This excellent article about THE WORST COURT SINCE TANEY is from Mother Jones.
Whites Only
The disaster the justices have unleashed has its roots in one of the darkest periods of our history.
Ari Berman and Pema Levy
September/October 2026 Issue
On May 8, hundreds of civil rights protesters, carrying signs that said, “No Jim Crow Maps” and “Hands Off Our Vote,” descended on Baton Rouge to oppose a plan by Louisiana’s Republican-controlled legislature to dismantle one or both of the state’s majority-Black congressional districts. They packed a Senate hearing, occupied three overflow rooms, and spilled into the Capitol’s halls.
Just 10 days earlier, the Supreme Court had destroyed the Voting Rights Act in its Louisiana v. Callais decision, triggering a mad rush to eliminate majority-Black districts across Southern states. The next day, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, despite 42,000 already-cast ballots, suspended Louisiana’s House primaries to give his party time to push through a new map reducing Black representation in Congress before the 2026 midterms.
Democratic Rep. Cleo Fields was on the front lines of this fight. It was his district, stretching 200 miles from Baton Rouge to Shreveport, that Callais had set the stage for invalidating, with Justice Samuel Alito calling it “an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”
The Supreme Court’s decision decimating Section 2 of the VRA—which had required that racial minorities have an equal opportunity to meaningfully participate in elections—threatens to return the country to a pre-1965 America, when white supremacy was the law of the land and Congress contained no Black members from the South. “This has sent us back, in my view, over 60 years,” Fields says.
When he appeared before the state Senate that day to testify against the new redistricting plans, he was joined by three other veteran Black politicians. Although Fields, a 63-year-old lawyer, has a reputation as an even-keeled consensus builder, he grew emotional as he spoke.
“To me, it is personal,” he told the Senate committee. “Since Reconstruction, Louisiana has elected four African Americans to Congress. And you’re looking at all of them. Four.” Even though nearly a third of Louisiana’s population is Black.
“You said something very profound,” state Sen. Gary Carter Jr., an African American Democrat from New Orleans, told Fields. “From the 1870s all the way through [the] present, just you four gentlemen—that’s it. And now this body wants to reduce that. ‘We want to cut it. That’s too many.’ How do we not be outraged?”
