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Det amerikanske demokratiet er DØD. Det er seks personer som hadde drepte det, anført av John Glover Roberts Jr. som vil huskes som en av de meste ondskapsfulle og falske dommerne i verdenshistorien. Roberts nekte å erkjenne at det er han som destabilisere det amerikanske samfunnet mer enn noe annet. Unionen vil dø når folk ikke lenge kan stemme fritt, for det virker som man er tilbake til "det britiske stemmerettssystemet" fra 1700-tallet hvor representantene velge sine velgerne fremfor omvendt. Som er 100 % uamerikansk ettersom koloniamerikanske stemmerett skilt seg ut med valgfrihet for velgerne - som lagt grunnlaget for det amerikanske stemmerettsbegrepet som ble bygd inn i konstitusjonen. Why Democrats stand no chance in the gerrymandering wars Last week, the Supreme Court issued one of its most damaging decisions in decades, essentially ending the protections of the Voting Rights Act, in Louisiana v. Callais. The decision means that Republican state legislators in the South will now be able to eliminate districts drawn to grant Black citizens some form of representation in Congress and replace them with districts dominated by white voters, dismantling one of the great achievements of the Civil Rights era. The court has blessed this move so long as these state legislators call their racial gerrymanders “partisan” instead. Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee have already begun plans to redraw maps to eliminate majority-Black voting districts. Nationally, Republicans stand to gain large numbers of new seats by 2028 and beyond, when states are expected to kick the redistricting wars into high gear while wiping out minority representation in Congress. But what about the Democrats? Memes have gone around social media showing blue states like California gerrymandering every one of their districts to oust every single Republican in response to Callais. This may be the fantasy of some Democrats, but the truth is, it’s far easier to draw one of these maps than to actually implement it, given the collateral damage Democrats would have to inflict on their own minority voters. Ultimately, the Callais decision is only going to amp up the redistricting wars that were already begun by President Donald Trump, who kicked things off last year by demanding that Republican-controlled states find ways to blunt the blue wave expected in the 2026 midterms, starting with Texas. Another core issue the mass redistricting movement ignores is the deep loss that American voters will suffer, particularly voters of color. Minority groups tend to vote Democrat, particularly Black voters, who have proved time and time again how integral they are for Democrats’ electoral success. But as the Democratic Party tries to keep up with Republicans’ partisan redistricting efforts, it may very well have to dilute majority-minority districts in order to expand and secure more congressional seats. When asked about this dilemma, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries demurred, insisting that Democrats will “ensure that communities of color will continue to have the chance to elect the candidate of their choice in districts that have traditionally been covered by the Voting Rights Act” but by, “at the same time, doing what is necessary, as occurred in California, to decisively respond to efforts by Republicans to gerrymander congressional maps.” No matter what path Democrats take, something’s gotta give. In order to make sense of the stakes involved in Republicans’ and Democrats’ redistricting push, I spoke with Pamela Karlan, law professor at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. Karlan previously served under the Obama administration’s Justice Department and, back in 1991, argued Chisom v. Roemer before the Supreme Court, a case that successfully argued that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act also applies to judicial elections. Here’s our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity. Shirin Ali: What do you see as the immediate consequences of the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision? Pamela Karlan: We moved from a world in which the voters pick their representatives to one in which the representatives are now picking the voters. It’s a kind of an endless-war, race-to-the-bottom type of world, in which each move produces some kind of countermove. We’re obviously getting very far away from the idea that elections should be designed to be fair. The Supreme Court, in Callais, in the space of 40 years, has moved from the view that political gerrymandering is unconstitutional to the view that it’s unconstitutional but we can’t do anything about it, to the idea that naked political gerrymandering is somehow a legitimate government interest that overrides interests in ensuring that all voters have an equal opportunity to elect candidates. We’re talking about many layers of elections. There are city council elections, county commission elections, state legislative elections, congressional elections, senatorial elections, gubernatorial elections, and presidential elections. Right now, what we’re talking about is gerrymandering at the congressional level, but what the Supreme Court has opened up is that you might see the same kind of gerrymandering with regard to state legislative races, city council races, school board elections, and the like. If what you do is create a system in which minority voters are unable to elect candidates who represent their interests, that is likely to depress minority turnout, which will have, obviously, spillover effects on other elections. Can you elaborate on that point? What are the risks to Republicans’ and Democrats’ mad dash to redistrict? Voters who feel that they have no chance of electing candidates of their choice are less likely to turn out to vote, and that will have effects not just in the district where they don’t have a chance to elect, but for statewide offices for presidential elections and the like. Obviously, voters don’t turn out because they feel that they’ve been gerrymandered out of having any chance of winning. It tends to depress political participation. The idea that you can elect the candidates of your choice is what motivates most people to go to the polls. It’s easy to talk about the immediate effects of the Callais decision, which is that it unleashes yet another round of partisan mid-decade redistricting. This effort, for congressional races specifically, asymmetrically benefits Republicans. The states controlled by Republicans where there are majority-minority districts have no internal constraint on how much they can screw over Black voters, because Black voters are not voting for that party. There are some places in which there might be some constraint on exactly how much they can eliminate majority-Latino districts, both because of demographics and because some of the Latino districts elect Republicans, but there’s virtually no constraint on how much they can screw over Democrats, right? Meanwhile, there are not a lot of majority-minority districts in states controlled by Democrats where the politics of that state make it feasible for the Democratic Party, if it’s in control of the redistricting process, to eliminate those districts. Those voters are part of the Democratic coalition, and you don’t screw over members of your own coalition, right? What do you think this means for the future of opportunity districts in places like New York and California, which are both heavily Democratic? California has already passed a partisan redistricting measure, and New York is considering one, while others like Illinois and Colorado could also jump in. Well, at the margins, they might be able to get a district here or there by reducing the concentration somewhat of minority voters in existing districts. But that may be very hard to achieve politically, because the politics of the state are not going to look favorably on that, and the Democrats in those states depend on Black and Latino voters in statewide races. They can’t just eliminate those districts or spread minority voters across a bunch of other districts to elect Democrats. For instance, you already have a total Democratic gerrymander in Maryland, so there’s really not much more you can do there. And then the next most heavily Black district in a blue state is only 52 or 53 percent Black. You could theoretically reduce the number of Black voters, but I’m not sure that the Democrats have as much running room as the Republicans do. The Republicans can go after every majority-Black district in states they control, but the Democrats cannot do that because they face a different political reality than the Republicans do. Republicans in places like Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Texas can go after majority-Black districts, but the Democrats cannot really do that, because in a lot of Democratic states there are also state voting rights acts that would prevent them from doing that, or state constitutional provisions that would prevent them from doing that. Ten years ago, Democrats were pushing a very different redistricting strategy, one that advocated for independent commissions to establish unbiased congressional maps. Today, they are scrambling to undo that work in favor of partisan maps. What do you think that says about the party? Here’s the thing, before the Supreme Court’s decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, and really now its decision in Callais, there was this implied limit on just how far you could gerrymander, because everybody understood that if you went too far, the Supreme Court might, might actually put some teeth into the equal protection clause or into the First Amendment that would restrict gerrymandering. There was at least a little bit of deterrence. And in that world, moving to independent redistricting commissions was not so much of a form of unilateral disarmament as it now looks in retrospect. Because in a world in which there’s some constraint on political gerrymandering, it’s not unreasonable for folks to think, Well, let’s really put some teeth into that constraint in our state. But in a world where the Supreme Court is saying: You want to screw over the other party? That’s totally legitimate, not just, You can do it because we can’t stop you, but it’s perfectly fine, it’s important for people to understand that really, Callais does two things: guts the Voting Rights Act and blesses political gerrymandering. Louisiana v. Callais is an inflection point in American politics, something that will undoubtedly change how elections are done in the United States for the foreseeable future. Is there any damage control that can be done? Well, this Congress isn’t going to do anything in response to this decision. You first have to get a new Congress and a different president, and you have to have a sufficient political movement behind the idea that elections should be not about one political party screwing over its opponents but about allowing the voters to decide who’s going to represent them. In the short term, there’s nothing that Congress can do. It could theoretically pass a law that forbids political gerrymandering in congressional elections, using its time, place, and manner power, but the question of whether this Supreme Court would say that that’s legitimate or not, who knows? In 2003, the then–Supreme Court, all nine justices agreed that there was a problem with political gerrymandering; they just disagreed about whether courts should fix it. The assumption, then, was Congress would fix this, or the state legislatures would fix this, or initiatives in the states that have direct democracy would fix this. Now the court is saying that this is an affirmatively permissible thing. That’s a huge change. I mean, no court, no Supreme Court, had ever before held that naked partisan gerrymandering was permissible and that it overrides the idea that Black and Latino voters should have the same opportunity as white voters to elect candidates of their choice. Until you build a political movement around that, voters can’t indicate they dislike this at the polls in most of the states that are going to engage in this naked partisan redistricting. It’s not as if voters can go to the voting booth and show that they disapprove of this. Voters have to first build a political movement around this that makes elected officials afraid to do this. We’re in a kind of race to the bottom and a land grab, and it’s deeply offensive to almost every notion of modern American democracy. Det amerikanske folket MÅ FOR FAEN innser at de vil ikke lenge være i stand til å utøve sine politiske rettighetene de hadde tradisjoner for helt siden 1600-tallet! De burde gå ut på gatene. Fordømme Roberts og hans kumpanene. Går i protester mot de rasistiske republikanerne. Hele verden burde slutte med å bli redd for Trump, og heller går sterkt ut for å sette amerikanerne i sterk forlegenhet - så sterk, at amerikanerne må våkne og innse at de er i ferd med å bli fratatt sine grunnleggende rettigheter for hender på et parti som vil kansellere de amerikanske fellesidealene til fordel for et rasehegemoni i autokratisk ånd! Det som Roberts hadde gjort, kan ikke forsvares på ingen som helst måte. Verken konstitusjon, lovverk eller tradisjon kan unnskylde dette overgrepet som er enda verre enn å gi presidenten absolutt immunitet som har gjort Trump til den meste korrupte og kontroversielle presidenten i USAs historie, som en dag kan raskt bli USAs meste upopulære noensinne - eller den siste presidenten av Unionen. Når USA plasseres på listen over land med demokratisk styre, vil jeg vedde på deres status som "demokratisk stat" vil forsvinne til fordel for "partiautokratisk presidentisme" - som aktuelt finnes som politisk statusbegrep på mange land, hvor parti og president samarbeidet i et autokratiskmanipulert likesomdemokrati. (Putins Russland er "autokratisk presidentisme" eller godt norsk "sivildiktatur") På norsk ment det ettpartidiktatur. Hvis amerikanerne tenker mer på økonomi og kultur, fortjene de ikke frihet og rettigheter.

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