Open Thread | About Tennessee Gerrymandering

Posted on May 15, 2026 by rikyrah

Eric Holder
@EricHolder
My statement on Tennessee’s immoral gerrymander:

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Posted in Black Voter Suppression, Black Voters, Democracy, Gerrymandering, GOP, Open Thread, Politics | Tagged , , , | 28 Comments

Open Thread | Nothing But Truth, Mr. Sellers

Posted on May 14, 2026 by rikyrah

Spitting nothing but truth:

MCBN
@MCBNNEWSS
Sellers: “We are going to be the first generation to actually leave this country worse than the one that we inherited.
Bakari: And I think for black millennials, uh the the the progress that our parents and grandparents gave us, that we’re watching being ripped away from us is something that our generation is going to have to really wrestle with and and figuring out how we get out of this conundrum.

If somebody fell asleep in 1896 and woke up today in 2026, they would simply say the only difference is now Negroes have a TV show and we wear nice suits.

They they swapped out clan hoods for Brooks Brothers suits. And and that is the problem.

I mean, Plessy v. Ferguson was 7-1 and it gave birth to 50 years of Jim Crow.

What we have with this court right now, what we’re seeing is is watching people who have fought and died and bled so that we would have access to the ballot box, so that we would have access to our voices being heard in Congress, being ripped away.

And and I think that there is a casual laughter from people we believe to be our friends on the right who are showing us true colors today because the most sacred or one of the most sacred acts you have in the United States of America is the ability to cast a ballot and elect someone and send them to Congress, the state house or mayoral seat that represents your interest and now black folks throughout the South are being silenced.

https://x.com/i/status/2054025111011783074

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Posted in Black Voter Suppression, Black Voters, Elections, Gerrymandering, GOP, Open Thread, Politics, Supreme Court | Tagged , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Open Thread | Worst Court Since Taney Made Decision Based Upon Fraudulent Data

Posted on May 12, 2026 by rikyrah

Samuel Alito Cited Fudged Data in His Ruling Gutting Voting Rights Act
Alito cited data provided by the Department of Justice that used faulty methodology.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito relied on misleading data to support his ruling decimating the Voting Rights Act, The Guardian reported Friday.

In the court’s majority opinion, Alito claimed that the kind of racial discrimination that had prompted the creation of the Voting Rights Act no longer existed.

“Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than white voters in two of the five most recent Presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana,” Alito wrote.

He was citing a friend-of-the-court brief submitted by the Department of Justice, which relied on a statistical methodology that is not preferred by experts in determining statewide voter turnout. The brief calculated Black and white voter turnout in Louisiana as a proportion of the total population of each racial group over the age of 18. This is generally considered a suboptimal method because it includes people who can’t vote, including noncitizens and people with felony convictions.

Experts typically prefer to consider voter turnout as a proportion of the citizen voting age population, or the eligible population. Using this methodology, The Guardian determined that Black voter turnout in Louisiana only exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 presidential election.

Using the DOJ’s data, Alito also elided the fact that the racial voter gap is actually widening. In the three most recent presidential elections since Barack Obama was on the ballot, Black voter turnout has trailed white voter turnout, according to The Guardian’s analysis. In Louisiana, the disparity grew wider between 2016, 2020, and 2024.

Kevin Morris, a researcher at the Brennan Center for Justice, said that Alito’s claim is “simply not factual,” and that the turnout gap had “exploded” over the last three years.

Michael McDonald, a leading expert on voter turnout who teaches at the University of Florida, told The Guardian that relying on this “misleading” methodology was purposeful. “If I wanted to manipulate the numbers in a way that was favorable to the government’s interest, I would be using voting age population,” McDonald said.

“They had to fudge how they’re calculating the turnout rate to get there, and they’re not even taking into account margin of error, and all these other methodology issues about the current population survey to arrive at that number,” he said. “Someone knew what they were doing.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has opened the door for redistricting efforts across the country, as Republicans rush to redraw Democrat-led districts, many of which have majority-Black populations.

BOTTOM LINE:

Mike Young
@micyoung75
The racial turnout gap has exploded over 15 years. Shelby County directly increased it. The Court suppressed Black turnout, then cited the lower turnout to justify ending VRA protection. The data used to dismantle the VRA was shaped by the prior dismantling of the VRA.
10:46 AM · May 8, 2026
https://x.com/micyoung75/status/2052777175015665948?s=20

Mike Young
@micyoung75
The VRA ruling in Louisiana v. Callais landed. Within hours, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, and Tennessee were moving to eliminate their substantially Black congressional districts. The plans were pre-built. They were waiting for legal clearance.

The Waldman piece contains a specific detail about the military base renames that deserves more than a footnote. Congress passed a law prohibiting military facilities from being named after Confederate leaders. The DoD’s response was to search through millions of service records to find individuals who happened to share surnames with the traitors – Bragg, Hill, Pickett, Lee – then formally declare the bases were named after those other Americans all along. Waldman says the administration delivered this explanation with “a sneer and a giggle.”

A government-maintained fiction, entered into official records, presented as policy. Not a workaround. A stated lie.
Roberts’s work on dismantling the VRA started not last week but during his years as a young Reagan administration lawyer in the 1980s. Louisiana v. Callais is the completion of a four-decade project. The Court’s conservative supermajority was built specifically to deliver it.

The Albert Pike statue – Confederate general, central figure in the early Ku Klux Klan – was torn down by activists in 2020. The Trump administration reinstalled it last year.
https://x.com/micyoung75/status/2053565991309721602?s=20

Emoluments Clause
@Emolclause
#BREAKING: Melissa Murray: “…Republicans…are given a MAJOR ASSIST from this court which, as Marc [Elias] says, has thrown away its past protocols and has basically eliminated that 32-day delay that typically accompanies a ruling, and has allowed this to go into effect RIGHT AWAY…Justice Jackson had very sharp words for her colleagues who put this into place…Justice Alito…called her…critiques baseless and insulting. They are not baseless and they are not insulting. This is a court that has basically thrown out the rule book in order to allow the Republican Party to consolidate its advantage across the South and to effectively disenfranchise voters as Louisiana is doing. 42,000 votes were already cast in that primary election and now Governor Landry is trying to stop everything, call a new election.”🤦‍♀️
https://x.com/Emolclause/status/2053435769952346319?s=20

Aaron Rupar
@atrupar
“Looking back now, it’s clear that the desire to undo the Civil Rights Era — and even restore the Confederacy to a place of honor — never disappeared. It was sometimes set to the side and reshaped, but they kept the fire burning with unwavering attention.”
https://x.com/atrupar/status/2052503418711744600?s=20

Chris Towler
@blkprofcct
Just another reminder that the states we see rolling back voting rights today & eliminating Black representation NEVER wanted Black people to have rights to begin with: they were FORCED to do so by federal law. Now that they’re not anymore…it’s right back to their racist ways.
https://x.com/blkprofcct/status/2053497950555570319?s=20

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Posted in Black Voter Suppression, Black Voters, Open Thread, Politics, Supreme Court, Voter Suppression, Voting Rights, Voting Rights Act | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 23 Comments

Open Thread | From Democracy Docket

Posted on May 11, 2026 by rikyrah

Thought that we would check in with Democracy Docket, considering that they work for voters rights all over the country.

Democracy Docket
@DemocracyDocket
🧵 (1/5)

🗺️ REDISTRICTING UPDATE

This is where the redistricting battle stands after SCOTUS ruled this week in Callais v. Louisiana to gut the Voting Rights Act, and effectively invalidate a key tool used to fight racially discriminatory maps.

Here’s where state efforts currently stand👇

Democracy Docket
@DemocracyDocket
(2/5)

🔴 WHERE CAN THE GOP GERRYMANDER?

LA and AL have already spurred into action.

Other GOP-led states like TN and GA are considering following suit.

Democracy Docket
@DemocracyDocket
(3/5)

🔵 HOW ARE DEMOCRATS FIGHTING BACK?

Meanwhile, Democratic leaders in states like NY, CO and IL have said they are exploring avenues for a mid-decade redistricting effort aimed at countering potential Republican gains from the SCOTUS ruling.

Democracy Docket
@DemocracyDocket
(4/5)

🪑HOW ARE SEATS NETTING OUT?

Republicans: +7 seats across FL, TX, MO, NC and OH due to gerrymandering.

This number could change drastically as both 🔴 and 🔵 states consider mid-decade redistricting efforts in the near future.
12:33 PM · May 1, 2026

Democracy Docket
@DemocracyDocket
(5/5)

The battle intensifies by the day in a post-Callais world.

It’s now more critical than ever to stay up to date on how YOUR vote could be impacted in 2026 and 2028.

That’s where our LIVE redistricting tracker comes in — share this resource with your circle to get the latest developments👇
https://x.com/DemocracyDocket/status/2050267476311589235?s=20

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Posted in Black Voter Suppression, Black Voters, Open Thread, Politics, Supreme Court | Tagged , , , , , | 37 Comments

Weekend Open Thread

Posted on May 9, 2026 by rikyrah

Good Morning.
I hope that you are enjoying this weekend with family and friends.

How we survived should be studied😂😂😂

Posted in Weekend Open Thread | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Open Thread | Democrats Must Do What They Have To Do In This Gerrymandering Battle

Posted on May 8, 2026 by rikyrah

From Democracy Docket:

Democrats must gerrymander to save democracy
By Marc Elias
May 2, 2026

This was an awful week.

For years, we have been watching a slow chipping away of voting rights in our country. This is not only because of a conservative Supreme Court. It is part of a well-funded plan by Republicans to change voting rules to ensure they can win and hold power even as they grow more unpopular.

Extreme gerrymandering and mid-cycle redistricting were not Trump’s first tactic to rig the midterms, and it won’t be his last. It is, however, likely to set off a cascade of more extreme measures.

That is because redistricting is, in nearly every respect, a zero-sum game. When you remove a guardrail, the consequences are immediate and trigger others. A state can change a voting law that disproportionately affects one party or the other. But with redistricting, the effects are immediate and run entirely in one party’s favor.

The only way to stop it is through effective deterrence or reform.

Last July, shortly after Donald Trump first pressured Texas to redraw its congressional map to add five more Republican seats, I advocated for the former. Democrats, I argued publicly, should respond by gerrymandering 15 to 20 seats in states they controlled. I later increased that number to 30.

Republicans made clear they would not be deterred by Democrats simply matching them seat for seat. The only way to stop them was to make clear that Democrats will go further than they will — and mean it.

In recent months, Democrats have done exactly that. The decision to redraw the Virginia map to flip four seats from red to blue was a game changer. For the first time, it put Republicans in the position of playing catch-up. As Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries put it, “we are in an era of maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”

It has been working. Pundits started writing that Democrats might benefit from the back and forth. A handful of Republicans began discussing a national ban on gerrymandering.

Then, on Wednesday, came the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais. In an instant, everything changed.

One of my favorite sayings about politics is borrowed from economist Rüdiger Dornbusch: “Things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.”

We are clearly now in the “faster than you thought” phase. The race to gerrymander is accelerating at a dizzying pace.

Just in the last few days, more than a half-dozen states have indicated an intention to redraw their congressional lines to disempower minority voters in order to gain Republican seats. This number is sure to grow.

I have already announced that my law firm will sue any state that tries to use this decision to trample on the legal or constitutional rights of its citizens. Indeed, we have already filed lawsuits and new legal briefs in existing cases to do just that.

But here is the truth: while we will do everything possible to stave this off for 2026, that will become increasingly difficult for 2028 and 2030. By the time states are required to redraw maps after the 2030 census, I fear the entire redistricting process will be near collapse.
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Posted in 2026 Elections, Black Voter Suppression, Black Voters, Gerrymandering, Open Thread, Politics | Tagged , , , , | 17 Comments

Open Thread | I Can’t Leave What This Decision Will Mean for Black Voters In The South

Posted on May 6, 2026 by rikyrah

50% of Black voters in the United States live in the South.
50%

Roughly 25 million people.
And, this decision, by the Worst Court Since Taney, would leave them, possibly, without any Representation in Congress.

Mother Jones
@MotherJones
“We could see the largest drop in Black representation since the end of Reconstruction. We could lose a third of the Congressional Black Caucus.”
https://x.com/MotherJones/status/2050606264258879555?s=20

Mike Young
@micyoung75
A third of the Congressional Black Caucus.

That is Ari Berman’s projection of the potential cost of the Callais ruling – and Berman has covered VRA litigation longer than most people in this conversation. His expectation: every southern state redraws its districts. The Alito ruling makes the legal path to do it without triggering a Section 2 challenge dramatically clearer.

The historical parallel Pema Levy draws is specific. From 1865 to 1965, redistricting was one of the primary tools used to eliminate Black political power without mentioning race explicitly. Section 2 was the federal answer to that century of race-neutral disenfranchisement. Callais reopened the toolbox.

The CBC currently has 58 members. A third is roughly 19 seats. Those are real people, real districts, real constituents who elected them. If Berman’s projection holds, Black voters in the South will have less congressional representation after the 2026 midterms than they had before the maps ordered under earlier VRA enforcement were drawn.

That is what this ruling costs. Attach a number to it.
https://x.com/micyoung75/status/2051021726541050363?s=20

This is why this decision can’t be anything but personal to Black people in the South.

Posted in Black Voter Suppression, Black Voters, Open Thread, Politics, Voting Rights, Voting Rights Act | Tagged , , , , , , , | 33 Comments

Open Thread | Still On the Worst Court Since TANEY

Posted on May 4, 2026 by rikyrah

Mavis Amundson
‪@mavisja.bsky.social‬

Follow
Will Bunch, gift post Inquirer
SCOTUS gutting 1965 Voting Rights Act is a wake-up call from a dream share.inquirer.com/WNSbDz

Will Bunch, gift post InquirerSCOTUS gutting 1965 Voting Rights Act is a wake-up call from a dream share.inquirer.com/WNSbDz

— Mavis Amundson (@mavisja.bsky.social) 2026-04-30T20:21:00.900Z

Will Bunch, at the Philadelphia Inquirer:

… The great Joan Didion’s most famous observation was that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. I can’t understate how central the 1965 Voting Rights Act has been to the story that my generation of boomers told ourselves about believing in the American dream.

The narrative that took someone like John Lewis out from under those police batons in Selma and into the corridors of Congress, and that peaked with Barack Obama’s once unthinkable election as America’s first Black president in 2008, seemed proof positive of another famous MLK maxim: that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

Late Wednesday morning, the U.S. Supreme Court — with three of its six-member conservative majority appointed by a racist president who routinely calls Black and brown members of Congress “low IQ” — grabbed that moral arc and twisted so hard that it broke.

Its 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais — destined to join Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Korematsu v. United States in the SCOTUS hall of shame — struck down a Louisiana congressional map that created a new Black-voter majority district. The majority opinion by conservative firebrand Samuel Alito tried to argue that they were saving the 1965 VRA by destroying it, that political maps like the ones that currently have 23 Black House members from the former Confederacy are essentially racist — because they discriminate against white people…

Legal scholars will no doubt study and debate for many years to come how the nation’s highest court came to view the legislative high point of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement as meaning the exact opposite of what Lyndon B. Johnson and that era’s lawmakers thought they were enacting. But the political and psychic fallout is already here.

Across the Deep South, news of the ruling was like a starter’s gun for a race to the bottom among GOP-dominated state legislatures to redraw majority-Black congressional districts into oblivion before the November midterm election…

The practical fallout is bad, and so is the damage to America’s psyche. The Voting Rights Act felt to our generation like an unbreakable granite monument to progress, tied to real gains for Black people and other racial or ethnic minorities, not only on Capitol Hill but everywhere from office cubicles to TV sitcoms. As recently as 2006, a GOP-led Senate reauthorized the VRA by a 98-0 vote, then signed by George W. Bush. The endless cycle of slavery and freedom, Jim Crow and civil rights, had finally been broken, and we weren’t going back.

Until we did…

It seems now that the faux granite of the Voting Rights Act wasn’t as durable as the white supremacy embedded in the red clay under Sumter County and so much of the rest of America. Every action toward a more diverse and more democratic nation — especially Obama’s election in 2008 — triggered an equal and opposite reaction.

Dreams can be beautiful, but they aren’t reality. Even though the alarm was set years ago, Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling was still a piercing wake-up call for anyone who wants the United States to ever fulfill its promise of democracy. If the Voting Rights Act didn’t save America, we need even more revolutionary action this time around.

If a corrupt and broken Supreme Court insists on playing partisan politics, then we need partisan politicians to bring them to heel. Expand the court to 13 justices, impose term limits, and investigate and impeach any justices who broke the laws about gifts or anything else.

Radical steps? You bet, but the alternative is allowing a kangaroo court to finish the job of dismantling the American Experiment, of turning a dream that became a lie into something worse. We can’t bend the arc of the moral universe until we grab it back from the people who stole it.

Jamison Foser
‪@jamisonfoser.bsky.social‬
John Lewis had John Roberts’ number from the jump: takebackthecourt.substack.com/p/john-lewis…

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Posted in Black Voter Suppression, Black Voters, Open Thread, Politics, Supreme Court, Voter Suppression, Voting Rights, Voting Rights Act | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 14 Comments

Weekend Open Thread

Posted on May 2, 2026 by rikyrah

Good morning.

Hope that you are enjoying this weekend with family and friends.

Posted in Weekend Open Thread | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Open Thread | More on SCOTUS VRA Ruling

Posted on May 1, 2026 by rikyrah

From The Establishment Bar:
Some thoughts on the SCOTUS VRA ruling
Posted by Liberal Librarian
April 30, 2026

Yesterday, our vaunted Supreme Court of these very United States gutted the Voting Rights Act even more. It seems to be a fondness that the six “conservative” justices have to dismantle this country’s greatest achievement in civil rights.

The usual suspects—the ones who have all the smoke for the Democratic Party but none for the party actually committing the malfeasance—are wailing and gnashing their teeth, declaring this is the end of the VRA and of democracy as we know it. These people would not have survived the civil rights marches, or the Second World War, or the Great Depression. I do agree with the man-children on the right: we’ve become coddled, used to instant gratification, unwilling to put in the work required to maintain democracy. (The irony, of course, is that those rightists are even more coddled and living in privilege.) People echo John Lewis about getting into “good trouble,” but absolutely do not comprehend the sacrifices that would entail.

But I wish to return to the idea that this ruling is the “end of democracy.” First, it isn’t. But more importantly: What democracy?

I would argue that until 1965, this country was, at best, a partial democracy. Yes, there were elections. Yes, power alternated between Democrats and Republicans. But can you call a country “democratic” if in an entire region an entire population was unable to vote? Can you call a country a “democracy,” as I would guess many of us define it, if large segments of those living in the country were second-class citizens? Can you call a country a “democracy” if for a large portion of its history it enslaved a captive population, and committed genocide against its native inhabitants?

Of course you can. And that is what was so epochal about the Voting Rights Act. For the first time in law, it was stated that, ideally, this was not a republic for white people only. That all citizens had the most fundamental right of citizenship: the franchise. That it could not be withheld by law or custom. It was a watershed moment in American history.

Before 1965, America was a partial democracy. It was a democracy which subjugated people at home and abroad. It was a democracy which placed 120,000 of its citizens of Japanese descent into concentration camps. It was a democracy in which its Supreme Court declared segregation legal. The idea that we have had two hundred and fifty years of wondrous democracy is simply farcical. Even most white men weren’t able to vote until the Jackson reforms of the 1820s because they were not property owners.

But look at this history. It is a history of slow, aching progress. It is a history of the expansion of what it means to be an American. It is a history of people struggling for, and many times dying for, rights which should have been theirs from birth. It is a history of people who would not give up, who would not accept “no” as an answer.

…………………………………………
The democracy we’ve taken for granted has existed for only sixty years. Do we meekly succumb, twirl a forelock, and bow to our betters? My parents didn’t flee to this country to be anyone’s serf, or for their sons to serve anyone. It’s time for white people to realize that they are as much being pushed into serfdom as anyone. And by that point it won’t matter what your pretensions about being superior to “those people” are. You’ll be right there with them.

The Voting Rights Act wasn’t “Black history.” It was a monumental achievement of American history. Its ghettoization has allowed this ruling. But rights which can be taken from some can be taken from all. The majority of this nation needs to grok this, and the sooner the better.

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Posted in Civil Rights, Current Events, Democracy, Open Thread, Politics, Supreme Court, Voter Suppression, Voting Rights, Voting Rights Act | Tagged , , , , , , , | 30 Comments