Voting rights and wrongs in a busy week for democracy
Voting rights and wrongs in a busy week for democracy
Reasons for hope, reasons for a new Supreme Court
Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.
I spent this afternoon and evening in the parking lot of JFK 8, the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island that made history as the first to unionize back in April 2022. Today, they held a walkout and picket, with marching, chanting, simmering, and brooding, plus a lot of chicken enchiladas.
The upstart Amazon Labor Union still doesn’t have anything close to a contract agreement and it’s been split internally between competing forces. In fact, the rally was the union’s first public official action at the warehouse since they won the election, but the movement is again becoming a force to be reckoned with. I’ll have more on that event for you in the days and weeks to come.
In tonight’s edition of the newsletter, we’re looking at a raft of voting rights news and decisions that could have a massive impact on the 2024 elation — and the people that want to stop them.
South Carolina: After a lifetime of civil rights activism, Rep. James Clyburn is in danger of inadvertently helping Republicans win Supreme Court approval for a racially gerrymandered Congressional map that minimizes Black political power.
The high court on Wednesday heard arguments in Alexander v South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, an appeal of a federal court decision that struck down part of the state’s gerrymandered Congressional map. Attorneys for the state didn’t even make a show of denying that the map was gerrymandered; instead, they simply insisted that it was gerrymandered with partisan intent, not for any racial reasons.
As a brief from Take Back the Court explained it, the argument boiled down to “we’re not racist, we just don’t want Black people to have representation for partisan reasons, not because they’re Black.”
As cynical as it is, the argument is actually tailor-made for this Supreme Court. In 2019 that partisan gerrymanders were beyond the reach of federal courts, which made them legal unless a state constitution specified otherwise.
Chief Justice John Roberts implicitly referenced the decision during questioning on Wednesday, suggesting that the NAACP’s attorneys presented only “circumstantial” evidence that Republicans purposely manipulated district lines in order to deny many of the state’s Black voters the opportunity for fair representation.
It was a bold statement for a justice who supposedly prizes and prioritizes maintaining the court’s legitimacy, given the mountain of evidence that made Republicans’ racist intent screamingly obvious.
During the 2021 redistricting cycle, South Carolina Republicans sought to shore up the increasingly purple first Congressional district, which had just been flipped by high school English scholar Nancy Mace in a tight race with Rep. Joe Cunningham. They ultimately moved 30,000 Black voters from the first district to the sixth district, and lo and behold, Mace’s margin of victory went from 1% in 2020 to 14% in 2022.
During oral arguments, Justice Amy Coney Barrett remarked that “the plaintiffs bear an exceedingly heavy burden when they’re trying to disentangle race and politics,” which sets up an impossible standard when one demographic of voters are so uniformly committed to one party. She added that the court must “give the legislature a presumption of good faith,” and if that was still an option after the mounds of evidence presented by the NAACP’s attorneys, then it’s clear which side Coney Barrett wants to win.
Brett Kavanaugh had a very specific focus in his line of questioning: What about Clyburn’s role in shaping the map?
Clyburn represents the sixth district, and in May, his staff quietly provided with a state Republicans a proposed map that the long-serving Congressman would be willing to accept. The map shored up his district, which had lost a significant number of residents and risked becoming less of a lock for the 82-year-old lawmaker, while putting Democrats at risk of not being able to elect a second representative from South Carolina.
If the GOP’s mapmaker referenced the district designed by one of the nation’s best known champion of civil rights, Republicans asked in a brief submitted to the court, could they actually be accused of being motivated by racial animus?
In a word, yes, but given the court’s predisposition toward rubber-stamping bigotry and taking away people’s rights, Clyburn’s sneaky, self-interested decision doesn’t help matters.
Wisconsin: Republicans suffered an embarrassing setback in their desperate attempt to prevent the new liberal majority on the state Supreme Court from overturning the egregious gerrymander that is the sole source of ongoing GOP power.
As we’ve covered here at Progress Report, state Republican House Speaker Robin Vos has spent months demanding that newly elected Justice Janet Protasiewicz recuse herself from upcoming legal challenges to the GOP’s outrageous maps. With a supermajority at his disposal, Vos has threatened to impeach Protasiewicz in the event that she refused to do so, but he hasn’t gotten much support for the idea, even among Republicans.
It’s only gotten worse since: Last week, Protasiewicz officially declined to step back from the case, and soon after, one of the former state supreme court justices that Vos tasked with advising him on the matter concluded that impeachment was a very stupid idea.
“To sum up my views, there should be no effort to impeach Justice Protasiewicz on anything we know now,” former Justice David Prosser, a conservative, wrote in a letter to Vos. “Impeachment is so serious, severe, and rare that it should not be considered unless the subject has committed a crime, or the subject has committed indisputable ‘corrupt conduct’ while ‘in office.’”
Now Vos is running out of options and it’ll be very fun to see him lose his ill-gotten grip on power.
Virginia: Democrats are seeking more information about the state’s mistaken purging of 10,000 registered and qualified voters.
Lawmakers, including members of the legislature as well as Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, are asking AG Merrick Garland to do what he hates most: Investigating potential GOP efforts to undermine democracy.
The story is that there was a glitch in the system that identified those 10k voters as formerly incarcerated felons, who automatically lose their right to vote until the governor restores it. Just why those voters were misidentified is the wild card here.
Meanwhile, a lawsuit to stop Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s deliberate slowdown of returning voting rights to returning citizens cleared a first hurdle, as it was allowed to proceed by a US district court judge on Friday..
Voters who are in jail but have yet to be convicted of a crime are still eligible to cast a ballot in Virginia, but generally aren’t provided an opportunity to do so. The sheriff in Richmond is angling to change that with help from a local community service nonprofit called Rolling for Justice.
North Carolina: The Republican supermajority voted to override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of the GOP’s vast new voter suppression law on Tuesday.
Within minutes of the vote, a coalition of progressive groups filed a federal lawsuit seeking to block parts of the law from going into effect.
We’ll have more on this in the days to come…
Georgia: State Republican leaders spent much of 2021 using the delirious Big Lie-fueled distrust of “election integrity” as cover to pass massive voter suppression laws. The laws passed in Texas and Florida were recently upheld, and though the fight isn’t over, voting rights advocates got bad news in their challenge to Georgia’s wretched, racist law.
US District Court Judge JP Boulee issued an extraordinary statement on Thursday that acknowledged the abject racism of the law and provided a vague and upsetting reason to permit it to continue:
"In considering the sequence of events leading to the passage of S.B. 202, the Court recognizes that Black voters used absentee voting at a rate higher than white voters in 2020 (although not by an overwhelming margin) and that candidates preferred by Black voters, and the Democratic Party, were successful in 2020. While these two findings could potentially suggest that the Legislature acted with a discriminatory intent, the Court cannot ignore what appears to be the Legislature’s legitimate justifications for passing the law…
"These justifications include, but are not limited to, the State’s interest in orderly and efficient election administration, preventing fraud or the appearance of fraud and increasing voter confidence…
The Big Lie has made it to federal court, everybody!
Fair Districts: The progressive group Common Cause released a redistricting report card on Wednesday that grades every state’s maps and ballot access. Some of the grades may surprise you!
Wait, Before You Leave!
Progress Report has raised over $7 million dollars for progressive candidates and causes, breaks national stories about corrupt politicians, and delivers incisive analysis, and goes deep into the grassroots.
This is a second full-time job, and I’m looking to expand. There are no corporations, dark money think tanks, or big grants sponsoring this work. It’s all people-powered. So, I need your help.
For just $5 a month, you can buy a premium subscription that includes premium member-only newsletters with original reporting and analysis.
You can also make a one-time donation to Progress Report’s GoFundMe campaign — doing so will earn you a shout-out in the next weekend edition of the newsletter!