John RobertsThe United States Supreme Court is now being asked by the minorities it sought to protect with the creation of minority voting districts to end that protection because the results aren’t to the satisfaction of the minorities doing the asking.
The Alabama case, which the court took up last Wednesday, is a sad denouement for the supposedly fair-minded idea of the Voting Rights Act’s insistence on protected districts for minorities.
Those minorities are now, to borrow a phrase from the biblical book of Hosea, reaping the whirlwind.
Indeed, the insistence on minority districts so cowed Southern Republicans in recent years that they went to great lengths to comply with the protected districts, to ensure they come close to achieving the “one person, one vote” constitutional demand and to prove that they not be seen in any way, shape or form as racist in their governance.
The results of such gerrymandering protected the minority districts in question, which overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, but that left the surrounding voting districts with more whites, who usually vote for Republicans.