When professional liars defend the Supreme Court’s nullification of the Voting Rights Act

In a recent podcast, E.J. Dionne has a pretty good summary of why Callais is such an atrocity:

I think the reason you’re having some difficulty in being ambivalent about this decision is because it’s a really, really horrible decision that violates some of the very principles that the court claims to be upholding. Congress should decide this question. Well, Congress did decide this question in the Voting Rights Act, when it passed a law.

Racial gerrymandering actually goes back a long way. The reason Congress changed this law is that states, like Mississippi, were drawing districts that very consciously cut up the Black vote so that Black voters could not be close to a dominant, or even near a majority in any of the districts. And Congress said that when you have all-white delegations in states with very, very large minority populations, minorities are not being represented. And the court says, “Oh, well, we’ve gotten past these racial problems.” And in Shelby County v. Holder — the decision where the court began its wrecking job against the Voting Rights Act — Ruth Bader Ginsburg had a great line where she said that it’s “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” We didn’t have discrimination because Congress passed the Voting Rights Act. I really think this is going to go down as a Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the separate but equal decision, because the court is really tying Congress’s hands with this.

It’s saying that it’s OK to discriminate against a Black voter because they’re Democrats. And so, immediately, all these Southern states rushed to get rid of all of these Black majority districts, proving the point of the advocates of the Voting Rights Act.

Among the many terrible arguments that child separation enthusiast and author of erotic Supreme Court fanfiction Sarah Isgur responds with one of the favorite talking points of anti-democratic bullshit artists like JD Vance:

I think what you have said is internally contradictory about this. We have held, for instance, that it’s OK that in New England — which is about 60/40 Democrat/Republican — there are no Republican congressmen.

Checkmate, libs! Only…there is no partisan gerrymandering in New England. Vermont can’t be gerrymandered by definition, Maine and New Hampshire have Republican-majority districts Republican candidates haven’t won, and Massachusetts can’t be gerrymandered because its rural areas are unusually liberal:

Isgur knows this, but it’s an important lie used to back up another lie she repeats, John Roberts’s claim that there’s no way for federal judges to develop applicable standards for partisan gerrymandering.

Then there’s this:

But my hope, again, is that actually there will be enough pressure from voters to put an end to the partisan gerrymandering, the extreme silliness that we are seeing where, again, race is only one thing that may define a person’s voting behavior. But we are now making sure that so many millions of Americans across the country are not actually represented, and that we have these gerrymandered districts that prevent competitive general elections. Voters can stop this any time they want.

Ah yes, the Felix Frankfurter argument — voters who are not represented should go to the ballot box to end their disenfranchisement. I see no flaws in this plan! Particularly since to go back to Republican judges disregarding the will of the voters to incentivize Republican gerrymanders you have to go all the way back to last week.

Dionne then goes on to point out that one party’s legislators (like its federal judges) has consistently opposed partisan gerrymandering and the other supports it, getting another remarkably dishonest response:

Dionne: We could go on like this. I just want to make a point that Democrats tried to pass a national ban on partisan gerrymandering in the last Congress. And —

Isgur: They put a poison pill around that. Yes. It was not a clean bill to stop partisan gerrymandering. It had a whole bunch of other Christmas-tree things that liberals wanted. They knew that it wouldn’t pass, and that they would get this talking point. Press-release legislation from Congress, from both sides, has annoyed me for years.

“From both sides” yeah sure. Anyway, if Republicans supported bans on partisan gerrymandering but didn’t like that they were embedded in legislation that did other things to expand access to the ballot, they were free to propose a “clean” anti-gerrymandering bill! Or they could…just enact one, since they control Congress and could get Democratic support for it! They don’t, because again as Isgur knows Republican elites in fact affirmatively like gerrymandering, both because of their contempt for democratic values and because they think that it will advantage them, like it will this cycle. As Kagan observed in her dissent in Callais, the crocodile tears in Rucho about how they really didn’t like what they were doing have been fully exposed as a fraud:

Seven years ago, this Court held in Rucho v. Common Cause that claims of political gerrymandering are not justiciable in federal court. That was, in my view, an ill-considered decision, whose adverse effects have never been more obvious than today, as this country’s two major parties compete in a race to the bottom. But to its (modest) credit, the Rucho Court did not pretend that partisan gerrymanders were something in need of safeguarding. To the contrary, the Court conceded that they were “incompatible with democratic principles” and “lead[ ] to results that reasonably seem unjust.” (The Court’s rationale was only that federal courts lack competence to deal with gerrymanders, not that they were protected by law or beneficial as policy.) Today, though, the majority straight-facedly holds that the Voting Rights Act must be brought low to make the world safe for partisan gerrymanders. For how else, the majority reasons, can we preserve the authority of States to engage in this practice than by stripping minority citizens of their rights to an equal political process? And with that, the majority as much as invites States to embark on a new round of  partisan gerrymanders—and makes an already bad precedent into one still worse. It is not enough that Rucho has harmed the whole body politic. Now, that decision also becomes the cudgel to diminish the rightful voting influence of its minority citizens.

Isgur can blame “the voters,” but the blame here belongs to Republicans, and if you won’t put the blame where it belongs you don’t actually object to gerrymandering.