Redistricting to Eliminate Blacks & Browns? – Oh No! – or to Eliminate Democrats? – Yes Please!

 

Redistricting to Eliminate Blacks & Browns? – Oh No! – or to Eliminate Democrats? – Yes Please!

Let’s start with the fact that those who rely mainly on social media, AI searches and/or the correct-thinking opinion of biased politicians are, you should pardon the expression, “losing their minds.” Quite literally. As Brian Chen, citing a University of Pennsylvania study supervised by Professor Shiri Melumad over how these variables impact the quality of perception (vs those who did some research on their own), explains some of these results in the November 6th New York Times:

“The tech industry tells us that chatbots and new A.I. search tools will supercharge the way we learn and thrive, and that anyone who ignores the technology risks being left behind. But Dr. Melumad’s experiment, like other academic studies published so far on A.I.’s effects on the brain, found that people who rely heavily on chatbots and A.I. search tools for tasks like writing essays and research are generally performing worse than people who don’t use them…. I’m pretty frightened, to be frank,’ Dr. Melumad said. ‘I’m worried about younger folks not knowing how to conduct a traditional Google search.’”

The “outsourcing opinions” habit does seem to rot brains. We are increasingly giving up our independence to pre-programmed “correct thought,” redefining even our most basic vocabulary so that simple, purportedly objective words are either created (“woke”) or given an entirely new meaning not found in any dictionary (“socialism”). To give voters the option to accept or reject these toxic trends requires undistorted facts and full and fair elections. In today’s world, we have neither… and today, our three branches of government (legislative, executive and judicial, federal and most red states), combined with their big money “donors,” are working overtime to make sure that does not change.

With completely unjustified tax cuts for the mega-rich at stake, necessarily funded by illegal revenue generators that pass the costs on to everyone else (e.g., a massive, global tariff scheme that functions exactly like a regressive sales tax) and deep cuts to “social programs” that benefit those Americans who need those the most, Republicans, touting horribly unpopular Trump-economics, must ensure that elections be redesigned to exclude Democratic votes. After a lower federal court found that the recent Trump incented (“Find me more Republican seats” Texas Governor Abbott) Texas Trump-puppet gerrymander – one that cancelled 5 traditionally-Democratic House districts to reconfigure the Texas map (see above) to add 5 new, almost certainly Republican seats – was a direct and obvious effort to push Black and Latino voters out of representation.

In 2013, the Supreme Court vitiated most of the specific provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (as amended) in Shelby vs Holder, pretty much leaving the racial discrimination provisions of Section 2 of that statute intact… until the Court’s 2021 decision in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (DNC), which severely limited how vote-depriving racial discrimination needed to be determined. And the Trump administration, arguing that protecting Black and Brown voters’ election rights was a form of illegal affirmative action, continues to press for the de factor repeal of that Section 2.

The case now before the Supreme Court – League of United Latin American Citizens vs Abbott, where the mid-term redistricting map was found by Texas lower federal courts to be objectively racially and intentionally racially motivated – is currently under a stay issued by Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito… temporally reinstating the discriminatory map. We know that California voters approved a rejiggering of its congressional districts to do a

reverse-Texas creation of 5 new Democratic districts to offset Abbott’s efforts. This too is before the federal judiciary.

The case could leave the biased Texas redistricting intact based on the so-called Purcell Rule (from the 2006 Supreme Court case of Purcell vs. Gonzalez), which has been applied, despite a lack of explanation from the Court, to stand for the proposition that decisions impacting an election can’t be issued too soon before an election. This unwillingness to rule, even in outrageous cases, defies the very relevance of the Court itself. But there are additional troublesome elements.

Writing for the November 25th Los Angeles Times, David Savage adds: ““The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics,’ wrote U.S. District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown in the opening of a 160-page opinion. ‘To be sure, politics played a role‘ but “substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map.’… He said the strongest evidence came from Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump administration’s top civil rights lawyer at the Justice Department. She had sent Abbott a letter on July 7 threatening legal action if the state did not dismantle four ‘coalition districts.’

“This term, which was unfamiliar to many, referred to districts where no racial or ethnic group had a majority. In one Houston district that was targeted, 45% of the eligible voters were Black and 25% were Latino. In a nearby district, 38% of voters were Black and 30% were Latino…. She said the Trump administration views these as ‘unconstitutional racial gerrymanders,’ citing a recent ruling by the conservative 5th Circuit Court.”

Given the difficulty of showing racial intent, an issue begging for clarification before a rightwing Supreme Court, Governor Greg Abbott is probably smiling in smug arrogance. Texas Republicans claim the redistricting effort was motivated by partisan politics, a practice which the Supreme Court has said cannot be reviewed in federal court. Despite ample proof to the contrary (starting with Trump’s call to Governor Abbott), Alito seems to be sticking to his “We start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” as he expressed in a 6-3 majority in a 2024 South Carolina case. Continuing this stay reinforces the right to gerrymander… if you use the correct wording.

Notwithstanding recent setbacks to Trump’s agenda, even given his growing disapproval levels in virtually every poll, the MAGA base does not seem to be paying much attention to this case, even though a GOP-rigged midterm almost certainly means continuing rising consumer prices and an increase in healthcare insurance costs, and to many MAGA voters, exclusion from access to genuine medical care or SNAP benefits. If you wonder why, please reread the opening three paragraphs of this blog.

I’m Peter Dekom and rising trends seem to accelerate the acceptance by a growing number of Americans of whatever distortions and manipulations have been built into our media… even if it costs them dearly.