It took just a week for the SCOTUS conservative majority's claim that the Voting Rights Act was no longer needed to be proven wrong.
Tennessee Republicans' gerrymander to procure the final of the state's nine Congressional seats for their party by carving up Memphis winkingly claims merely to be nakedly political, and so SCOTUS-approved. Of course a third of the electorate voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, and Tennessee has had a Democratic governor since 2019... but that's no reason why a gerrymandered state legislature can't engineer a 100% Republican delegation to Washington, surely? That's just politics!
Except it's not. Such transparently anti-democratic theft of votes is pure White Supremacy. The Republicans elected in gerrymandered districts don't bat an eyelid at silencing the Democrats in their state, because they've been raised to believe that not all citizens' votes should matter, even as they claim representation based on census counts including those they disenfranchise. The template for this theft of others' voice is slavery and its Jim Crow successors, where not only the voice but the labor and freedom of African Americans were systematically stolen.
Did the SCOTUS majority consider that their green-lighting of "merely political" vote-rigging might entrench White minority rule? Or do they, too, think that it wouldn't really be minority rule, since those robbed of their votes should know their place as second-class citizens in a White "Christian" America? Democracy for some is not democracy.
