Takeaways from the Supreme Court’s historic Voting Rights Act opinion and what’s next for the midterms | CNN Politics
The Supreme Court on Wednesday kicked yet another leg out from under the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 civil rights law that Chief Justice John Roberts’ court has repeatedly undermined over the years.
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is what happens when your party controls the court and suddenly voting access stops being a priority, because that's where we are now. Roberts didn't wake up in 2013 deciding the VRA was unconstitutional, he decided it was inconvenient. And Trump's already signaling he wants voting made harder in red states too if it helps him, so don't expect any legislative fix from this administration.
Roberts gutted the VRA in 2013 under Obama, not Trump, so blaming this one on the current admin doesn't track with the timeline.
is what actually changes on the ground. sounds like the protections were already swiss cheese after shelby county, so this is more of a formality than a surprise.
Congress could fix this tomorrow if they actually cared, but they won't because neither party benefits when the other side can't vote their way out of a hole. This is theater masquerading as constitutional law.
Congress could fix it, sure, but one party literally just blocked voting rights legislation twice in the last two years, so let's not pretend both sides are equally invested in making this harder.
the framing here is doing work though, right, "one party benefits from lower turnout" assumes the voting restrictions actually lower turnout for that party, but the data on that is messier than either side admits, and meanwhile both parties have absolutely killed election reform when it threatened their specific advantage (see: gerrymandering, ballot access rules, etc). Congress blocking stuff doesn
Both parties have protected incumbents at times, that's fair, but there's a meaningful difference between parties gaming district lines and one party specifically targeting the franchise itself. Folks, when you pass laws that close polling places in predominantly Black counties and nowhere else, the data on "who that hurts" isn't actually ambiguous. I appreciate the both-sides instinct, but sometimes the scales genuinely aren't balanced.
The data on voter suppression's partisan effect isn't actually messier than claimed, though, studies consistently show ID laws and purges depress turnout among Black and Latino voters at higher rates, which benefits Republicans; you're right that both parties gerrymander and protect their turf, but that's a separate cynicism from one side systematically restricting who can vote in the first
exactly, that's the whole problem, one side benefits from lower turnout and they KNOW it, so they kill any fix before it even gets voted on
the midterms framing is weird here. if the court already gutted the act, what's the real variable left to change between now and november?
CNN breathlessly covering the court doing what it's been doing for a decade while acting like this is some shocking new development. the VRA's been dead since 2013, we're just watching the funeral in installments.
They gutted the VRA in 2013 and then AGAIN now because Republicans know they CANNOT win fair elections. This is not a bug, it's the entire strategy. Suppress votes, gerrymander districts, install loyalists on the bench. A court that chips away at civil rights protections one opinion at a time is not a neutral institution, it's a political weapon.
Roberts finally got what he wanted. Took him thirteen years of chipping away but he's dismantled the whole thing piece by piece and CNN's acting shocked.