Supreme Court is rigging the election. Democrats are helping.

There is no opposition party

Welcome to a Monday night edition of Progress Report.

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Two late-breaking news stories together epitomize the catastrophic state of American politics, though the word “politics” feels generous now because it implies a spirited competition between two motivated, ideologically disparate actors in a relatively fair environment.

As tonight’s developments make clear, that is not what we have in the United States.

First, the Supreme Court this evening put Alabama on course to eliminate the Black-majority Congressional districts that the court itself upheld just a few years ago. Whereas Samuel Alito’s opinion in Callais claimed to technically uphold Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (while making it functionally useless), this emergency decision ends all pretense of respect for the landmark law and affirms once again this court is nothing more than a raft of corrupt, racist and partisan hacks.

The decision is unprecedented and unprecedentedly hypocritical in several ways.

First, an Alabama district court found in Allen v. Milligan that lawmakers had drawn gerrymandered districts with explicitly racist intent, meeting the ultra-high bar for a VRA violation that Alito set in his Callais opinion. This was an immediate opportunity for the court to prove that it would indeed uphold the Voting Rights Act in the rare occasions that the racist intent was provable beyond a shadow of a doubt, but instead, the far-right majority showed its true colors (white hoods).

Second, no matter how much John Roberts complains and insists his fellow Federalist Society members are not political actors, conservative partisanship and naked bigotry are the court’s central organizing principles, the only coherent throughlines between its decisions. There’s no other way the court could truly justify citing the Purcell Principle to block a challenge to Texas’s gerrymandered map last fall a full 15 weeks before the state’s primary election, the turn around and grant Alabama’s wish to eliminate Black, Democratic districts just one week before the scheduled primary.

Capitulation is collaboration

At the same time that the Supreme Court rushes to flex and build Republican power, Democrats are rushing to render themselves powerless, setting themselves up to fail and surrender what small modicum of power they still hold. Virginia Democrats in particular had a torrid day of chosen helplessness and pitiful excuse-making, exacerbating the devastation of the state Supreme Court’s decision to throw out their newly voter-approved Congressional map.

As a reminder, it emerged this weekend that Democrats could essentially circumvent the decision by lowering the court’s mandatory retirement age and replacing the justices with younger, more liberal judges. Doing so would all but guarantee that the party would win nine of Virginia’s ten Congressional seats, which would mitigate some of the damage being done by the GOP’s gerrymandering spree across the South. With a trifecta in state government, the only thing that could prevent Democrats from pulling off this novel maneuver is their own cowardice, and lo and behold, that’s exactly what’s happening: two of Virginia’s three most powerful Democrats ruled out the judicial switcheroo on Monday.

First up was state Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, who called the move “too extreme” and said that the “time restrictions at the Department of Elections” make it too impractical. Of course, practical timing issues did not prevent Republicans from moving forward: Louisiana’s Republican Gov. Jeff Landry threw out hundreds of thousands of early votes so that Republicans could implement emergency redistricting.

If there’s one person in Virginia that could overrule Surovell and force through a plan to rescue the map, it’s Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who campaigned across the state to push the constitutional redistricting amendment over the line. But Spanberger, who has almost always hewn to the center and made a habit of shaming the principled progressives in her party, simply told reporters “no” when they asked whether she had any interest in pursuing a new Supreme Court.

Here’s the kicker: Virginia Democrats decided to instead appeal to the US Supreme Court, asking its virulent right-wing judges to reverse or block the state high court’s decision. Liberals, asking Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas to save them and hand them four Congressional seats. It’s almost embarrassing, considering the far-right justices’ brazen partisan decision-making, but there are few things that Democratic leaders like better than taking a loss, feigning anger, and then fundraising to “fight back” against conservatives who their fecklessness conveniently keep in power.

It’s a truly depressing state of affairs. Remember, a majority of Virginians voted for these maps — Republicans in Florida, Ohio, and Utah, among other states, are just simply imposing gerrymanders that violate voter-approved amendments to their state constitutions — after a campaign powered by tens of thousands of volunteers and millions in small dollar donations. Democrats are obligated to fight on behalf of those voters, volunteers, and small donors, and this surrender makes these leaders in many ways even more contemptible than Republicans. That this could be the difference between winning back Congress and condemning the United States to a permanent GOP majority only deepens the shamefulness.

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