Tyler O’Neil writes for the Daily Signal about a former president’s response to the US Supreme Court’s recent redistricting ruling.
Barack Obama is a real piece of work. Seriously, he has no shame.
One week after the former president successfully gaslit a small majority of Virginians into voting for a redistricting initiative that got rid of the state’s two majority-minority congressional districts, he has the gall to condemn the Supreme Court’s ruling against the practice of redistricting along racial lines.
He doesn’t really care about giving black voters better representation—he cares about the Democrats’ grasp for raw, naked political power, by any means necessary.
While the Constitution generally prohibits sorting citizens based on race, lower courts have long interpreted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as effectively mandating redistricting along racial lines. This process has ensured that Democrats have more congressional districts in the South—maintained by the legal fiction that drawing maps based on race will give black voters an equal playing field.
Yet the Supreme Court on Wednesday put an end to all that. In Louisiana v. Calais, Louisiana’s Legislature had drawn a redistricting map that preserved one majority black district, but a court mandated that the state redraw the map, to create a second majority black district. Louisiana did so, and faced a court challenge.
The Supreme Court’s majority opinion found that the Voting Rights Act only forbids redistricting explicitly aimed at racial discrimination—not political advantage. This effectively means that southern states can redraw their congressional maps and eliminate majority-minority districts, so long as they do so for political, not racial, reasons.
Democrats hate this, because it destroyed their legal backstop to maintain Democratic congressional districts inside red states.
Obama condemned the Supreme Court ruling, suggesting he was doing so on principle. …
… Obama faulted the Supreme Court for “abandoning its vital role in ensuring equal protection in our democracy and protecting the rights of minority groups against majority overreach.”
That’s ironic, because if he really cared about the principle of “protecting the rights of minority groups” in voting, he wouldn’t have supported the blatant partisan power grab in the Old Dominion.
