What’s interesting is that the Voting Rights Act has been used to gerrymander states to elect more GOP members.
The way you gerrymander is by creating one area that overwhelmingly goes for one party, and a bunch of other areas that very slightly go the other way. It’s often hard to come up with a legal pretext to do that (back when that sort of thing mattered). The voting rights act said that not only was it legal to create districts that would give black voters a majority, it was necessary. How do you do that? You group all the black voters together into one district, thereby creating a strong democratic-voting district. What side effect does that have? It creates a bunch of other districts that are not democratic-leaning so the overall state goes Republican.
If other laws still mattered, Republicans might have been fighting to save the VRA because it was their best tool to legally gerrymander in their favour. But, with the modern “laws don’t matter lol” supreme court, it’s different.
What’s interesting is that the Voting Rights Act has been used to gerrymander states to elect more GOP members.
The way you gerrymander is by creating one area that overwhelmingly goes for one party, and a bunch of other areas that very slightly go the other way. It’s often hard to come up with a legal pretext to do that (back when that sort of thing mattered). The voting rights act said that not only was it legal to create districts that would give black voters a majority, it was necessary. How do you do that? You group all the black voters together into one district, thereby creating a strong democratic-voting district. What side effect does that have? It creates a bunch of other districts that are not democratic-leaning so the overall state goes Republican.
If other laws still mattered, Republicans might have been fighting to save the VRA because it was their best tool to legally gerrymander in their favour. But, with the modern “laws don’t matter lol” supreme court, it’s different.