Opinion – Redistricting ruling roils Supreme Court with corruption, bias claims

Here’s the biggest mystery in Washington: Was it a six-sided conspiracy? Or are there only one or two Supreme Court justices behind the chaos caused by the recent ruling allowing new congressional districts to be drawn even after midterm primary voting has started?

Among Democrats, there is no mystery. There is talk of outright corruption. The only question is the extent of the corruption among Supreme Court justices. How many have abandoned judicial impartiality to help President Trump hold his Republican majority in the House?

Last week, the charges of cronyism at the high court pushed beyond whispers with the full-throated charge being made publicly in the credible voice of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The Supreme Court has to be seen “as neutral, nonpartisan,” to maintain “public confidence,” she told a meeting of the American Law Institute last week.

That followed more pointed criticism. Today’s conservative majority “dives into the [political] fray,” she wrote after the right-wing majority on the court issued an emergency ruling to allow Louisiana’s Republican governor to suspend primary voting after more than 100,000 people had already voted.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. responded to Justice Brown Jackson in strong terms. He dismissed her complaints as “groundless and utterly irresponsible” charges.

The spat among the justices can be ignored as a fuss based on predictable complaints from the losing side. But it is hard to ignore the political fact that Republicans in Louisiana as well as Alabama halted primary elections to draw new maps that are more favorable to Republican congressional candidates.

In Tennessee, the congressional map is similarly being redrawn before Election Day. And in South Carolina the Republican governor asked for a special legislative session to review redistricting and possibly squeeze out the one Black-majority district. It is the only congressional district that favors Democrats.

By some estimates, the wave of districting now spreading through the South, with approval of the Supreme Court, will reward Republicans with about seven to 10 more seats.

This storm began with Trump’s desire for better odds in the midterm elections as he tries to keep majority control of the U.S. House.

But there is more than political advantage at stake. In addition to charges of the justices playing politics, the high court’s permissive approach to partisan redistricting opens the door to real racial division and pain. The civil rights struggle to win equal voting rights for racial minorities and fair representation in Congress is a struggle that goes back to the years following the Civil War.

The hardball politics now on display are centered in southern states with a real and long history of Black voter suppression. And the game of mid-decade, one-sided redistricting is taking place at the urging of President Trump. His only concern is to maintain a Republican majority in Congress.

The racial damage does not concern him. Trump’s indifference to that history is rooted in fear of losing his hold on Congress. In his first term, a Democratic-controlled Congress twice impeached him.

Facing low public approval numbers in polls, Trump can see a wave election approaching that will give Democrats control of the House. His cold response is to tilt the playing field in his favor and eliminate people who vote against his interests, even if that math adds up to racial discrimination.

With recent rulings, the Supreme Court has cleared the way for 21st-century white, southern politicians to silence the voices of Black voters while raising the volume of voices belonging to white voters with a history of voting for Republicans.

The high court’s recent ruling amounts to the most destructive blow against Black political power in my lifetime.

In Louisiana, the governor saw no shame in stopping an ongoing election to allow the state’s Republican legislature to eliminate a Black-majority congressional district.

And the court agreed. This required the court to break with a standing rule at the court calling for a 32-day waiting period before putting legal rulings into action to avoid creating political chaos.

And political chaos and pain, racial pain, is now taking place.

“The parties who came to us said please alter your rules so that we can essentially have an advantage,” Jackson said. “That should not be something that we should do because it would look like we are doing something unusual.”

Alito, who wrote the majority opinion that cut into restrictions on redistricting with racial consequences, wrote that giving Louisiana permission for speedy redistricting was reasonable. He said the current map with two congressional districts of Black majority voters “has been held to be unconstitutional, and the general election will be held in just six months.”

Alito fails to mention that a third of Louisiana’s population is Black. The current map, overturned by the high court, was created under orders from lower federal courts that it was discriminatory.

Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) put his objection to eliminating Black majority congressional districts in the old Confederacy in direct terms: “Jim Crow in new clothes.”

Warnock’s words carried moral weight because he spoke from the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church, the church where civil rights icon, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., once preached.

No mystery there — just pain.

Juan Williams is senior political analyst for Fox News Channel and a prize-winning civil rights historian. He is the author of the new book “New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement.“

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