Once again on today’s BradCast, we step through the latest corruption-in-plain-sight by Trump/Republicans working to undermine democracy itself to rig this year’s critical midterm elections in their favor. [Audio to full show follows this summary.]
On Friday, the right-leaning Supreme Court in Virginia gave a big boost to Republicans with the unprecedented rejection of the will of the voters in last month’s statewide Special Election ballot referendum for a new, temporary U.S. House map favorable to Democrats.
On today’s show we connect the dots from the explosion of Black elected officials following the enactment of the 14th and 15th Amendments after the Civil War; to the U.S. Supreme Court, in the 1870s, allowing the introduction of Jim Crow laws that suppressed the Black vote and election of Black officials for nearly 100 years; to the emergence of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965; to the reintroduction of new Jim Crow laws and both partisan and racial gerrymandering of U.S. House maps redrawn under this corrupted, activist U.S. Supreme Court. This has all been done in the middle of the 2026 primary election cycle by GOP legislative fiat in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee and South Carolina (so far). The activist and hypocritical SCOTUS has allowed those newly gerrymandered maps to be redrawn for partisan advantage after voting had already begun in several of those states.
With the horrible ruling a week and a half ago in Louisiana v. Callais, the activists on the rightwing SCOTUS majority not only gutted what was left of the Voting Rights Act in order to allow majority-minority voting districts to be erased into history, they’ve allowed it to happen in states where thousands have already cast their votes this year. That, by the same radical Republican Court majority that repeatedly blocked new, often court-ordered maps, enacted months before an election — if they might benefit Democratic voters — on the basis (known as the Purcell Principle) that doing so would lead to chaos and confusion for voters and election officials.
Now, all bets are off and SCOTUS has given the okay to any and all GOP states to toss out voting results and redraw their maps right now — while elections are already underway and voters are voting for candidates on the previous maps.
Meanwhile, in one of the two states where Democrats took action to try and push back by placing a new map before the voters in response to the Trump/GOP Gerrymanders, a 4 to 3 right-leaning Virginia Supreme Court on Friday invalidated the results of last month’s Special Election for a temporary new U.S. House map that would likely have flipped four seats from “red” to “blue” this November.
The will of the voters was nixed over little more than a supposed procedural issue. That issue? Last October, state lawmakers took the first of two separate votes in two separate legislative sessions to place the new map on the ballot before voters in a special election. But, the Court claims [PDF], they did it too close to last year’s 2025 off-year elections when the entire House of Delegates was up for reelection. (Apparently, voters were so “angry” at the Democrats who did it, that they voted to flip 14 seats from “red” to “blue” in the state legislature and replaced their Republican Governor with a Democrat!)
And, last month, voters again gave their approval for the new map in the referendum which has now been tossed by the Commonwealth’s Supreme Court.
It’s all both more corrupt and more ridiculous than it sounds in this quick summary. Tune in for the full story, and the latest related breaking new just before airtime, as the U.S. Supremes gave their blessing to Alabama Republicans to ignore a federal Court order to not redraw their map again until after 2030, and as Virginia Democrats appeal their case to the same corrupted U.S. Supreme Court in hopes of overturning their state High Court’s ruling from last Friday.
Got all of that? And, oh yeah, what are we gonna do about it all? Tune in…
