'Exactly What Happened in the Jim Crow Era'

The Virginia Supreme Court threw out an election where 3 million people voted. Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry suspended elections. Tennessee and Florida, have already passed new Republican-leaning congressional maps with many other states, like South Carolina, fighting to join them. We are not even two weeks post-Callais. Ari Berman, the national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, joins Tim to discuss the immediate fallout after the disastrous SCOTUS decision. Berman emphasizes how the Supreme Court has, over the past decade, whittled away at the Voting Rights Act and practically sanctioned gerrymandering. All signs point towards an unsteady, rigged election system come November. Ari Berman is Mother Jones‘ national voting rights correspondent. He’s the author of the new book Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It, as well as Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. The following transcript has been edited for formatting purposes. Tim Dickinson This is Tim Dickinson, senior editor here at The Contrarian, and our guest today is Ari Berman. He is the ace voting rights reporter at Mother Jones, as well as the author of Minority Rule, the Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People. Ari, how you doing? Ari Berman Hey, Tim, good to talk to you, thanks. Tim Dickinson These are bleak times in terms of our, democratic retrenchment here. I think people realize that something really big has happened at the Supreme Court, but can you, sort of, from a 30,000-foot view, help explain what Callais has done and set in motion over the last couple weeks? Ari Berman What the Callais decision did narrowly was strike down the creation of a second-majority Black district in Louisiana. What it did in the larger run was effectively kill the last remaining tool of the Voting Rights Act, because the Supreme Court has now weakened the Voting Rights Act on 3 different occasions. In 2013, in the Shelby County v. Holder decision, they ruled that states with a long history of discrimination no longer had to approve their voting changes with the federal government, so that was the first major blow against the Voting Rights Act. Then in 2021, they ruled that it was going to be much harder to challenge discriminatory voting laws under the Voting Rights Act. That was the second major blow. And then they basically ruled that majority-minority districts, those districts in which people of color can elect their candidates of choice, are no longer protected under the Voting Rights Act, and by extension, the 15th Amendment to the Constitution. And that’s what they ruled in Callais, and that, of course, has opened up this crazy bid to redraw maps in all of these southern states with alarming speed. to eliminate majority Black districts throughout the South. Tim Dickinson And so the basic idea is that you can gerrymander your heart’s content as long as you can sort of have it the color of this is partisanship rather than racial discrimination, is kind of the gist of it. Ari Berman Yeah, that’s basically the gist of it. I mean, the Supreme Court has been moving towards this position for a while now. I mean, first off, they ruled a few years ago that partisan gerrymandering couldn’t even be challenged in federal court. So that kind of took the gloves off before with gerrymandering writ large, because before, the court had basically said, gerrymandering is bad, but we don’t exactly know what to do about it. And then they basically said, gerrymandering is bad, but we’re not going to do anything about it. And now they’ve moved from gerrymandering is bad to basically legislatures can gerrymander whenever they want, as long as it’s for partisan reasons, and they’re basically saying, well, if they happen to target black voters in the South, it’s just because Black voters happen to vote Democrat, in which case there’s really no problem here. And the problem with that is that, well, A) Black voters are being targeted based on their race. But B) there’s really no way to, to unlink race and party, particularly in a region as racially polarized as the South. And then C) they are now very, very quickly dismantling districts that have existed for decades, and dismantling districts that provide really the only representation for Black voters in the South, who, of course, were the ones who were enslaved and disenfranchised and, you know, briefly had the right to vote during Reconstruction, then had that right taken away for nearly 100 years until the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. Tim Dickinson Well, so let’s move to Tennessee, which is, like, the sort of clearest example of where this is happening. You had a district over Memphis, or surrounding Memphis, that had been there. I understand for about a century that they’ve now, and it was a Black Opportunity District, And now they’ve cracked that into 3 different districts and separated those voters among states, among districts that sort of snake into disparate and distant parts of Tennessee. Can you walk us through what happened there? Ari Berman That’s right. Memphis has actually had its own congressional district since 1923. Obviously, it hasn’t always been represented by someone who Black voters could vote for, because for many years, Black voters were disenfranchised in Tennessee. But for the last 30 years, maybe, 30, 40 years. That district was one in which Black voters could elect their preferred candidate. It just so happens that they had elected a white Democrat to the Congress in Steve Cohen, but it is a majority Black district, and they just dismantled it into three parts. They made it stretch 200 miles all the way to rural Tennessee. That was the kind of thing that the Voting Rights Act was very clear you couldn’t do, previously, and then just the speed in which they did it was really remarkable. I mean, you had a district that has existed for decades, and basically in three days, they completely dismantled it, and did so in very overt ways. I mean, there was one legislator who walked into the chamber wearing a Trump flag. he was later told to take it off. There was a lot of racially charged rhetoric. Black members of the legislature were told not to speak. There were huge protests, and so this is really indicative of the climate that we’re facing, where, you know. Tennessee now has a all-Republican delegation. It’s a 9-0 Republican map. So they no longer have any Democrats, they no longer have any districts in which Black people can elect their candidates of choice. I mean, so this is one-party rule. I mean, this is exactly what happened in the Jim Crow era. There were no districts in which people of color could elect their preferred candidates. One party, at that point. that time it was the Southern Democrats just ruled the entire… all the South, and now you’re going back to those days again, where it’s Southern Republicans that are basically saying, we’re entitled to every single seat in the South, and the law’s not gonna stop us. In fact, the Supreme Court is encouraging us to do this. Tim Dickinson Right, and we should specify that it’s not just black voters, but it’s also brown voters, as we’re seeing in Florida, where they, I think, move quickest of all to implement new maps. Can you talk us through a little bit about what’s happened in Florida and what Ron DeSantis put through? Ari Berman Yeah, they passed a map that would give Republicans four new districts. This was supposed to be in response to what Virginia did, but of course the Virginia map is now longer in effect, so basically, it doesn’t equal out at all. Republicans are four seats ahead, just in Florida. There’s some question about whether they are four seats ahead. I think some seats are thought of as to be somewhat competitive there. They also targeted Democratic members, but also rejiggered minority communities to make these districts more white. The contrast between Florida and…