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by
Elie Mystal
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July 18 - August 6, 2022
The supposed rights of the unborn hold no moral suasion in a society that is willing to consign children who are born alive to poverty, malnutrition, and toxic air and water.
These hypocrites want to make rights attach at conception, but not citizenship and representation in the census. These would-be moralists can fuck all the way off.
Fetal personhood laws cannot overcome the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition on involuntary servitude, if we accept that a woman is a person who cannot be forced to labor.
Seeing as the state can’t even find enough willing parents to take care of all of its born wards (especially if those wards happen to be Black), I doubt it can find enough willing wombs to make unborn personhood anything more than involuntary servitude,
Fetal personhood amendments are the state writing a check it cannot cash, then forcing women to cover the bill against their will.
From a certain point of view, rich people never have a problem with monarchy; they have a problem with hereditary monarchy. Throughout history, regicidal motherfuckers tend to show up when rich people can’t buy their way into more power than they were born into.
game of thrones, if you will. And our founders were more Lannister than Stark:
It made sense to the founders that voting rights would be left up to the states, and they saw no inherent problem with those rights being different in every state.
The Fifteenth, Nineteenth, Twenty-Fourth, and Twenty-Sixth Amendments all either directly expand the voting franchise or remove restrictions to voting on new classes of people.
expansion of the franchise has been resisted and undercut by the judicial branch and conservative politicians at nearly every turn.
Conservatives have never accepted the proposition that “everybody gets to vote now”
There’s always somebody, somewhere, whose voting rights conservatives figure out how to suppress.
Because the Fifteenth Amendment has rarely been enforced, the Nineteenth Amendment has done very little for Black and brown women trying to vote.
Yes, for reasons that are at this point intentionally stupid, we still don’t have one federal election system; we have fifty state electoral systems for federal office holders.
Our electoral system is madness.
Nowhere have conservatives succeeded in ignoring the Constitution as much as they have with neutering the fifteenth Amendment.
the Voting Rights Act is the most important piece of legislation in American history.
The Voting Rights Act makes it illegal to gerrymander away the voting power of Black communities by submerging their votes within majoritarian white districts.
Preclearance has been one of the most effective schemes in stopping states from enacting discriminatory voter suppression. Which is why it no longer exists. Conservative judges will find a way to do racism.
To put it in Clue form:
The deed was done by Chief Justice John Roberts, with a majority opinion, in Shelby County v. Holder.
White people have been hanging “Mission Accomplished” banners on every courthouse since Appomattox, declaring victory over their own bigoted filth, and they’re always wrong.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, may her memory be a blessing, in probably her best dissent of her many outstanding ones, put Roberts’s willful ignorance on blast. She wrote: “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
Everybody knows that the Supreme Court made George W. Bush president in 2000 with its ruling in Bush v. Gore. But most people don’t realize the Court made Donald Trump president in 2016 with its ruling in Shelby County.
Most Black people still live in the states where their ancestors were enslaved.
Do you know how different this country would look if the Black voters in those states enjoyed frictionless access to the ballot?
Black voter suppression is a biological imperative for white supremacy. It is a survival strategy.
the only strategy white supremacists have to deal with Black political concerns is to suppress their votes so that they cannot effectively voice those concerns.
the process of drawing districts that lead to a fair representation of the voters in a legislature is the exact same process as the one used for drawing districts that lead to the effective disenfranchisement of voters. Gerrymandering is like fire: it’s just a tool that can cook dinner or burn the house down.
the question of underrepresented racial or ethnic minorities just wasn’t on the table at the Constitutional Convention.
gerrymanders became a constitutional issue because
the moment the South had an opportunity to disenfranchise Black people, white Southerners disenfranchised Black people by apportioning districts so that only people living in white areas mattered.
Excavating sixty-odd years of gerrymandering jurisprudence to tell a coherent story about where we are and how we got here is beyond my narrative and (probably) cognitive powers. It’s like trying to explain the final battle in Avengers: Endgame to someone who didn’t see all the other Marvel Cinematic Universe movies.
if you can sell your map as “necessary to enforce the Voting Rights Act,” and the districts drawn are contiguous and not outright bizarre, courts may allow it.
Nobody ever writes “This is a negative racial gerrymander” or “This map is necessary to keep uppity Negroes in their place” in the margins on their map.
Even here, in a field of law where the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection and the Fifteenth Amendment’s right to vote are the only constitutional principles that matter, conservatives still act like disenfranchising or diluting the votes of minorities is something that just kind of happens without the “bad” intentions of anybody involved.
the distinction between political gerrymanders and racial gerrymanders doesn’t exist when you’re inside the map room.
To think that there is even a meaningful distinction between “political” factors and “racial” factors requires one to be more naive than me, and white.
With modern technology and “big data” at their fingertips, politicians can now gerrymander down to the cul-de-sac.
Thanks to John Roberts, they’ll say their maps are “political” gerrymanders: it’s just a coincidence that Black people happen to overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, because Democrats seem to be the only party that can go four years at a stretch without giving aid and comfort to Klansmen.
the same thing causing the problem can in fact be the solution.
Programs can tell us how representative a legislature is of its constituents, how much it should be, and draw the maps accordingly.
There is a technocratic solution now to this decennial democratic battle.
there is one amendment that would immediately end one of the most obvious structural features of white supremacy in this country: Abolish the Electoral College.
it would be great to abolish the Senate.
The problem is that the United States Senate is not an exercise in republican government; it’s a prophylactic to prevent republican self-government.
Tying representation to the land as opposed to the people living on it is, among other things, fucking stupid. North and South Dakota (combined population of about 1.6 million people) have four senators in total, while New York City has 8 million people and gets, like, a large say in the two senators that the 19.4 million people living in New York State are allotted.
Queens (population 2.2 million) should have four senators if the Dakotas do.
Washington, DC, gets zero senators.
the “Great Compromise”
