN: Ari Berman, voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones magazine, author of Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People — and the Fight to Resist It. We’ll link to your piece, “The Roberts Court Just Helped Trump Rig the Midterms.”
Next up, immigration crackdowns continue nationwide. We’ll go to New Orleans, where agents are expected to make 5,000 arrests, and to Minneapolis, as Trump escalates his attacks on the Somali community there, calling the whole community “garbage.” Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN: “Ounadikom,” “I Call Out to You,” composed by Ahmad Kaabour at the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975 and performed at a Gaza benefit concert on Wednesday by the NYC Palestinian Youth Choir.
