Posted on June 13, 2026
As The Crow Lies
The segregation party is at it again
by
Daniel Clark
The Louisiana
v. Callais Supreme Court ruling, which struck down a judicially mandated case
of racial gerrymandering, is being described by Democrats as -- all together now
-- "Jim Crow 2.0." One would think that
they, being the party of the original Jim Crow, might be reluctant to even
bring up the subject, especially when they are the ones who are advocating
racially segregated voting districts.
The way it
was commonly reported was that the conservatives on the Court "gutted" the
Voting Rights Act. In fact, the majority
opinion, written by Samuel Alito, plainly states that Section 2 of the VRA did
not require the state of Louisiana to redraw its districts in a race-conscious
manner. In other words, the VRA and Louisiana
v. Callais do not conflict with each other in any way.
Section 2 subsection (a) guarantees
that there shall be no voting qualification or procedure that results in the abridgment
of the voting rights of any U.S. citizen on the basis of color. Subsection (b) states, among other things,
that an inability of members of a protected class to be elected in a state or
political subdivision may be considered as a factor when trying to establish a
violation of the VRA, "Provided, That nothing in this section establishes
a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their
proportion in the population."
It is just
such a right that District Court Judge Shelly Dick declared in 2022, when she
ordered Louisiana to create a second majority-black district, based on the fact
that there are six voting districts in the state, whose population is one-third
black. She presented this ruling as if
it had been compelled by the Voting Rights Act, when in fact that law
explicitly identifies this outcome as something it specifically does not require.
Nevertheless,
liberal organizations like the ACLU and the Brennan Center are complaining that
the Supreme Court has deprived black voters of their rights under the VRA. That characterization is inconsistent with
the historical origin of the practice of gerrymandering, which was named after
early 19th Century Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry, whose Democratic Republican Party manipulated
the state's electoral map by isolating Whig Party voters in a small number of
districts. If one were to liken that
effort to the creation of Louisiana's misshapen majority-black 6th District,
one would conclude that the intention must have been to minimize the voting
power of blacks throughout the rest of the state, and not to strengthen it in those
districts in which they were the majority.
Indeed, it is this district's blatant violation of standards of
compactness and contiguity that marks it as a product of discrimination, rather
than a cure.
No matter the motivation,
race-based districting discards the "one person, one vote" principle in favor
of a paradigm by which it is groups that have rights, and not individuals. Judge Dick said as much by assuming that members
of a group vote monolithically for other members of the same group. Absent from the discussion is any accusation
that the Supreme Court ruling denies any person the ability to vote, because it
obviously does no such thing. What Democrats
tell us is that black voters are being disenfranchised as a group in House
races, as long as they do not belong to majority-black districts. Extrapolated to statewide elections, this would
mean that race-based voter suppression was integral to the system.
Politicians
cannot change the shapes of states the way they can voting districts. If voting rights belong to groups instead of
individuals, then it follows that black Americans, who are not in the majority
in any state, are being shut out of gubernatorial and Senate elections, as well
as the allocation of electoral votes for president. According to this model, they cannot possibly
exercise their voting rights as long as they remain in the minority.
What the
Democrats are really saying is that they see black Americans as a permanent
demographic enclave, never to blend into the whole of the nation. Their group rights are inevitably being
denied, by the very nature of what it means to live in a representative republic. If carried out to its logical conclusion, the
Democrat approach would result in the creation of separate states, and
ultimately separate nations, based on race.
Those rhetorical entities called "Black America" and "White America" to
which liberals often refer would actually exist. Or, as Democrat Governor George Wallace of
Alabama said in his 1963 inaugural address, "segregation now, segregation
tomorrow, and segregation forever."
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