DEFEND VOTING RIGHTS

“I think the clearest political outcome of today's decision is that these redistricting wars that started in the middle of the decade, you know, which is very rare, are gonna spiral into 2028, and they're gonna expand. Already, Democrats in New York and Colorado have begun to explore the process of redrawing their maps ahead of 2028. And today, governor Hochul indicated, I'm gonna continue on that.”

“We've spent most of this conversation talking about how this could impact Congress. But, today's ruling could impact state legislative lines and county lines. This ruling also creates an opportunity for state lawmakers to redraw their own districts, or local city and municipal districts to try and gain a partisan edge. It's still about power, but in doing so, they would be decimating some of these black majority districts. And, those local races are important because it creates a pipeline of lower elected officials, lower black elected officials, getting an opportunity to eventually climb the political ladder and eventually end up in Congress.”

“So the Trump administration put together Supreme Court, three Supreme Court justices, all of them super MAGA. They did it for things like this decision that came down this week. Conservative six three just gutted the Voting Rights Act. What they said was you no longer need to have majority minority seats, and that was all Louisiana needed to redraw the map. They already had voting. Louisiana is already voting in primary elections. And what did Jeff Landry do? He called a state of emergency. The emergency is fixing the primaries so that Republicans can pick some seats up so that maybe they don't lose the house. They are going to suspend the primary process even though they're already voting.”

“So the court says the Voting Rights Act only kicks in if lawmakers had intended to discriminate against minority voters. Whatever the effect of, whatever the results of the map are, only intentional racial discrimination, which is very hard to prove what was in the lawmakers' heads counts.”

“But let's look at Tennessee to start. There, Republicans have been loud today, including senator Marsha Blackburn, who's also running for governor, in calling for the state to dismantle its remaining Democratic district ahead of the midterm elections. So this district in the Southwestern part of the state is the lone Democratic district in Tennessee. It encompasses Memphis and is a majority minority district with roughly 60% of a black voting age population, and a major black population city like Memphis in there. So if Republicans were to take a ruthless gerrymander to that city, they'd be splitting apart these black voters into a number of other Republican districts.”

“So as it relates to the nuclear question, you know, the the codes are always with the president. And so there are a bunch of people who several people do the job at a time so they can get rest and things like that. But you're there with the president all of the time, and and that job is a big job. So when you carry the nuclear football, you are in charge of emergency response for the president. And so it's kind of everything from, say, an assassination attempt all the way to nuclear war. And then you are the point person for all the assets at the White House, which are like Air Force One and the helicopters and the drivers and Camp David and the food guys. It's a very big job. There's a lot of people there. So you are coordinating with that group of people with the Secret Service and the White House staff to make sure the president can do their job every day.”

“Look. I'm glad you brought Michigan because especially for a liberal audience. It's a little bit nuanced. Let me unpack it very quickly. Yes. Some Muslim Americans did defect to Trump in big numbers in some of these parts, including prominent figures who got jobs out of it. And then some of them believed the bullshit that Trump would be anti war. And by the way, the anti war lane was left empty by Kamala Harris who decided to campaign with Liz Cheney warmonger. So when Trump said, Liz Cheney's gonna send your kids to die in The Middle East or gonna kill your families in Lebanon, they believed him.”

“Justice Elena Kagan in dissent on behalf of herself and the two other Democratic appointees, justices Sotomayor and Jackson, has a completely different view. She wrote that the Voting Rights Act was, quote, born of the literal blood of union soldiers and civil rights marchers. It ushered in awe inspiring change, bringing this nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality, and it has been repeatedly and overwhelmingly reauthorized by the people's representatives in congress. Only they have the right to say it is no longer needed, not the members of this court.”

“And then on the politicization piece of the military, you know, I've been really impressed with the military, resisting being politicized. I do think Hegseth and Trump are trying to do that when they called all the general officers and flag officers back to Virginia to talk to him, I think the military did a good job of being fairly stoic. They didn't say a lot. They didn't nod. They didn't smile. They didn't clap. You know? They listened to what the president said, but they stayed apolitical, and it's good to see that even amongst calls and desires to politicize the military.”

“The one thing the right is very good at. They're not very good at governing. They're not very good at telling the truth, but they're very good at message discipline. And so once the line goes out, they all say and, obviously, we've now seen revelations from, Elon Musk's ex girlfriend, mother of his child, now switching away from the she's been revealing about what happens in some of these WhatsApp groups and mess, you know, chat group chats where they all have the talking points go out, the ballroom talking point goes out. So I think it's really interesting to look and see at how they've managed to persuade the American public. You look at the polling now. Americans are actually more concerned about left wing violence than right wing violence despite the opposite being the case for the last ten years, which again is testimony to the power of the media machine because we don't talk about all the right wing violence that is still happening, nor do we talk about the fact that every single empirical study, every single academic study, every single government study shows that right wing political violence is the biggest threat in this country, much bigger than left wing violence going back five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, thirty years, forty years.”

“The Supreme Court did further and, in a sense, final damage to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, probably the greatest legislative achievement of the civil rights movement, which was meant to protect minority voting power. So it's meant to stop southern officials from using all kinds of methods from violence to poll taxes, to literacy tests, to grandfather clauses, to keep individual black voters from the voting booth. But it also meant to ensure that minority voters as a group had the collective power or at least the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.”

“And that's in Florida. Now, earlier this week, Governor Ron DeSantis introduced a new map, and it's in a very aggressive gerrymander. It would eliminate four of the eight Democratic districts currently in the state. Now, in justifying drawing new maps, governor DeSantis had pointed to this looming decision before the court as a reason that the state needed to redraw its maps ahead of the midterms.”

“Famously, justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2013 responding to this same kind of argument said, that may be so, but you don't throw away your umbrella just because you're not getting wet. And her suggestion was that it was because the Voting Rights Act was still in place that these gains could be sustained.”