The Daily Populous Tuesday May 12nd, 2026 day edition
Authored by ms.now and submitted by plz-let-me-in

In seemingly the blink of an eye, the gerrymandering wars have turned against Democrats — all because of unelected judges imposing their views over the will of voters and elected officials.

If Democrats are able to win back power despite the new electoral hurdles the courts have placed before them, there is only one path forward: judicial reform and, in particular, adding new justices to the Supreme Court. Indeed, packing the court may soon become a new litmus test for Democratic politicians — and it should be. Any hope of Democrats holding power and enacting their agenda will rely on undoing the Supreme Court’s partisan lean.

GOP-controlled Southern states quickly proved why the Voting Rights Act was so necessary.

Over the weekend, Democrats focused their ire on Virginia’s Supreme Court after four of the court’s seven justices threw out the results of a statewide redistricting referendum in which three million Virginians cast a ballot. With that ruling, the court undid Democratic efforts to flip four House seats from red to blue.

But the real culprit for the Democrats’ sudden reversal of fortune is the conservative majority sitting on the Supreme Court in Washington. It’s because of their actions that Virginia Democrats were pushed to redraw their congressional maps in the first place.

Back in 2019, the Supreme Court issued one of its most damaging decisions in recent memory. In Rucho v. Common Cause, the court’s conservative justices ruled that even though “excessive partisanship in districting leads to results that reasonably seem unjust,” federal courts simply could not adjudicate partisan gerrymandering.

“For the first time ever,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent, “this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities.”

Writing for the conservative majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said that “the court’s decision does not condone excessive partisan gerrymandering.” But that’s precisely what has happened since — and until recently, almost exclusively to the benefit of Republicans.

Last month’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais compounded the damage. The court’s conservatives eviscerated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which was enacted to stop Jim Crow laws that limited Black political participation and had provided voters a legal path to challenge racially discriminatory election laws.

Incredibly, Justice Samuel Alito made clear in his opinion that states can now defend themselves against claims of racial gerrymandering by arguing that they are merely engaged in partisan gerrymandering — even though, in the South, limiting Democratic representation and Black political representation is in effect one and the same. But in allowing states to use partisan gerrymandering as a cover for racial gerrymandering, Alito is not merely condoning partisan gerrymandering — he’s endorsing it.

it’s impossible to disentangle the court’s decision-making from a desire to help Republicans win elections.

Tennessee Republicans quickly to carved up Memphis to remove the state’s only Black-majority district. Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry suspended House primary elections in which some 80,000 votes had already been cast so the Republican-controlled state Legislature could erase a majority-Black district. Republicans in Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina may follow suit and, in effect, gut Black representation across the South.

The Voting Rights Act, a triumph of the Civil Rights Movement, has been destroyed by partisan Republicans masquerading as Supreme Court justices. (Though President Trump remains unsatisfied. In a Sunday social media post complaining about the court’s hostility to his administration’s stance on birthright citizenship, Trump wrote, “In fact, I should be the one wanting to PACK THE COURT!”)

As Kagan wrote in her dissent in Callais, the Voting Rights Act brought America “closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality,” and the law had “repeatedly, and overwhelmingly, reauthorized by the people’s representatives in Congress.”

But none of that mattered to the court. Indeed, it’s impossible to disentangle the court’s decision-making from a desire to help Republicans win elections.

Last December, a district judge in Texas, after nine days of hearings and testimony from 23 witnesses, issued a 160-page decision throwing out Texas’s mid-decade gerrymander. The Trump-appointed judge found overwhelming evidence that Texas had created a racial gerrymander.

Without even bothering to hold a hearing, the Supreme Court breezily dismissed the lower court’s findings and criticized it for having “improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections.”

Yet in the Callais decision, the Supreme Court granted Louisiana’s request to dispense with the usual waiting period between issuing the decision and sending it to a lower court. By doing so, the justices are allowing the state to expedite rewriting its congressional maps. If this isn’t an example of the Supreme Court improperly inserting itself into “an active primary campaign” and “causing much confusion,” it’s hard to imagine what would qualify.

_Fun_Employed_ on May 12nd, 2026 at 01:42 UTC »

It’s not just that we need to prosecute everyone who was involved with this administration, including the court. All disbarred, all tried, all publicly punished.

68plus1equals on May 12nd, 2026 at 01:20 UTC »

This was clear in 2016 when McConnell started stealing picks

accountabilitycounts on May 12nd, 2026 at 00:41 UTC »

They need a lot of votes between now and 2028 for that to be possible.