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1 Jul, 11 tweets, 5 min read
America did not truly become a liberal democracy until 1965 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act. It's the most important civil rights law in U.S. history, & the Roberts Court has tried to dismantle it for many years (with Roberts himself spending his whole career on it)
While not the worst-case scenario, SCOTUS just delivered a major blow to the VRA by making it harder to strike down voting laws with discriminatory effects on voters of color.

Proving racist intent is often impossible, which is why banning racist effects has been so effective
Your reminder that a majority of 5 GOP Supreme Court justices were confirmed by Senates where the Dem minority represented more people & had won more votes than the GOP majority, with 3 of those justices appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote dailykos.com/stories/2020/1…
NEW: The Supreme Court's conservatives dealt a historic blow to the last remaining pillar of the Voting Rights Act, opening the floodgates to a new wave of ever more extreme Republican voter suppression laws & bringing the U.S. one step closer to Jim Crow dailykos.com/stories/2021/7…
There's been an infuriating line of punditry in recent years that GOP voter suppression just isn't a big deal, relying on academic research that's very hard to do right with limited data.

Well guess what, today's SCOTUS decision means new GOP voting laws can be MUCH more extreme
Between 21 years of frequent GOP minority rule & the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, liberal democracy in America has officially ceased to exist, & we've entered competitive authoritarianism.

If Senate Dems don't act soon to restore democracy, we may not get another chance
When SCOTUS gutted Voting Rights Act preclearance in 2013, North Carolina GOP responded hours later by mandating voter IDs that Black voters were least likely to have, which a lower court called "surgical precision."

Today's ruling means laws like this would likely be upheld
One big implication of today's Supreme Court ruling is for redistricting. The ruling doesn't directly affect it, but SCOTUS is likelier to blow up the requirement for "majority-minority" districts. White GOPers could win many more seats & could lock Dems out of power in the South
What Dems need to do to save democracy:
1. Curtail the filibuster
2. Pass a new Voting Rights Act, #HR1, & ban on election subversion
3. Add more states to rebalance the Senate
4. Expand/reform Supreme Court

I doubt they will, but if anything could get them to, it's this ruling
It's pretty clear where American democracy is headed thanks to GOP extremism if Dems don't take serious steps to change course. We've entered the age of competitive authoritarianism, & Dems have little time to act before they could lose Congress in 2022
Redistricting wasn't directly at stake in today's SCOTUS ruling, but if SCOTUS is willing to do what it just did with voting, it may just be a matter of time. The Roberts Court has already undermined POC in redistricting since 2009, & it may get even worse economist.com/graphic-detail…

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More from @PoliticsWolf

Stephen Wolf Profile picture
30 Jun
Re-sharing after last night’s debacle.

Another key thing to know about New York elections is that the GOP had a gerrymandered hold on the state Senate for decades until after 2018 & blocked reform for years.

Dems passed a ton of voting fixes since 2019 but still have much to do
Same goes for slow vote counting, which has nothing to do with ranked-choice voting & everything to do with New York law.

State Dems passed a bill this month to ensure absentee ballots get counted much quicker in future, & almost every Republican voted no dailykos.com/stories/2021/6…
You're going to see a lot of bad-faith Republicans use New York City's unique screw-ups as a pretext to spread lies about ranked-choice voting without so much as acknowledging that their party is fighting to keep things broken.

They want chaos to delegitimize elections they lose
Read 5 tweets
Stephen Wolf Profile picture
28 Jun
Gee, what do you know, a significant minority of the voters swept up in a 2017 Georgia GOP purge of the rolls were still eligible & some re-registered. And no, every state doesn't remove eligible voters from the rolls simply for exercising their right not to vote like in Georgia
Yes, it's true that every state removes people voters from the rolls when they die or move. And it's also true that, while Republicans in Georgia & elsewhere have done just that, they've also intentionally swept up many people who are still eligible, especially voters of color
The 1993 National Voter Registration Act (motor voter law) says states cannot remove eligible voters from the rolls simply for exercising their right not to vote. SCOTUS gutted that protection on the most pretextual grounds in 2018, so GOP states adopted "use it or lose it" laws
Read 4 tweets
Stephen Wolf Profile picture
23 Jun
Colorado's independent redistricting commission will release a preliminary congressional map shortly. Here are 2 maps I just quickly drew to give you a basic idea.

Left has a Latino district #CO01: davesredistricting.org/join/6ddda8a2-…
Right keeps Denver mostly whole: davesredistricting.org/join/76acb619-…
Both of these CO maps would have 4 relatively safe Dem districts, 3 relatively safe GOP districts (though Boebert could imperil their hold on #CO03), & the new #CO08 would be a swingy Trump '16 - Biden '20 district. I don't have precise 2020 data yet
Breaking: Colorado's independent redistricting commission just released its preliminary congressional map proposal.

This map is very problematic IMO for not drawing a substantially Latino district in Denver as I did upthread & instead prioritizes keeping Denver mostly whole
Read 9 tweets
Stephen Wolf Profile picture
23 Jun
Connecticut's Dem governor just signed a law that:
✅Adopts automatic voter registration at various state agencies
✅Restores voting rights to everyone not in prison
✅Allows online mail ballots requests & makes drop boxes permanent
✅Gives workers 2 hours unpaid time off to vote
After Connecticut's expansion of automatic voter registration & voting rights restoration, I've updated my cartograms on AVR & felony voter bans.

47% of Americans live in states with AVR laws & 55% in states where almost everyone not in prison can vote
Since just 2015, there's been huge progress on the adoption of automatic voter registration after Oregon became the first state to adopt it that year, & many states (plus D.C.) both blue & red have curtailed felony voter bans in that same time period. Still a ways to go, though
Read 4 tweets
Stephen Wolf Profile picture
16 Jun
Potentially huge news for efforts to strengthen democracy!

The For the People Act would enact the most significant voting access expansions since the 1965 Voting Rights Act, ban congressional gerrymandering, & adopt new campaign finance/ethics regulations dailykos.com/stories/2021/3…
Of course, if Manchin still won't curb the filibuster in some way to let Dems overcome GOP obstruction, this won't matter much, but the necessary first step toward setting up a filibuster showdown is to secure majority support & thus Manchin's vote on the bill itself
The reports of the death of the For the People Act (#HR1/#S1) at the hands of Dem Sen. Joe Manchin have been premature
Read 9 tweets
Stephen Wolf Profile picture
4 Jun
Illinois Dems have enacted new legislative gerrymanders & state Supreme Court districts, making IL the 2nd state to enact new legislative maps after the 2020 census. But due to census data delays, these were drawn using population estimates & could draw a lawsuit because of it
Illinois redistricting is badly flawed & IL should adopt proportional representation to ensure fairness.

However, these legislative gerrymanders only counteract Dems' geography penalty & likely fail to obtain a Dem advantage in excess of the popular vote electionlawblog.org/?p=122269
Illinois' Supreme Court has been redistricted for the first time in 6 decades to end the malapportionment that had left one district with as many people as two others combined. The new map is much fairer but counterintuitively still has a huge GOP bias. See this thread for more:
Read 5 tweets

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