Forget Congress: How the Supreme Court ruling could gut Black political representation at state, local level
By Adam Ganucheau | Originally published by Mississippi Today
Somewhere in Jackson this week, Republican strategists and their attorneys are tinkering with maps.
They’ve had them on their desks for years. State Supreme Court and judicial maps that favor Republicans, a party led almost entirely by white officials. State legislative maps that hand Republicans even more seats by redrawing districts currently represented by Black lawmakers because of federal orders. Key city council, county boards of supervisors and school district maps that most directly affect daily life across our communities.
These strategists have been waiting for permission to pull these maps and move them through the Legislature or local governments. On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court gave it to them.
The ruling in Louisiana v. Callais will be debated in courts by lawyers and protested in the streets by activists for years to come. National headlines this week focus on what this ruling will mean for congressional representation — no doubt, a major and legitimate factor, given ongoing efforts to stack Washington’s numbers in major parties’ favor.
But the decision’s local effects for Black voters across Mississippi demand just as much attention. The federal law that long forced white-led, Southern state legislatures to draw legislative and judicial maps giving Black citizens genuine representation — the law that put many Black leaders in statehouses, on city councils and school boards across the Deep South — has been effectively stripped of its enforcement power
Southern states like Mississippi that spent decades fighting to discourage and dismantle Black political power now have what they always wanted: a wide open door. And things could turn bleak quickly.
Special session slated in response to Callais
In Mississippi, the consequences of this decision will begin to make themselves clear imminently.
Gov. Tate Reeves, a few days before the Callais decision dropped, announced a special session of the Mississippi Legislature to redraw state Supreme Court maps ahead of key elections. That special session will happen May 20, and the Legislature will undoubtedly easily pass districts that favor white, Republican voters.
Other prognosticators believe redrawing legislative districts is a next appropriate step. Last year, the federal courts, leaning exclusively on the provision of the Voting Rights Act that just got watered down by the U.S. Supreme Court, forced state lawmakers to redraw state legislative districts to create some that didn’t dilute Black voter strength and hold midterm, special elections. Two Black senators were elected then, ending Republicans’ supermajority control of the upper chamber. In addition, one Black House member was elected as a result of the special election that was ordered by the federal judiciary based on the Votings Right Act. It’s unclear when Republicans will claw back those seats, but it’s coming based on the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
And yes, some powerful Republicans think lawmakers should go farther than that. State Auditor Shad White, a leading candidate for governor next year, has already urged his colleagues in plain terms what he wants to do with this ruling. He wants to erase Rep. Bennie Thompson’s district — the 2nd Congressional District, a majority-Black district that exists only because federal courts spent decades forcing Mississippi to draw it. White’s ambitions are not a secret, and they are not fringe. They reflect what Mississippi Republicans have wanted for generations.
If all these efforts succeed, up to 700,000 Black Mississippians could lose their voice in the halls of state and local governments and on the state bench. This would not happen because they stopped participating in the democratic process or because they lost an election. It would be because the maps were redrawn to dilute the influence of their votes.
Supreme Court ruling will be felt on local level
Beyond just the district maps, there is a quieter potential damage from this Supreme Court ruling. It won’t be as obvious as a legislative special session or new elections for judges.
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has for decades served as the primary legal backstop for local fights that rarely made major national news. A bustling suburban Mississippi county whose Black population is growing quickly that drew all five of its supervisor districts to favor white Republicans. A majority-Black Mississippi town that stacked its city council to favor white residents. A Delta city council that wanted to return to at-large elections, which Black candidates had always lost, instead of the single-member districts that finally gave Black residents a voice and a seat.
These white-led efforts to grasp as much political power as possible have persisted even still today, and similar court battles challenging those efforts are certainly now poised to increase in prevalence without the key provision of the Voting Rights Act intact. Only now, those fights will be much tougher for Black Southerners to win.
The people who will feel these things most acutely are not the ones whose names appear on ballots. They are the parents at the school board meeting, the residents trying to get a pothole fixed on their street, the workers who need a sympathetic ear in the statehouse. Representation is not abstract. It determines who gets hired, which neighborhoods get paved, whose kids get resources, and whose complaints get taken seriously in the halls of power.
Civil rights lawyers are already regrouping. Organizers are already on the phone. In Mississippi, the people who have spent their careers fighting for Black political power inside a system designed to resist it are not surprised by what happened this week. They have been preparing for it.
But preparation is not protection, especially when the nation’s highest court rules against your causes, and organizing cannot fully substitute for a federal law with teeth.
For more than 60 years, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was the only answer to a specific question: What stops a state from rebuilding, legally and methodically, the political structures of the Jim Crow era? This week, the U.S. Supreme Court made that question a great deal harder to answer.
In Mississippi, the politicians who want to redraw the maps already know what they want to do. The only questions now are how fast they move and whether anyone can stop them.
This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Source: Original Article
