I'm pretty sure that in my lifetime, this SC will re-examine such outdated things like the poll tax, the right to vote, civil rights. Maybe dredge up the Dred Scott decision for re-examination.
Voting discussion thread
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One thing I am ecstatic about is the demise of the concept of "disparate impact."
DOJ applied this principle in such a ridiculously aggressive fashion, that "disparate impact" trumped every provision of the Constitution, indeed it trumped the Constitution itself.
If HUD adopted a policy that prospective homeowners cannot make their downpayment using unemployment checks. (A wise policy, based on common sense), when DOJ discovered that this would results in more minority applicants being disapproved, they declare it has a "disparate impact" and is thus unconstitutional. This is of course ludicrous. The policy makes no mention of race at all, and is based on sound financial reasoning, but that mattered not at all to DOJ.
The XIV Amendment was intended to go after laws that said, "No black person may be given a mortgage." For the "no downpayments using unemployment checks" question, a law having a disparate impact warrants the question of its motivation, but it does not warrant leaping to the conclusion that racial discrimination is all it was about. If it stands rational scrutiny, then it is fine.
If Cullman County would decide to move its voter registration to the KKK headquarters on Main Street, race would not be mentioned, but would that I think would have a disparate impact, and pretty clearly because it was intended to.
In the 1960s, an egregious case overturned by the DOJ led to another slightly less egregious case, and so on and so on, until by today, DOJ was imply overturning sound policy. Anyway, good riddance, disparate impact.
DOJ applied this principle in such a ridiculously aggressive fashion, that "disparate impact" trumped every provision of the Constitution, indeed it trumped the Constitution itself.
If HUD adopted a policy that prospective homeowners cannot make their downpayment using unemployment checks. (A wise policy, based on common sense), when DOJ discovered that this would results in more minority applicants being disapproved, they declare it has a "disparate impact" and is thus unconstitutional. This is of course ludicrous. The policy makes no mention of race at all, and is based on sound financial reasoning, but that mattered not at all to DOJ.
The XIV Amendment was intended to go after laws that said, "No black person may be given a mortgage." For the "no downpayments using unemployment checks" question, a law having a disparate impact warrants the question of its motivation, but it does not warrant leaping to the conclusion that racial discrimination is all it was about. If it stands rational scrutiny, then it is fine.
If Cullman County would decide to move its voter registration to the KKK headquarters on Main Street, race would not be mentioned, but would that I think would have a disparate impact, and pretty clearly because it was intended to.
In the 1960s, an egregious case overturned by the DOJ led to another slightly less egregious case, and so on and so on, until by today, DOJ was imply overturning sound policy. Anyway, good riddance, disparate impact.
Blanche: "There's a lot of things we can be doing, like voter ID. Every time you walk into a restaurant you have to show ID. How about you have to show your idea to vote? That's not anything that's crazy."
This administration will say absolutely anything to justify its policies. The Weekly World News is more trustworthy.
Rather than assume I know just what you're saying here, will you please expand on these statements?
The point is whether you use gerrymandering to create a district where a certain minority cannot elect a desired representative is wrong - regardless of their skin color. While everyone on the left of worried about black people, they ignore the fact that many of these ‘majority black’ districts created under the VRA essentially erase the voting power of the other minorities within those districts.
And that ignores the fact that no voting group is monolithic in their voting.
IOW, due to racist intent (basing districts on majority skin color) or not, gerrymandering is bad for everyone.
Race and politics in America are inseparable whether people like it or not. This is a false choice. Ignore race and you often get maps that systematically dilute minority voting power. Focus only on race and you risk crude sorting. The real issue is how to avoid both at the same time.
And the idea that Republicans aren’t going to use race is nonsense. They’ll just say they’re using politics, because the Supreme Court of the United States has said partisan gerrymandering is allowed. When race and voting patterns overlap this much, that’s an easy workaround.
Until districts are drawn in a genuinely neutral way, taking race off the table doesn’t create fairness. It just makes it easier to draw maps that dilute voters while claiming they don’t.
So you believe that minorities vote monolithically? Or whites do?
Hint: they don't.
You're propping up purely racist districting in an effort to avoid racism. And it's quite comical.
It's coming to Alabama soon. Ivey has called a special session to discuss redistricting. The SCOTUS has given the GOP permission to wipe out blue districts under the guise of eliminating racial gerrymandering.
I don't think I have ever had to show an ID at a restaurant. Pure evil always lies.
Every state is about to max out its gerrymandering one way or the other. Neither side cares about fairness or respecting the voting public, they only thirst for power at any cost.
In the near term, FiveThirtyEight's "Atlas of Redistricting" shows that if every state government maxed out their partisan gerrymandering, the House would end up with 262 Republicans to 173 Democrats. That's a losing situation for everyone, just as it would be if the numbers were reversed.
No, I don’t believe that and you know it. You love your strawmen.
No one said anything about people voting monolithically. That’s a dodge. The point is that voting patterns and race are correlated in the real world, whether you like it or not. You don’t need 100 percent uniformity for district lines to have predictable effects.
And calling any consideration of race “purely racist” just ignores why those tools exist. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 wasn’t passed for fun. It was passed because maps were being used to dilute minority voting power.
If you take race off the table in a system that isn’t actually neutral, you don’t eliminate the effect. You just get the same outcomes through partisan lines and call it something else.
Look, if you’d rather just make unfounded accusations and toss out insults, I’ll stop discussing this with you. Is that your goal?
Who is making unfounded accusations or insulting you? Where have I done so? Drop the personal stuff and discuss the issues at hand.
It's insane to me that you are literally proposing basing voting districts on skin color in an effort to 'avoid' racism. I know the left has driven that into your head for decades, but that's textbook racism, whether you can see it or not.
I totally understand if you're frustrated that not drawing districts based on skin color will hurt your team, but that doesn't mean it's right, regardless of the pretzel logic used to come to that conclusion...
And if you're so concerned with this issue, tell me what happens when a district drawn based on skin color means white people aren't represented, such as in places where the majority is black. I assume you'd be fine with gerrymandered districts in places like Detroit, Birmingham, or Memphis so that the minority white people are represented? Or do you think this reverse-uno racism only works in one direction?
MLKjr is probably rolling in his grave that this is even a thing in 2026.
I have. been having this discussion with my MAGA-loving younger brother.
I told him(similarly) that he is willing to justify/excuse just about anything as long as it fits the MAGA agenda.
His response was a litany of MAGA bull manure/manufactured outrage: Hillary's email server, birther b.s., Hunter Biden's laptop, the scary scary murdering rapist immigrants, transgender bathrooms.
I think it's pretty obvious that the people running this country at the moment are either dangerously mentally ill, or it's just a sideshow/circus meant to scare people into believing their abject and horrific b.s.
This is why I said the Democrats would regret the over-the-top gerrymandering in Virginia. I just didn’t know the nationwide impact could be so great.
Thanks for the data-backed quantification..
After Spanberger’s, “Nyah, Nyah…ya can’t touch meEee,” gloating, she’s looking like Wile E. Coyote after lighting a cigar. Virginia’s only 11 USHOR seats. But they started a fire that won’t go out, and they’re not going to like how this ends.
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When you combine that with the census in 2030 that is going to probably make the path harder for a Democrat to win the presidency it's not a good scene for anyone. The blue wall will most likely be gone in 2032. A Republican will be able to lose all three and still win the WH. The exodus from the Northeast, specifically NY, and MA coupled with IL and CA to more conservative states like TN, TX, FL, NC, and SC is going to be an electoral problem. SC is now the fastest growing state in the USA. This imbalance along with the crazy gerrymandering that is taking place all over won't be healthy for the country, but then again what is happening in our politics that is good for the country overall. If one side feels locked out it could end badly.
I fear all of this is going to push the parties further to the extremes instead of making them trend towards the middle which could happen with more competitive districts in the House. We are trending to the edges with our politicians and we need to trend to the middle. The left and the right both have some good ideas and we need them to balance each other out and we need more center right and center left people getting elected. We need less AOC's and Thomas Massie's.
don't you realize who the real victims of racism are?
Steve Bannon claims Southern states 'oppressed' by law that empowered Black voters
MAGA strategist Steve Bannon asserted that a law empowering Black voters had "oppressed" Southern states since the days of the Civil Rights movement.
No one (here) is suggesting such.
But literally creating race-based districts is 100% racist.
Well, if the Democrats were forward thinking they could leverage this to their advantage. It would unshackle them from the identity politics they championed to an utter losing platform over the last 40 years. Removing racism from the gerrymandering calculus allow them to move back to the middle on policy.
What other choice do they have considering the models they dont have a chance of winning the House or White House? Abandoning the identity politics frees them up to big tent their party on other issues while at the same time shackling Republicans with race based values and authoritarian policies that devalue household welfare across all races. Republicans will feel embolden to push even more aggressive agendas that hurt all Americans.
If you think about the 40-50 year parade of the Democrats after WWII pushing to their ultimate demise, the Republicans are in year 25 of their demising reign. And if you think about all the stuff that has transpired since 2000 at the hands of Republican leadership it is essentially progressing toward a path of the US as some techno-autocracy and not really even a country - more like a national corporation that exploits its inhabitants - a Hunger Games Society.
In 20 years Boomers will be an immaterial voting block and Xers and Millennials see the world and country in a much raceless lens. Zs will be sick of living in their parents basement.
The smartest thing we could do to save our country and its representative form of government would be to eliminate party affiliation in federal elections.
You know that I don't think all white people are racist. Or that all black people vote the same. On the other hand, maybe you think I'm an idiot. Whatever.
The idea that you refuse to see the difference between using race to exclude people and considering race to prevent exclusion is mystifying.
The issue is whether you can acknowledge reality in a system where race already shapes voting patterns. Ignoring that doesn’t make the system neutral. It just makes minority vote dilution easier to excuse.
Calling that “textbook racism” skips why the Voting Rights Act of 1965 exists in the first place. So either you do not understand why that law was necessary, or you find that protection inconvenient because it interferes with the outcome you prefer.
And “the left has driven that into your head” is laughable, as if anyone who dares to disagree is a brainwashed moron. I'd like to think that my sense of justice came from the learned desire to see all people treated fairly. I'll leave it to you to find the source of your own point of view.
Since the outcome you prefer means that your team will gain seats, I guess it all depends on perspective. I prefer that no one is excluded based on race. That means eliminating ALL gerrymandering. I think we agree on that. Until that happens, the voting rights of minorities must be protected.
This "gotcha question" is a joke, right? Are you honestly asserting that including blacks will exclude whites?
You have to have blinders on to not realize that race is a part of every Republican and Democratic decision when it comes to creating gerrymandered districts. There is no such thing as race neutral if partisan gerrymandering is allowed.
MLK was a strong and vocal supporter of the Voting Rights Act, so using him as a mascot for weakening voting rights protections is quite a choice. He’d probably be more dismayed by people dressing up exclusion as “fairness.”
*sigh*
So much typing to justify ‘we need racism to fight racism’…
SMH
So much typing to justify ‘we need racism to fight racism’…
SMH
Only white conservatives view fixing the injustices of the past as racism. You have to prop up minority groups to right the wrongs, but that hurt the feelings of a certain group. So, now we are wiping out a civil rights act to go back to the broken racist districts of the past, but it is being sold by conservatives as “stopping racism”.
Turning back the clock on civil rights is one of the goals of Project 2025. This is just another check mark in that gameplan as the MAGA cult stands and cheers.
Turning back the clock on civil rights is one of the goals of Project 2025. This is just another check mark in that gameplan as the MAGA cult stands and cheers.
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