Black Democrats on Capitol Hill are up in arms over the GOP effort to purge Congress of minority districts, accusing Republicans of silencing Black voters and, in the process, undermining decades of civil rights advancements.
Many are framing the debate in existential terms, warning that the Republicans’ redistricting campaign, spurred by President Trump, combined with the Supreme Court’s recent decision to claw back provisions in the Voting Rights Act (VRA) — which has sparked another wave of partisan map-drawing across the South — will turn the clock back to the era of sanctioned discrimination and racial segregation that plagued the country under Jim Crow.
“What they have done in eviscerating the Voting Rights Act is to put us back in a position where Jim Crow can be the rule of the day for Black people,” Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) said.
“We are now, legally, in a posture where Black communities are not able to enforce a right to elect the representatives of their choice,” he continued. “And that is undemocratic, it’s racist, it’s wrong.”
The remarks reflect the outpouring of anger and anxiety that’s followed the Republicans’ redistricting push, particularly within the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), which is expected to lose at least a handful of members to the new maps.
Republicans maintain they’re just trying to even the playing field by eliminating race as a factor in redistricting. But Democrats say there’s a more nefarious strategy at play: suppressing the Black vote.
“It has nothing to do with party, it’s about race,” charged Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.). “Republicans are acting irrational by kicking Black folk out of Congress.”
At the urging of Trump, GOP-controlled states around the country were already moving this cycle to redraw their House maps ahead of November’s midterms — a rare, mid-decade redistricting push designed to pad the Republicans’ slim majority in a tough election cycle.
The Supreme Court threw gas on that effort late last month in the case of Louisiana v. Callais, ruling that Louisiana had violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause when it considered race to carve out a second Black-majority district following the 2020 Census.
Writing for the 6-3 majority, Justice Samuel Alito said there was no evidence that the old Louisiana map discriminated against Black voters — a condition that would have justified the new map under the VRA — and therefore the new majority-Black district was “an unconstitutional gerrymander.”
“In sum, because the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create an additional majority-minority district, no compelling interest justified the State’s use of race in creating [the new map],” Alito wrote.
Alito also suggested that Black participation at the polls has reached levels to suggest the country has evolved far enough, since 1965, that the anti-discriminatory goals of the VRA have been met.
“Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South,” Alito wrote.
Black Democrats are furious with those conclusions. They agree with former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who had warned during a similar debate in 2013 that gutting the VRA protections by citing Black progress at the polls “is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
