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If You Had The Supreme Court Supporting Fair And Non-Discriminatory Elections As A Wish This Year, I Have Bad News

So this is how democracy dies… with weird, Jenga-like pieces.

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Gerrymandering WikipediaGerrymandering is one of those goofy words that, despite sounding very made up, has a powerful impact on our lives. It sounds like that one episode of Rick and Morty where Jerry got stuck in an adult daycare with all the other Jerrys. Much like when life-threatening storms are given cutesy names like “Sandy” that disincentivize evacuation, it’s goofy name distracts from the power of its effects. A better name would be “the-jengaficification-of-electoral-maps-in-order-to-undermine-democracy-and-the-will-of-the-people,” but I admit that the new moniker doesn’t roll off the tongue with quite as much ease.

Anyway, the Supreme Court just greenlit a form of it that allows for the functional exclusion of Black voters from South Carolina.

After the 2020 Census, South Carolina’s Republican-led legislature assured Democratic lawmakers and the public that they would carry out a fair and transparent process to redraw the state’s seven Congressional election districts.

A year earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had decided for the first time that partisan gerrymandering is lawful, permitting lawmakers to manipulate electoral maps to gain an edge for their party. Electoral maps based on race are impermissible, the court said, but those designed to give a political party an advantage are lawful.

…

Yet, the federal district court in South Carolina on Jan. 6 found that they, in fact, targeted and diluted the voting power of Black constituents specifically…Republicans effectively bleached Black voters out of an increasingly diverse — and increasingly politically competitive — congressional district in order to gain an electoral advantage, a three-judge panel wrote in the decision.

Weird spot to be in, realizing powerful jurists and lawmakers in the country are against race-based admissions to schools because there’s been enough “racial progress” while also shrugging race-based exclusions from the democratic process. And these aren’t just nobodies who would have no real political relevance if not for their race-baiting, like Marjorie Taylor Greene. I’m talking about Chief Justice Roberts.

The Republican defendants clearly relied on the landmark 2019 Supreme Court decision that approved partisan gerrymandering, a 5-4 ruling split along political lines.

“You can take race out of politics,” conservative Chief Justice John Roberts said at the time, “but you can’t take politics out of politics.”

The statement had the same ring of certitude as a 2013 decision in which Roberts wrote that certain legal protections for minority Americans have outlived their usefulness because “[o]ur country has changed.”

Chief Justice Roberts’s apparent truism is, as the French would say, stupid. From women’s suffrage to tough-on-crime rhetoric ramping up around elections and felon disenfranchisement, voting has rarely, if ever, been a politics qua politics issue. It has usually been racial. And if you don’t believe me, I warmly invite both you and Justice Roberts to find a hotly contested voting issue in the states that did not have some salient racial matter involved. Poor application of judicial theory is one thing, but for a textualist to shoo away historical accuracy? I, for one, look forward to our robotic judicial overlords.

U.S. Supreme Court enabled racial gerrymandering in South Carolina [Reuters]

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Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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