MAGA Supreme Court Okays G.O.P. Overthrow of American Democracy

Disenfranchising 40% of a state’s citizens cannot be reconciled with representative democracy

Mitchell Zimmerman

The Supreme Court gave a “two-fer” to white supremacists and proponents of Republican autocracy: First, six right-wing justices completed the erasure of the crowning achievement of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, the Voting Rights Act. Second, in the same case, Louisiana v. Callais, the right-winger judges approved of states shaping legislative districts that deny the opposing party any role in government.

In essence, the Supreme Court okayed the destruction of Congress as an instrument of American democracy.

The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution was enacted and ratified five years after the Civil War. The Amendment confirmed – in principle – that African-American citizens have the right to vote and to have their votes count.

So said the Constitution. But for almost a century the former Confederate states negated African-Americans’ right to vote.

The Voting Rights Act put an end to the myriad legal schemes Southern white politicians had used to disenfranchise Black Americans

The Fifteenth Amendment also gave Congress the power to enforce its mandate. After years of struggle over civil rights – after peaceful demonstrators in Birmingham confronted snarling police dogs, mass arrests and lethal bombing, after hundreds of nonviolent students worked for freedom in Mississippi in the face of murder, assaults and the burning of Black churches, after peaceful marchers for voting rights returned to Selma after being clubbed by state troopers and ridden down by racist possemen – Congress tackled the white supremacist obstacles to African-American voting.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 put an end to the myriad legal schemes that Southern white politicians had used to disenfranchise Black Americans and terminated the ploys used to deny African-Americans a fair opportunity to elect representatives of their choice.

The outcome: Even as the segregationist white South moved to the Republican Party, African-Americans gained substantial voting power and Black legislators were elected to Congress, state legislatures and local government offices in meaningful numbers. The promise of the Fifteenth Amendment, that all groups are entitled to a meaningful voting opportunity in a multiracial democracy, was mightily advanced.

But white supremacists and MAGA Republicans never accepted the new reality, so their right-wing agents on the Supreme Court finally throttled the Voting Rights Act for them. When the conservative justices threw out a congressional map that upheld Black voters’ right to have their votes count, they unleashed a new wave of state gerrymandering laws, enacted with extraordinary speed, and designed to make African-American voting futile.

To make things worse, the Court justified its decision by affirming the power of states to deny meaningful representation to opposing party voters through gerrymandering.

As the right-wing justices explained, carving Congressional districts for the purpose of denying representation to Black people may be forbidden (and good luck proving intent to discriminate, when Republican legislators don’t say so out loud). But doing precisely the same thing is fine when the stated purpose is denying representation to an opposing party’s voters.

Get that? The right-wingers of the United States Supreme Court say that judges must stand by and look, powerless to take action, if a state dominated by Republicans decides to manipulate congressional district maps to weaken or destroy the voting power of Democrats.

In practice it amounts to the same thing. The G.O.P. can achieve its desired result by calling their gerrymandering by another name. Racial gerrymandering, not okay. Partisan gerrymandering (which just happens to negate Black voting power), just fine.

The G.O.P.’s ultimate goal is the same either way: a Congress under MAGA Republican control regardless of voters. A nation in which African-American political influence is crushed.

What does this look like?

After the Supreme Court’s Callais decision, Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature promptly redrew its congressional maps. They sliced up the one district held by a Black Democrat, with the intended outcome that all nine of Tennessee’s representatives will be Republican.

One third of Tennessee citizens voted for Democrats in 2024. This year that one third of the population – including the Black voters of Memphis – are to have zero representation in Congress.

South Carolina has begun the same process and anticipates a similar result. Republicans now hold six of seven House seats, and intend to eliminate the one Democrat.

Forty percent of South Carolinians voted Democratic in 2024, and will have zero representation in Congress following redistricting. The one quarter of South Carolina’s population that are Black will have no district in which their political voice will be heard.

Trump has pressed for a similar outcomes wherever Republicans control state government. In bright red Indiana (but 38% Democratic), Trump seeks to zero out Democratic representation in Congress.

G.O.P. redistricting is only marginally less extreme elsewhere. In Missouri, for example, 38% of “Show me” state voters are blue, and their representation will be reduced from two to one of the state’s eight congressional seats (12%).

We have separate district elections for Congress so that the range of local communities, with their different racial and ethnic populations, different beliefs, interests and occupations can have a fair opportunity for representatives of their choosing. Disenfranchisement by gerrymandering thwarts that purpose.

Even more disturbing, Trump’s gerrymandering offensive seeks to flout majority rule by creating a voter-proof Republican Congress.

American voters are increasingly seeing through the failures and the fakery of Donald Trump’s presidency, the broken promises, the corruption, the incompetence, the cruelty. And voters see the price they are paying for Trump’s senseless grandiosity, from inflation to health care costs to measles, war and climate change.

But through it all, congressional Republicans have remained Trump’s loyal, submissive toadies.

Voters will certainly make Republicans pay the price this fall. But Trump – with a big assist from MAGA Justices Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett – hopes to keep his hold on Congress, voters be damned. If a solid majority of voters cannot shake a would-be totalitarian’s hold on power, what will be left of our constitutional democracy?

Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller Mississippi Reckoning. He's also a longtime contributor to Progressive Charlestown. His writing can also be found on his Substack, Reasoning Together with Mitchell Zimmerman.

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You may also be interested in my road-trip novel / social thriller Mississippi Reckoning. Read an excerpt. Read the Progressive Charlestown review HERE.