It’s a grim day. Tune in for today’s BradCast for the full story. I’ll keep it brief here. [Audio to today’s show follows this summary.]
In short, after telling America, when SCOTUS gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, in 2013’s Shelby County v. Alabama, that there was no concern, because Section 2 was still intact to protect against racial discrimination in elections, the corrupted Rightwing Supreme Court majority on Wednesday issued its 6 to 3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais [PDF] gutting Section 2.
After barring federal lawsuits against partisan gerrymandering in 2019’s Rucho v. Common Cause, the Court has now made it all but impossible to block blatant racial gerrymandering meant to prevent minority voters from being able to elect representatives of their choosing.
In gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in today’s Callais decision, the activist Republicans packed on to the U.S. Supreme Court and legislating from the bench, have again undermined the 15th Amendment, enacted in 1870 in the wake of the Civil War. The text of the VRA itself explains that it was literally adopted “to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States.”
That simple two-sentence Amendment bars the denial or abridgment of the right to vote by the federal or state government “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude” in its first sentence. It is followed by the second which reads in full [emphasis added], “The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
Not the Supreme Court, but the Congress.
That “appropriate legislation,” finally adopted nearly one hundred years later, was the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. It was overwhelmingly reauthorized by the Congress four times since its initial passage.
And yet, today, writing for the Republican majority, corrupt activist Justice Sam Alito declared a U.S. House district in Louisiana, drawn to meet the mandates of the VRA by allowing a second majority-minority district in a state where a third of the population is Black, to be “unconstitutional”. Presumably, all other such Districts in the other 49 states are now similarly “unconstitutional” with the wave of the unaccountable Alito’s pen. The result, at a minimum, is likely to be about a dozen majority-minority U.S. House Districts redrawn out of existence in GOP-controlled states. Millions of American disenfranchised.
As UCLA election law expert Rick Hasen characterizes the Callais opinion today: “The Supreme Court’s Conservatives Just Issued the Worst Ruling in a Century.”
We’re joined today by DAN VICUÑA, National Director of Redistricting and Representation at the nonprofit good-government watchdog Common Cause (as in 2019’s Common Cause v. Rucho), to break down what today’s ruling means in the short term for the critical 2026 midterms, longer term for 2028 and beyond, and how today’s horrific decision will affect state and local legislatures and even town councils for years to come.
“This really strikes a big blow against fairness in redistricting, against the opportunity of people to have a voice in their government — particularly people of color,” Vicuña tells me. “The court has done an incredible job basically eliminating the most effective protections that we have against an autocracy, against the authoritarian approach to government that Donald Trump and his allies seek.”
“I think you will see states that have one or two districts that are majority Black, majority Latino, those will be dismantled,” he explains. “They’ll be like pizza slices, possibly. They’ll carve up those districts and extend them out to whiter, more Republican, more rural areas, depending on the geography of the state, and ensure that that community that’s compact — and under the previous law would have been put together so that they could have a voice in Congress and the state legislature — will be sliced up.”
Tune in for more, including what now needs to be done about it.
HOWEVER… There are also a few not as grim things playing out today as well, which we cover as a much-needed salve in the back half of today’s maddening show, including…
- Former FBI Director James Comey‘s response to his new, ridiculous, doomed-to-fail “86 47” witch-hunt indictment by Trump’s pathetic, weaponized DOJ.
- A U.S. appeals court has declined to hear Trump’s appeal to the $83 million defamation verdict won against him by E. Jean Carrol, after a separate court jury determined he had sexually assaulted her. He then went on to lie about it and her.
- Trump approval rating is still falling, now with just 22% of Americans approving of his performance on the cost of living…
