After the Supreme Court’s Louisiana vs. Callais decision struck down the state’s racially gerrymandered congressional map and thus “undermined” the Voting Rights Act, the high court recently granted Alabama permission to use a map that eliminated one of two majority-minority districts. This after an Alabama district court initially defied Callais to reject the map.
NPR election correspondent Hansi Lo Wang (who identities as "he/him" in his official bio) sounded bereft in Friday’s online article “Voting rights ruling leaves limited alternative protections,” which came complete with another artifact of wokism that won’t die, capitalizing “Black” (but not “white”) when referring to people:
Minority voters are left with limited alternatives for combatting racial discrimination in redistricting, after the U.S. Supreme Court's latest undermining of the federal Voting Rights Act.
Remaining options for protecting the collective power of racial-minority voters include state-level voting rights acts and map-drawing strategies, likely in Democratic-controlled states, yet they cannot fully replace the nationwide provisions under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act that many legal experts say are now practically impossible to enforce.
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"Today the bulk of Black people live in the states of the old Confederacy. And that is exactly where you're seeing the worst types of retrenchment," says Wilfred Codrington III, professor of constitutional law at Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law.
Still, some voting rights advocates are pushing forward with what they see as short-term solutions ahead of a longer-term project of rebuilding the federal Voting Rights Act or even the overall system for electing members of Congress.
Wang's reporting is out of date in other senses as well: He has a long history at NPR of seeing the bad old days of U.S. racism reemerging.
Wang quoted liberal professors but didn’t label them as such, while twice finding a “conservative” Supreme Court and also a “conservative” legal foundation, and strategized with Democrats in the upcoming election cycles.
Sometimes partisan gerrymandering is acceptable to NPR, as when heavily Democratic states do it.:
The example to follow, [Harvard Law election law professor Nick] Stephanopoulos says, is California's new congressional map, which Democrats drew to flip five Republican-held seats without eliminating any minority-opportunity districts. The Trump administration argued that the map is "tainted by an unconstitutional racial gerrymander," but the Supreme Court ultimately allowed California to use it.
That redistricting strategy, however, would not address the court's weakening of protections for minority voters in Republican-controlled Southern states.
Reporters love describing liberal policies as "protections" for their favored groups. Another liberal trial balloon was launched:
Some election reformers are also calling for structural changes in Congress — specifically how voters elect House members. Supporters of replacing the current single-member, winner-take-all districts with a proportional representation system say that the change could help ensure fairer representation of people of color and other minority voters….
In Wang’s world, ending racially gerrymandered districts is equivalent to ending democracy, while helping partisan Democrats is equivalent to preserving democracy:
"States are in this unique position to do some things," Codrington says. "But we need a federal government to be involved and invested in this problem if we're going to have any sort of wide promotion of democracy across the United States."
He was equally doleful discussing the Supreme Court’s Callais decision on the May 9 edition of NPR’s race-based, frankly sexist podcast “Code Switch”: “How the Supreme Court gutted Black voting power.” After fretting that the Supreme Court had made “it much, much harder to challenge voting maps with claims that they discriminate against voters of color,” he showed he had zero understanding of or sympathy for conservative philosophy (par for the course at NPR):
Wang: ….there have been opponents of the Voting Rights Act who believe in this conservative ideology that racial differences should not be acknowledged in society. That essentially ignoring race will help solve the problem of racism. And that way of thinking really undermines what has been the premise of the Voting Rights Act and other civil rights laws….
