The Supreme Court’s recent gutting of the Voting Rights Act is adding fuel to a redistricting war in Congress.
Willie Simon stood outside the Memphis motel where Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, now a museum dedicated to the Civil Rights Movement.
Days after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, Simon feared what the decision would mean not just for Black Americans like himself but an entire country where the political guardrails seem to be coming apart.
Simon, who leads the Shelby County Democratic Party in Tennessee, said the court’s conservative majority set a precedent that if you’re “not in the in-crowd group, they can just erase us.”
By weakening a requirement that states draw congressional districts in a way that gives minorities an opportunity to control their own fate, the court escalated the nationwide redistricting war that has seen Democrats and Republicans casting aside decades of tradition in hopes of gaining an edge over the competition. New sessions are scheduled to begin this week in two Republican-controlled states to eliminate U.S. House districts represented by Democrats, and there’s more on the horizon.
It’s the latest example of how the American democratic experiment has been pushed to the breaking point in the decade since Donald Trump rose to power. Extreme rhetoric has become commonplace. There’s been a spike in political violence and a rash of assassinations. Five years after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Trump’s allies are trying to harness the same falsehoods about voter fraud to reshape elections.
The rules and norms that once helped smooth over an unruly country’s vast differences have given way to a race for power at all costs.
“I’ve never subscribed to the idea we’re in a civil war, but the gerrymandering wars and the recent decision from the Supreme Court do not make the United States more united,” said Matt Dallek, a political scientist at George Washington University. “It speeds up the hyperpartisan force and atmosphere that people feel on both sides.”
