Republican Redistricting Maps Are Motivated Entirely By Race, Not Politics | Michael Harrison

TOAlthough the phrase “All politics is local” is often attributed to Tip O’Neill Jr, a former Speaker of the US House of Representatives, the aphorism probably originated in the February 1932 Associated Press column “ Random politics,” when Washington bureau chief Byron Price wrote: “All politics is local politics.” As valid as Price’s summary of politics within the Beltway may be, there is probably a more accurate way to describe the American sport of civic brokering of power:

All politics is racial.

Over the past quarter century, white voters have overwhelmingly identified with the Republican Party While all other racial and ethnic groups – Black, Hispanic, and Asian American voters: consistently identify with the Democratic party. This unshakeable reality reduces the machinations of each political party to a demographic math game, especially in racially diverse parts of the country, where one truism dominates local politics: When nonwhites can’t vote, Republicans win.

Perhaps the clearest example of this racial divide is Alabama, where whites make up 69% of the population and are 89% of the Republican electorate. By comparison, the state is 27% African American, 80% of whom identify as Democrats. Six of the seven Democrats in the Alabama Senate are black, as are 26 of the 27 Democratic members of the House. In 2022, Kenneth Pascual he became the first black person to represent the Republican party in the Alabama state legislature since Reconstruction. Contrary to what Price would say, politics here is not local. In Alabama, regardless of location, “white voter” is synonymous with “Republican” and “black” means “Democrat.”

Perhaps this reality is why last Monday, a federal court threw out the congressional map of the state that disenfranchised black voters statewide. The three-judge panel explained that the congressional redistricting plan created by Alabama’s Republican-controlled legislature meant that “Black voters have fewer opportunities than other Alabamans to elect candidates of their choice to Congress.” The map above packed the two blackest cities into one congressional district, dividing the rest of the state’s black population — three of the state’s five largest cities — among three majority-white districts that have been safely Republican for years. The justices gave white (Republican) lawmakers 14 days to draw new districts that did not violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Alabama Republicans have vowed to appeal the ruling to the US Supreme Court, where the court’s conservative majority ruled in 2019 that disenfranchising black voters is perfectly fine as long as gerrymanderers intention it was partisan and not racial. “If the district lines were drawn for the purpose of separating racial groups, then they are subject to close scrutiny because ‘race-based decision-making is inherently suspect,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. “But determining that the lines were drawn on the basis of partisanship does not indicate that the districting was inappropriate. A permissible intent (to secure partisan advantage) does not become constitutionally impermissible, such as racial discrimination, when that permissible intent “overrides.”

Herein lies the problem with politics, conservative ideology, and America in general. For years, there has been a subtle campaign to redefine racism by intention and not the effects of discriminatory actions. According to this new American translation, disenfranchising entire communities by suppressing their voting power is not necessarily racist, as long as the person did not mean to be. And, because there are so few people willing to stand up in front of the world and confess their racial bias, anyone can discriminate as long as they don’t articulate their racism out loud. However, this cleverly constructed loophole only applies to racism. The US court system has found a way to convict people of unintentional murder and hold people accountable for car accidents, but somehow whites are innocent until proven racist.

But in the case of the Republican-controlled Alabama legislature, there is real evidence.

A few weeks after U.S. Supreme Court justices decided there was nothing they could do to stop North Carolina from disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of Black citizens, the daughter of the man who pioneered the use of the race to redraw political maps, he leaked the content of his recently deceased father’s account. hard drive, revealing that North Carolina’s redistricting plan focused on race all along. Known as the “Master of the Modern Gerrymander”, Thomas Hofeller had only considered race when drawing the maps of North Carolina. The proposed maps even included a plan that would have allowed the state elect an all-white legislature.

But the leaked files also revealed that Hofeller was the main architect of redistricting plans for states across the country, including Alabama. Hofeller’s files included emails and proposals from then-chairman of the Alabama House redistricting committee, Rep. Jim McClendon, which included racial data, census maps broken down by race, and… . Okay, nothing more. The basis of McClendon and Hofeller’s plan for Alabama was not primarily about race; it seems as if it were just race. After serving in the Alabama House of Representatives for 12 years, McClendon was elected to the state Senate in 2014, where he co-chaired the Senate commission whose doctored maps were thrown out in federal court. It was probably a coincidence. I’m sure he didn’t mean to.

Alabama is not an outlier in this phenomenon. Republican-controlled legislatures in Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, Missouri and Wisconsin have come up with rigged maps that diminish the power of black voters. Of course, they won’t admit that redistricting plans are motivated solely by race because, under the new American definition, that would make him racist. According to the highest legal authorities in the United States, there is nothing wrong with stealing the voices of black people and accidentally killing their opportunity to participate in democracy. After all, it has nothing to do with racism.

It’s just politics.