The 1965 Voting Rights Act was the crowning achievement of the Civil Rights Motion. It stripped away the Jim Crow-era legal guidelines within the South that had, for 9 a long time, practically eradicated any likelihood for Black People to solid a vote or maintain elective workplace.
Actually, it may be argued that circumstances within the Southern states have radically modified since 1965. Discrimination by race is way extra uncommon. But, in politics, the extra issues have modified, the extra they’ve stayed the identical.
The South has traditionally been a one-party area. After the Civil Conflict, in response to Republican Abraham Lincoln’s elimination of slavery, it was segregationist Democrats who dominated within the states of the defeated Confederacy. Then, the civil rights victories of the Nineteen Sixties provoked a swing away from the more and more liberal Democratic Social gathering and, in consequence, the dominant Southern social gathering turned the GOP.
Regardless of the period or the social gathering model, nonetheless, it has at all times been the identical political class clinging to energy — white conservatives. The Voting Rights Act diminished that energy by imposing congressional district maps that extra pretty represented voters of all races, however the Supreme Courtroom has now given all the facility again to the conservative white institution by ruling that redistricting plans that purposely create Black majority districts are an unconstitutional violation of the 14th Modification’s equal safety clause.
The court docket majority’s argument is that race can’t be the driving think about figuring out the composition of a congressional district. The fallacy in that reasoning is that the justices, in different rulings, have stated they don’t have any authority to intervene with state legislatures that gerrymander to provide a bonus to at least one social gathering or the opposite.
So, now, due to the court docket, Republican-controlled legislatures, notably within the Southern states, will gerrymander away districts the place African People — who closely favor Democrats — have had illustration. Not directly however successfully, they’ll disenfranchise folks based mostly on race, however in a fashion permitted by the Supreme Courtroom.
Jim Crow rises once more.
See extra of David Horsey’s cartoons at: st.news/davidhorsey
View different syndicated cartoonists at: st.news/cartoons
Editor’s word: Seattle Instances Opinion now not appends remark threads on David Horsey’s cartoons. Too many feedback violated our community policies and reviewing the handfuls that have been flagged as inappropriate required an excessive amount of of our restricted employees time. You possibly can remark by way of a Letter to the Editor. Please e mail us at letters@seattletimes.com and embrace your full title, tackle and phone quantity for verification solely. Letters are restricted to 200 phrases.
