It’s been a long week for the gerrymandering Democrats.
On Monday, attorneys representing Virginia Democrats’ absurdly gerrymandered rewrite of the commonwealth’s congressional maps faced some pointed questions from a skeptical-sounding Virginia Supreme Court.
On Tuesday, the high court denied a motion brought by Virginia Attorney General Jay “Two Bullets” Jones to appeal Tazewell County Circuit Court Judge Jack “Chip” Hurley Jr.’s immediate ruling declaring unconstitutional last week’s referendum to change Virginia’s constitution. Voters narrowly approved a ballot question seeking to “temporarily” rip out a 2020 amendment that put political map-making in the hands of an independent commission — an inconvenient impediment to Democrats’ drive to change the current congressional maps to grab four more seats in Congress in the midterms. If all goes as the Dems planned, the new maps would give them a 10-1 advantage in Virginia’s congressional delegation.
Also on Tuesday, a three-judge panel dismissed a leftist lawfare group’s “novel” lawsuit seeking to rewrite Wisconsin’s congressional maps further to the Democratic Party’s advantage. The ruling marked the second rejection of the Democrats’ efforts to nix congressional maps drawn by the Red China-sounding People’s Maps Commission, handpicked by far-left Gov. Tony Evers. They have hopes a liberal-led Wisconsin Supreme Court will come to their rescue.
Luke Berg, deputy counsel for the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, the Milwaukee-based law firm that successfully fought the lawsuit, called the lawsuit’s legal argument “novel” and “especially crazy.”
As Berg notes, there are uncompetitive districts everywhere. Madison and Milwaukee are massively uncompetitive state political districts for Republicans, for example.
“I searched nationwide for an anti-competitive gerrymander. I couldn’t find one,” Berg said in a phone interview this week with The Federalist. “They don’t cite one in their lawsuit. They don’t cite anything.”
But the most impactful decision arrived on Wednesday. The U.S. Supreme Court issued a 6-3 bombshell ruling gutting the discriminatory practice of racial gerrymandering in the redistricting process. The 6-3 majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, found unconstitutional the twisting of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by courts “to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids.”
“It’s been a good week” for the rule of law, election law expert Hans von Spakovsky told The Federalist following the SCOTUS ruling in Louisiana v. Callais.
‘An Unconstitutional Racial Gerrymander’
As The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood reported, the Supreme Court took issue with Louisiana creating a second majority-black district in its congressional maps. The Pelican State did so after a lower court found the lack of two majority-black congressional districts likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). The 1965 civil rights law “prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate” against individuals based on race or color.
The majority opinion rejects the premise that race should be considered in drawing up congressional maps based on the “compelling interest” of states to comply with the VRA.
“Compliance with §2 thus could not justify the State’s use of race-based redistricting here. The State’s attempt to satisfy the Middle District’s ruling, although understandable, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, and we therefore affirm the decision below,” Alito wrote.
In her new book, Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution, The Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway describes the associate justice as a “practical originalist.” He’s shown on numerous occasions that he will not stand by the Supreme Court’s long-held interpretation of a law if it clashes with original constitutional intent. His opinion in Louisiana v. Callais is no exception. Alito notes in the opinion that the court for more than 30 years “has simply assumed for the sake of argument” that “compliance with the Voting Rights Act provides a compelling reason that may justify the intentional use of race in drawing legislative districts.”
“The Constitution almost never permits a State to discriminate on the basis of race, and such discrimination triggers strict scrutiny,” the majority opinion states.
‘It’s Just Politics’
The left, of course, went full-on apoplectic.
NAACP President Derrick Johnson called the ruling a “devastating blow to what remains of the Voting Rights Act, and a license for corrupt politicians who want to rig the system by silencing entire communities.”
The left’s corporate media PR agents brought the same level of hysteria. The New York Times headline summed up the screaming, “Justices Further Weakens Voting Rights Act, Igniting Political Scramble.”
Von Spakovsky, who served as Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Justice in President George W. Bush’s administration, said the the left’s hysteria level is akin to how Democrats greeted the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, which found unconstitutional another section of the Voting Rights Act.
“They said, ‘This ruling has destroyed the VRA. There’s going to be mass discrimination across the country,’” von Spakovsky, Senior Legal Fellow in the Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law at Advancing American Freedom, told The Federalist in a phone interview. “None of that happened.”
The same leftists are calling Congress’ SAVE America Act — with its voter ID requirements — “Jim Crow 2.0”. Studies show election integrity laws have not suppressed voter turnout in states requiring voter verification, despite the hyperbolic nonsense from Democrats that millions of eligible voters can’t obtain identification.
Former President Barack Obama fatuously insisted that Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling “serves as just one more example of how a majority of the current Court seems intent on abandoning its vital role in ensuring equal participation in our democracy and protecting the rights of minority groups against majority overreach.”
Obama’s Illinois, where the old “community organizer” began his political rise, is arguably the most gerrymandered state in the union. The Land of Lincoln is dominated by Democrats thanks in no small part to rigged political maps that Obama pushed on the state.
A 2012 New Yorker piece, as reported by the left-wing Pro Publica, detailed Obama’s work with a Dem redistricting consultant in 2001 to manufacture a state senate district to the future president’s advantage. The new district not only brought him votes, but gobs of campaign money from wealthy white liberals on the Gold Coast. Ryan Lizza, the reporter who authored the piece, wrote that the district manipulation “may have been the most important event in Obama’s early political life.”
Interestingly, Obama had previously lamented a “system of redistricting in the U.S. tends to allow representatives to choose people instead of people choosing representatives.”
“It’s just politics,” he said in a 2001 Hyde Park Herald story.
‘A Complete and Total Victory’
The redistricting ruling extensively rests on the language of the 15th Amendment and it draws heavily on Shelby in asserting the post-Civil War voting rights amendment “is not designed to punish for the past” but works “to ensure a better future.” As that decision argued, “things have changed dramatically” since congress passed the VRA.
“Voter turnout and registration rates in covered jurisdictions approach parity; blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare. Minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels,” the Shelby ruling, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, states.
The Trump administration echoed those sentiments.
“This is a complete and total victory for American voters,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement. “The color of one’s skin should not dictate which congressional district you belong in. We commend the court for putting an end to the unconstitutional abuse of the Voting Rights Act and protecting civil rights.”
