The U.S. Supreme Court has done it. By effectively striking down the Voting Rights Act of 1965, American representative democracy has been downgraded to a relic of a bygone era, when this nation made a sincere attempt to realize its founding ideal of equality for all.
Now that the court has created a legal structure to wipe out majority-minority districts across the South, as Sen. Marsha Blackburn and President Donald Trump have threatened to do to Tennessee’s lone Democratic congressional district centered around Memphis, we are left with a hack competition over who can out-gerrymander the opposition.
This never-ending race to the bottom is, by eradicating what is left of Black political power in Congress, a 21st-century version of Jim Crow.
But the ramifications of this decision, Louisiana v. Callais, reach well beyond Washington, D.C. With the Voting Rights Act (the VRA) left unenforceable, meaningful access to the ballot for Black residents in local elections is under threat in Chattanooga and Hamilton County.
To understand the key ways the VRA boosted local representative democracy, we must look at the history of Chattanooga’s government.