Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome to it could happen here a podcast where the
Speaker 2: thin veneer of democracy that has hitherto veiled the settler
Speaker 2: colony of the United States in the mask of humanity
Speaker 2: is being increasingly ripped away, leaving behind. I think calling
Speaker 2: it a new Jim Crow is that title has already
Speaker 2: been used for something else. But it's a return overtly
Speaker 2: to some of the worst discrimination of the Jim Crow era.
Speaker 2: So I'm your host, Miya Wong. Let's talk about what
Speaker 2: is actually at issue here, and that is a recent
Speaker 2: Supreme Court ruling called Louisiana v. Kalay. On a sort
Speaker 2: of micro level, this is about the question of can
Speaker 2: Louisiana just eliminate the two majority black districts that it
Speaker 2: had in its congressional map in twenty twenty four. Getting
Speaker 2: to this map in the first place was a subject
Speaker 2: of really intense civil rights litigation to get to the
Speaker 2: point where there were two majority black districts in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty four. On a macro level, what is that stake
Speaker 2: here is can a state create an electoral map where
Speaker 2: they spread all of the black voters across different districts
Speaker 2: in order to make them a minority in every district,
Speaker 2: thus making it impossible for black voters select the candidate
Speaker 2: if they're choosing. Until now, the answer was no, because
Speaker 2: this is specifically what the Voting Rights Act was passed
Speaker 2: to stop. Like this, specifically like this, This is one
Speaker 2: of the very specific things. I cannot emphasize this enough,
Speaker 2: this specific thing which is spread out the black vote
Speaker 2: across a whole bunch of districts where everyone else is white,
Speaker 2: so that black people cannot choose who they want to elect.
Speaker 2: This is like one of the specific things it was
Speaker 2: designed to stop. Again, up until now, you have not
Speaker 2: been allowed to do this, and this has led to
Speaker 2: the creation of what are called minority majority districts. This
Speaker 2: is a long and complicated history that frankly could be
Speaker 2: its own. It probably is like multiple people's doctoral dissertations.
Speaker 2: The short, short version of what a minority majority district
Speaker 2: is is it's a district where the majority of voters
Speaker 2: are from a minority group, thus allowing people from a
Speaker 2: minority group to select a candidate of their choosing. There
Speaker 2: are a lot of these districts in the South, specifically
Speaker 2: to prevent Republican politicians from making it impossible for black
Speaker 2: voters to elect anyone they chose. And fundamentally, what's at
Speaker 2: stake here, right, is the constitutional right to elect the
Speaker 2: candidates of your choosing if you are part of a
Speaker 2: minority group. Right. This is why all of this stuff
Speaker 2: was passed in the first place, because under what we
Speaker 2: call Jim Crow, it was extremely easy for a white
Speaker 2: majority to simply effectively deny the rights of black people.
Speaker 2: And this is other non white people too, but like
Speaker 2: this is primarily black people. It was it was very,
Speaker 2: very easy to simply deny them from ever getting to
Speaker 2: elect anyone by just drawing maps where a candidate they
Speaker 2: would vote for can never be elected. This is one
Speaker 2: of the basis of Jim Crow over discrimination. The Supreme
Speaker 2: Court has decided no, Actually, what they decided is that
Speaker 2: if the Republican party that controls the legislature draws a
Speaker 2: map that does the thing we've been talking about, where
Speaker 2: they spread out all of the like specifically the black
Speaker 2: vote into a bunch of districts, so that black people
Speaker 2: can't elect a representative. In order to challenge this as
Speaker 2: violation of your voting rights, you have to prove definitively
Speaker 2: prove that the intent was racism and not literally anything else.
Speaker 2: So for example, and this is this is the thing
Speaker 2: that's really at issue here, right, you have to prove
Speaker 2: that they specifically wanted to do this out of racism
Speaker 2: and not just because they want to elect Republicans by
Speaker 2: jerrymandering it partisan lee, which is amazingly a thing that's
Speaker 2: legal to do in the United States for reasons that
Speaker 2: are incredibly baffling. And also you have to be able
Speaker 2: to prove that they created this map specifically out of
Speaker 2: the intention to disenfranchise a minority group. And also you
Speaker 2: have to create a map that would allow them to
Speaker 2: achieve whatever other goals they supposedly want, like, for example,
Speaker 2: again making sure that Republicans have all the seats in
Speaker 2: a state, but also would not be racist. So you
Speaker 2: have to create a map for them that would allow
Speaker 2: them to do this in order to prove that there
Speaker 2: could be another map that achieves their goals of like
Speaker 2: partisan jerrymandering that isn't also racist. It's completely unhinged legally,
Speaker 2: this this is a shambles. We have covered some downright
Speaker 2: like hideous nonsense on this show in terms of Supreme
Speaker 2: Court decisions, right, Like this Supreme Court has just the
Speaker 2: lowest level of legal literacy in like living memory of
Speaker 2: any Supreme Court. It is astounding the kinds of just
Speaker 2: absolute horseshit they are popping out with this. This is
Speaker 2: maybe their worst ruling, which is difficult to prove because
Speaker 2: there have been so many abhorrent ones. Even just from
Speaker 2: a pure legal perspective, this one is so bad it
Speaker 2: defies belief. So, okay, one of the main issues here
Speaker 2: is Section two of the Voting Rights Act. I'm just
Speaker 2: gonna read what it says, Quote, No voting qualifications or
Speaker 2: prerequisite to voting, or standard practice or procedure shall be
Speaker 2: imposed or applied by any state or political subdivision in
Speaker 2: a manner which results keep that in mind later, which
Speaker 2: results in a denial or a bridge of the right
Speaker 2: of any citizen of the United States to vote on
Speaker 2: account of race or color, or in contravention of the
Speaker 2: guarantees set forth in section nineteen seventy three B. So again,
Speaker 2: I kind of emphasize this enough, right, So, the way
Speaker 2: this is written is that it says that you can't
Speaker 2: apply qualification or prerequisite to voting, or have any standard
Speaker 2: or practice or procedure cannot be imposed by the state,
Speaker 2: or any other political subdivision that results in the denial
Speaker 2: or abridgment of the rights of citizens, vote and account
Speaker 2: of race. Right.
Speaker 3: It specifically says results. It does not say intent. Now
Speaker 3: this is incredibly important because Alito is like, no, fuck that, Actually,
Speaker 3: you have to proven intent.
Speaker 2: I'm going to quote from a piece of Scotus blog
Speaker 2: by Edward Foley, who has an extremely long title of
Speaker 2: the Charles b Ever Sold in Florence Whitcomb Ever Sold
Speaker 2: share and constitutional law. As the director of Election at
Speaker 2: Law at Ohio State University, You're written a book on
Speaker 2: like poral law. He is a constitutional law professor who
Speaker 2: specifically does election law. He is like, by no means
Speaker 2: a leftist. He's coming into the right of Justice Jackson
Speaker 2: in her dissent in this case. Right, but even he
Speaker 2: I'm going to quote what he writes about this. He
Speaker 2: calls this ruling an abomination, which is like a thing
Speaker 2: that you don't really get from like legal people. They
Speaker 2: don't say shit like that. I'm going to quote what
Speaker 2: he says about this quote. The ruling purports to interpret
Speaker 2: the Voting Rights Section two, but it destroys the central
Speaker 2: meaning of the section, converting it into the exact opposite
Speaker 2: of what Congress meant for it to do.
Speaker 4: The one thing that is unambiguous about Section two is
Speaker 4: that the nineteen eighty two amendment to the section's test
Speaker 4: creates a quote results test for determining whether there is
Speaker 4: liability under the section, replacing the intent test that the
Speaker 4: Supreme Court had previously adopted for Section two claims, as
Speaker 4: the tech states, quote, no standard practice or procedure shall
Speaker 4: be imposed which results in a denial or abridgment of
Speaker 4: the right of any citizen to.
Speaker 2: Vote on account of race. Yet the case defiantly converts
Speaker 2: Section two back to an intention inquiry rather than a
Speaker 2: results analysis. So what happened here, right, To make this
Speaker 2: extremely clear, is that Congress in nineteen eighty two had
Speaker 2: amended this. They amended what this thing said, right because
Speaker 2: Supreme Court had been adopting a standard of intent, right,
Speaker 2: which means that you have to prove that, like these
Speaker 2: people were like mustache whirling saying the N word in
Speaker 2: fucking clan robes, doing Nazi solutions. You have to like
Speaker 2: prove that they intentionally did this for racist reasons and
Speaker 2: not any other reason. And Congress went back and went, no,
Speaker 2: fuck that if the result of it is racist, then
Speaker 2: you can't do it, even if, like nominally, what you're
Speaker 2: saying out loud is that you're doing this for non
Speaker 2: racist reasons. If the result is racism, then you have
Speaker 2: to not do it. And Alito goes, yeah, no, fuck that,
Speaker 2: We're just like flipping it back to an intent standard
Speaker 2: for no reason other than I want to be able
Speaker 2: to do racism and help Republican Party win seats. The
Speaker 2: other thing that fully talks about is the Court is
Speaker 2: arguing that, like, Congress can't draw from the fifteenth Amendment
Speaker 2: in order in order to like have the Voting Rice
Speaker 2: Act work in the first place, I'm going to quote
Speaker 2: him again. Yeah, the Court in this decision did not
Speaker 2: need to consider the question of Congressional power to enforce
Speaker 2: the fifteenth Amendment. That is because the power of Congress
Speaker 2: to enact Section two with the Voting Rights Amendment for
Speaker 2: the purposes of the case could have been sustained not
Speaker 2: under the Fifteenth Amendment, but under Article one, Section four
Speaker 2: of the Constitution. Congress has full power under Article one,
Speaker 2: section four to enact laws governing the quote, time, place,
Speaker 2: and manner of congressional elections. Thus, Congress can enact a
Speaker 2: prohibition against minority vote dilution for congres national districts under
Speaker 2: a dispriat impact theory without any consideration of discriminatory attent,
Speaker 2: and not rely on the Fifteenth Amendment at all. So, okay,
Speaker 2: what does this mean? Right? What Alito is saying is that, like,
Speaker 2: oh well, actually, Congress doesn't have the authority to like
Speaker 2: write the secution of the Voting Rights Amendment. They don't
Speaker 2: have the authority to do it under the fifteenth Amendment
Speaker 2: because it like oversteps the rights of states to you know,
Speaker 2: like run their own elections. Right, So I'm gonna do
Speaker 2: the thing I did last time with Fully's thing, and
Speaker 2: just read the full Article one, section four of the Constitution.
Speaker 2: By the way, when something says like Article one, section four,
Speaker 2: you have to remember that all of the amendments, right,
Speaker 2: the amendment that got rid of slavery, even like the
Speaker 2: first Amendment, right, the freedom of speech, that's an amendment
Speaker 2: that's not in the original text that had to be
Speaker 2: added onto it. And obviously we have something called the
Speaker 2: Bill of Rights that like you know, was like the
Speaker 2: first ten amendments that was passed with the Constitution. But
Speaker 2: that's not stuff that was like put like a freedom
Speaker 2: of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship that was
Speaker 2: not in the original texts of the Constitution. That was
Speaker 2: the amendments put on. This is something that the people
Speaker 2: who were at the Constitution were like, fuck if this
Speaker 2: is gonna be in the original thing, right, So Article one,
Speaker 2: Session four, this is from like the original fucking body
Speaker 2: of text of the Constitution says, quote, the times, places
Speaker 2: and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives shall
Speaker 2: be prescribed in each state by the Legislature thereof. But
Speaker 2: the Congress may at any time, by law, make or
Speaker 2: alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing senators.
Speaker 3: So yes, obviously they could fucking do the Voting Rights Amendment.
Speaker 3: They literally have the ability, Like it says in Section on,
Speaker 3: Congress may at any time, by law, make or alter
Speaker 3: such regulations. By such regulations they mean the times, places
Speaker 3: and manner of holding elections. They could just do this, right,
Speaker 3: So obviously they can fucking do the Voting Rights Amendment.
Speaker 3: It's it's literally just there in the cunstumitation. It just
Speaker 3: says that if.
Speaker 2: All like this, it's gibberish.
Speaker 3: It's like, oh my god, you can just read the
Speaker 3: text of the Constitution and it says you can do this.
Speaker 2: It's God holy shit.
Speaker 4: Even from the.
Speaker 2: Perspective of like if you treat the law as real,
Speaker 2: this is just pure Calvin Ball shit, Like I mean,
Speaker 2: it's just Jesus Christ. Okay, you know what's real and
Speaker 2: not Calvin Ball. It's it's these products and services we
Speaker 2: are back. So, okay, what has the result of this been.
Speaker 2: It's been about two weeks since the Court did this decision.
Speaker 2: The Court immediately followed this up by allowing Alabama to
Speaker 2: jerrymander the shit out of their upcoming election. They're doing
Speaker 2: this via again, the shadow docket, which is their ability
Speaker 2: to just be like, no, fuck you, we're not ruling
Speaker 2: on this case out actually issuing a decision, an unsigned,
Speaker 2: one paragraph thing from the court can just dictate what
Speaker 2: the law is. It's great, it's amazing, and by amazing,
Speaker 2: I mean Jesus fucking Christ. This happens about a week
Speaker 2: after the original screw Court decision. This shadow docket allows
Speaker 2: Alabama to put in place a map that was already
Speaker 2: found to.
Speaker 1: Be explicitly racially motivated, a thing Alito said in a
Speaker 1: decision that he wouldn't do right. Alito says in a
Speaker 1: decision that he won't overturn a cases that are like
Speaker 1: avert discrimination and b that he wouldn't.
Speaker 2: Overturn this exact case, and then they did it.
Speaker 3: Anyways, It's like Jesus Christ, I're.
Speaker 2: Just like, oh my God. So the short version of
Speaker 2: the Alabama conflict I'm drawing here from Slat's story on
Speaker 2: this thing is that Alabama tried to do a map
Speaker 2: that would let them get rid of like both of
Speaker 2: the congressional black Congression candidates in the states by jerymandering
Speaker 2: the black vote. There's a whole bunch of court cases
Speaker 2: about this. In twenty twenty three, the Supreme Court said
Speaker 2: that they couldn't do this and they had to make
Speaker 2: fairer districts that didn't like violate the Voting Rights Act.
Speaker 2: So this was three years ago. This, like the Supreme
Speaker 2: Court said they had to do this. Here's some Slate quote. Alabama, however,
Speaker 2: refused to comply with that order.
Speaker 1: Again, like they got an order from the Supreme Court
Speaker 1: and refused to do it.
Speaker 2: Quote. So the lower court imposed its own map featuring
Speaker 2: two districts where black voters had a real shot at
Speaker 2: choosing their representative. The court also found that, in defying
Speaker 2: its previous mandate, the Alabama legislature had engaged in intentional
Speaker 2: racial discrimination, violating the Fourteenth Amendments Equal Protection Clause in
Speaker 2: addition to the Voting Rights Act. Up until Monday, this
Speaker 2: decision had prevented the legislature from joining the former Confederate
Speaker 2: States now racing to eliminate black representatives from their congressional delegations.
Speaker 2: Alabama Republicans pressed the Dish Act Court to lift its bar,
Speaker 2: but it refused, so they filed an emergency request at
Speaker 2: the Supreme Court asking permission to read jerrymander black communities
Speaker 2: in light of this decision. Now, I can't emphasize enough
Speaker 2: this vote from when they were granted this position. This
Speaker 2: vote is in like eight days, right, people had already
Speaker 2: started voting for candidates and primaries, right, And Streme Court
Speaker 2: was like, yeah, sure, yeah, you can. You can fucking
Speaker 2: rejerrymander this thing eight days before the election. That's absolutely fine.
Speaker 2: Even though again I canna emphasize this enough in the ruling,
Speaker 2: Alito specifically said in the majority opinion that they wouldn't
Speaker 2: overturn this exact case, and then they did it. It's
Speaker 2: mind boggling. It used to be, like it really truly did.
Speaker 2: Used to be that if you were going to do
Speaker 2: shit like this, you had to like sort of like
Speaker 2: pretend that you were following some kind of legal order.
Speaker 2: And now you just don't. You can just fucking do
Speaker 2: Calvin ballshit. You can just literally lie about what you're
Speaker 2: doing and you're just saying and then just fucking do
Speaker 2: whatever you want about it. And obviously, you know, as
Speaker 2: Slave points on. This has been pointed out by a
Speaker 2: whole bunch of different outlets. The Supreme Court also had
Speaker 2: used another legal principle to prevent states that would have
Speaker 2: we're trying to like make more democratic maps, both in
Speaker 2: the sense of like not being racist and also that
Speaker 2: would elect more democratic politicians. And even though it was
Speaker 2: three months before the election, the court was like, well,
Speaker 2: it's actually too soon, like it's too close the election
Speaker 2: for you to be changing this stuff. But then also
Speaker 2: now they're just letting Alabama do one of these like
Speaker 2: eight days before an election. So it's so incredibly clear
Speaker 2: about what's happening here is that the Court is trying
Speaker 2: to allow Republican politicians to just straight up rig elections.
Speaker 2: For them by doing gerrymandered districts in a way that
Speaker 2: lets them eliminate the ability of non white people to vote.
Speaker 2: And this is a huge fucking deal. Getting the nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty five Voting Rights Act was one of the major
Speaker 2: achievements of the Civil rights movement. Right, It's like, one
Speaker 2: of the biggest goals of the moderate wing of the
Speaker 2: movement was to have elections in which black people got
Speaker 2: to actually fucking vote and not have their vote intentionally
Speaker 2: diluted so they could never actually elect a candidate. And
Speaker 2: that's what's being done here, right, And this has been
Speaker 2: pointed out. It's like anyone who's read any kind of
Speaker 2: analysis of racial politics in the US. One of the
Speaker 2: consistent themes of the sort of you know what you
Speaker 2: would call, I guess like the era of black uprising, right,
Speaker 2: the sort of modern era stretching from roughly Ferguson I thought,
Speaker 2: I guess you could talk about the stuff in the
Speaker 2: Bay before that, or roughly from Ferguson through twenty twenty,
Speaker 2: was that the US was not a democracy before the
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty five Voting Rights Act because the principle of
Speaker 2: one person, one vote was not real because you could
Speaker 2: simply disenfranchise anyone from a minority group, and that was
Speaker 2: the status quo of the South, and also like a
Speaker 2: lot of other parts of the country too, was this
Speaker 2: very overtability of these people to you know, not only
Speaker 2: just like this is this is one of the components
Speaker 2: of segregation. Right. It's not just like imposing segregation legally
Speaker 2: in public spaces, right, it's also you know, like preventing
Speaker 2: it's preventing black people from voting. And this is the
Speaker 2: thing that the Supreme Court ruling has just effectively destroyed. Right,
Speaker 2: It's the thing that like made it possible to even
Speaker 2: sort of like in the loosest sense possible, called this
Speaker 2: country a democracy. And it's gone. It's just gone. And
Speaker 2: now you know, it's like okay, like what what fucking
Speaker 2: is this now? And you know, I don't know, it's
Speaker 2: like it's it's an even more just extremely overt Jim
Speaker 2: Crow state, this is what the goal of the Republican
Speaker 2: Party has always been, Like they want resegregation. It's been
Speaker 2: the basis of modern Republican politics forever. Right, It's you know,
Speaker 2: dating back to you if you want to look at
Speaker 2: like what trump Ism dessentdsful We've talked about this at
Speaker 2: length on the show. The thing that became the sort
Speaker 2: of religious right was originally born out of like the
Speaker 2: school choice movement. And the thing about the school choice
Speaker 2: movement was that it was an anti integration thing. After
Speaker 2: losing their fight to be able to have whites on
Speaker 2: these schools, a bunch of these sort of right wingers
Speaker 2: were like, Okay, well, we'll just do private schools where
Speaker 2: we can do that. And that's the basis of modern
Speaker 2: Republican politics, right, you know, sort of both evangelicalism and
Speaker 2: sort of the Bush administration and trump Ism and Reagan too.
Speaker 2: Is this shit, and this has been what the Republicans
Speaker 2: have done when they've been in power. Right, this is
Speaker 2: a lot a lot of the Trump administration, like what
Speaker 2: they're doing, like all of the stuff about DEI, all
Speaker 2: this stuff about wokeness like this is also a lot
Speaker 2: of what doche is doing was trying to make it
Speaker 2: so that black people like couldn't work for the US government. Right.
Speaker 2: It was a huge purge of black women from the
Speaker 2: US government. And you know, now we're seeing this on
Speaker 2: the level of elections and on this level what Republicans
Speaker 2: are trying to do with these gerrymandered maps, is remove
Speaker 2: non white people and especially black people from Congress so
Speaker 2: they can just have untrammeled white supremacist rule. And they're
Speaker 2: doing it by claiming both that it's actually partisan. It's
Speaker 2: just partisan jerrymandering, which is legal to disenfranchise black vetters
Speaker 2: because black vetters won't openly vote for the party of
Speaker 2: white supremacy. And they're also claiming that like, not doing
Speaker 2: this is like infringing on the civil rights of white people,
Speaker 2: a thing that like is completely you know, just gibberish
Speaker 2: world turned upside down nonsense. But if they can just
Speaker 2: do that now because they're in power, because the court
Speaker 2: will just let them do this shit. And so I
Speaker 2: think in a way that really has not been conveyed
Speaker 2: in the media in the discourse, like this is one
Speaker 2: of Bleak's moments of this administration, right you know, on
Speaker 2: top of just the multiple gedocides they're committing, right on
Speaker 2: top of you know, just like the ethnic cleansing of
Speaker 2: no white people from the US that ICE is doing.
Speaker 2: They're what they're doing right now is attempting to end
Speaker 2: multi racial democracy in the US. And obviously, politically, I
Speaker 2: have my critiques of like electoral democracy as a concept,
Speaker 2: but having it just revert back to only white people
Speaker 2: get to decide who politicians are is something even worse
Speaker 2: than what we've had so far. You know, it's a
Speaker 2: seismic shift in just literally what this country is towards
Speaker 2: something that unbelievably an unfathomably weak state of pure white rule.
Speaker 2: And the people who are talking about this think that
Speaker 2: it can be reversed just by voting more, but no,
Speaker 2: it can't. The whole point of this right is to
Speaker 2: make sure that elections and you know, whatever the will
Speaker 2: of the people is is incapable of actually affecting the
Speaker 2: white supremacist state because not white people just don't get votes.
Speaker 2: You can't just vote harder your way through all of
Speaker 2: this shit. You have to actually do things. And you know,
Speaker 2: if we don't want to live in a white supremacist society,
Speaker 2: we're going to have to actually take action to combat
Speaker 2: and actually resist the fact that this is like this
Speaker 2: is just a pure white supremacist Jim Crow state. Now, yeah,
Speaker 2: so this has been cold happened here. I don't have
Speaker 2: a nonbleaque way to end this, but the common refrain
Speaker 2: is if you've ever asked yourself what you would be
Speaker 2: doing in Nazi Germany, it's right now, and I think
Speaker 2: you can also add to that right if you've ever
Speaker 2: asked yourself what would you be doing during Jim Crow,
Speaker 2: The answer is whatever the fuck you're doing now, and
Speaker 2: if if you're not happy with that answer, then it's
Speaker 2: time to move. It Could Happen Here is a production
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