Supreme Court Poised To Gut Voting Rights Act

This is what I am excited about.

In Donald Trump’s first term, I got blackpilled after the collapse of the Alt-Right. I sat out the 2020 election mainly because I was disappointed with how the Trump presidency had unfolded. During Joe Biden’s presidency though, I began to change my mind and reconsider Trump’s legacy.

The Supreme Court rulings in Dobbs v. Jackson on abortion in 2022 and the Students for Fair Admissions v. UNC case on affirmative action in 2023 were key moments. I had not fully appreciated how Trump had succeeded in reshaping the Supreme Court in his first term. He began to score big wins on social issues like abortion and affirmative action when Biden was president. This winning streak has continued through the rest of the Biden presidency, the 2024 election and down to the present day.

NBC News:

“WASHINGTON — While President Donald Trump’s aggressive use of executive power has resulted in a flurry of lawsuits, administration officials have won a series of high-profile victories at the Supreme Court in part due to careful case selection aimed at securing the backing of the conservative majority.

The White House has won 19 times at the Supreme Court since Trump took office and is on a 16-case winning run. The last loss was in May.

“They’re ecstatic,” a person close to the White House said of the series of recent legal wins, adding that officials do not want to overplay their hand at the court.

But only a small number of the more than 300 active lawsuits filed against the Trump administration have made it to the Supreme Court.

So far, the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on an emergency basis 28 times, according to an NBC News tally. It has lost only two. …”

Activists, of course, have ignored Trump’s victories in the higher courts including his 26-2 record at the Supreme Court. Trump has been on a roll in using the courts to reshape the government. Keep in mind he has another four years to pack the higher courts and landmark cases coming out of all those district court injunctions will accumulate down the pipeline in the latter half of his second term.

This case that is challenging the Voting Rights Act is the big enchilada.

New York Times:

“In a landmark 2013 case, the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that had required some states with a history of discrimination to seek approval from the federal government before changing their voting laws.

In that case, Shelby County v. Holder, the justices split along ideological lines in a decision that showed they differed on how much progress the country had made in race relations since the law was adopted as a crowning achievement of the civil rights movement.

“Our country has changed,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in the court’s opinion, “and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.”

The court’s decision left untouched a central piece of the Voting Rights Act known as Section 2, which prohibits election or voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race. In the Shelby County opinion, the chief justice wrote: “Section 2 is permanent, applies nationwide, and is not at issue in this case.”

A little more than a decade later, Section 2 is now squarely at issue. …”

NBC News:

“The Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments on Wednesday in Louisiana v. Callais. It is just the latest in a series of Republican-led attacks on the Voting Rights Act, which is known as one of the crown jewels of the Civil Rights Movement.

The case challenges a congressional map that Louisiana adopted in 2024 to comply with the Voting Rights Act. That map created two majority-Black districts out of a total of six districts in Louisiana. The previous map had only one majority-Black district, even though Black Louisianians make up roughly a third of the state’s population. …”

CNN:

“Two years ago, the US Supreme Court surprised observers and even some inside the court when it narrowly preserved the 1965 Voting Rights Act and race-based remedies intended to counteract historic discrimination against Blacks and other minorities.

But new signals from the justices point to a potential reversal and suggest a looming retrenchment of the landmark civil rights law.

The court may be on the brink of forbidding the consideration of race in redistricting and eroding states’ ability to consolidate Blacks or other racial minorities into majority-minority congressional districts to boost their chance of electing a candidate of their choice. …”

Granted, this isn’t “NS.”

This is the United States and that isn’t the way counter revolutions happen here.

The way that counter revolutions happen in America is through working within the system and dominating the federal government, especially the courts, for an extended period of time until old norms have time to dissolve and one or two generations can no longer remember the previous order.

I agree with Ross Douthat.

New York Times:

“So I thought it might be worth offering a case for bread-and-butter governance as a necessary — though by no means sufficient — path to ideological transformation, by simplifying that case to an even simpler rule: A true revolution should be seeking a minimum of 12 years in power.

Twelve years here means three consecutive presidential terms, a number I’m choosing for two reasons. First, because it’s entirely attainable: Over the past century the same party has held the White House for at least three terms on three occasions (1921-33, 1933-53 and 1981-93) and come excruciatingly close on several others (the nail-biter elections of 1968, 2000 and 2016).

Second, because the most successful American ideological revolutions of the 20th century, Rooseveltian and Reaganite, were both three-term affairs, whereas in several cases a potential realignment or revolution was left unfinished or meaningfully rolled back because of a failure to claim just one more term. …”

The counter revolution that I have in mind though is the collapse of Reconstruction. The retreat played out over the course of several decades from 1877 until the Wilson presidency.

Here is how something like that could happen again:

1. The Supreme Court guts the Voting Rights Act in much the same way that it killed the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and paved the way to Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.

2. Red States use their redistricting power to gerrymander a solid House majority. This is already happening and could be exacerbated by a major ruling on the Voting Rights Act that would put a dozen to two dozen House seats held by black and Hispanic Democrats in play.

3. With the federal courts locked down for a generation and the House majority secure, the Senate which already leans Republican due to its rural bias nukes the filibuster, which would allow legislation to pass the Senate with a simple 51 vote majority instead of through special reconciliation rules.

4. With the Supreme Court, a solid House majority and a Senate without the filibuster, the president could ram through major legislation which is now unthinkable like ending the Immigration Act of 1965.

5. Finally, the 2030 Census could exclude illegal aliens and further entrench a Republican-leaning House map which would make it nearly impossible for Democrats to retake the House.

Activists lament the passing of a White super majority.

They don’t reflect on how that White super majority was created in the first place. Also, a White super majority has only been the historical norm in the North and parts of the West. The South has always been racially diverse with states like South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana being majority non-White at times. The White super majority was squandered because of foolish decisions made by White liberals in the North in the 1960s who created the system that is now dying in our own times.

While this is unfortunate, it is also an opportunity. The entire country now has massive racial problems like the South which is creating a new openmindedness to Southern solutions to old intractable problems. Fewer White people are insulated from racial diversity. The White super majority was lost because delusional White liberals were insulated from the problem and could pretend that Southerners were oppressing blacks and they could be transformed into little Yankees with integrated schools. Liberalism required racial homogeneity to thrive and reach its mid-20th century apogee under JFK/LBJ.

The loss of racial homogeneity is undermining liberalism. “Racism” is no longer taboo. Race realist takes on black crime are increasingly seen on television. There is a growing movement online to restigmatize miscegenation. Charlie Kirk went to his grave thinking MLK was a con man. The fact that the Voting Rights Act is now on the table illustrates how swiftly the tide is turning. We will never live to see a White ethnostate or a “NS” revolution, but we could see the country wake up and turn away from the racial madness that has come in periodic waves in the past. We could see a long retreat.

If you are ever in Columbia, SC, go check out this statue of Gov. Pitchfork Ben Tillman on the grounds of the South Carolina Statehouse. Tillman’s generation grew up in the post-Civil War Reconstruction South and were hardened by that experience. They erected most of our Confederate monuments, took power and left the country much better off than they had found it. They were dealt a shitty hand in life, but made the most of it without falling into the pits of despair or escapist daydreaming.

Tillman understood that you take power away from these people and don’t give it back. You use any means to do so. Rig elections if you have to. Bribe blacks to vote for your party if you have to. Civilization must be defended over barbarism and abstract principles. People like him ruled the South before the soft, muddle-headed Boomer generation many of whom were starstruck by MLK. They are passing away and the whole country will need to elect Ben Tillmans to start digging us out of this ditch.