Cartoon by Jeff Koterba

This is either specific to Biden, in which case it's clearly unconstitutional, or it isn't, in which case the actual victims of weaponization of the government, which pretty much all happened under Trump, should start demanding payments www.cnn.com/2026/05/17/p...

Years ago Scalia provoked gasps in the gallery when he called the Voting Rights Act a “racial entitlement.” But turning American democracy back into a white racial entitlement, as it was for most of American history, is exactly what the Roberts Court is doing. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Thanks for the shoutout @mjsdc.bsky.social! "They've made Sam Alito very mad" - this should go on our resumes. w/ @greerdonley.bsky.social @rebouche.bsky.social

“this Court has so perverted the VRA and the 15th Amendment that they serve almost the opposite of their intended function. These provisions were adopted for the…purpose of guaranteeing the political rights of African-Americans. After Callais…they function to limit black political power.”

EditorialCartoonist @andertoon.bsky.social with a powerful message.

I am begging journalists covering Callais to think a LITTLE BIT about how covering only the partisan implications of Callais reinforces the batshit opinion's assertion that the VRA was only about partisan power

Great thread. And bonus: the MALDEF lawyer quoted, Susana Sandoval Vargas, is my former student! So proud!

@jamellebouie.net is right; Callais pushes even more of our politics into a “Red America / Blue America” frame—& out of the conditions needed to preserve the Union. As Obama put it in 2004, to divide the country into “liberal America & conservative America” is to deny the United States of America.

This is my personal Meat Loaf That

SCOTUS, which ordered Alabama to create a second Black opportunity district just 3 years ago, has lifted that order a week before the primary. The Purcell principle says courts shouldn't permit chaos too close to an election—it's now an open question whether there will even be a primary on schedule.

This is such a vital point so beautifully put. Across the country, Dem leaders behave as though the only legitimate opposition is an appeal to judges, & if R’s acts are non-justiciable they are acceptable. Pols are obligated to form their own constitutional theories & act on them! Uphold your oaths

Yesterday morning, I wrote about how #SCOTUS keeps *choosing* to inject itself into politics. Then, the Court did it again last night—clearing the way for Alabama to re-draw its maps *this* cycle, even though it allowed Alabama to use old, unlawful maps in 2022: www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

very much of the view that a democratic congress should wield the guarantee clause against ad hoc, mid-decade redistricting, a practice which is an end run against representative government itself

We do not in fact need to be permanently bound by a precedent from the Taylor administration issued by the auteur of Dred Scott. Make the Guaranty Clause great again!

NEW: NAACP on Supreme Court allowing Alabama to redraw map to dilute power of Black voters "We are witnessing a return to Jim Crow. Anybody who is alarmed by these developments—as everybody should be—better be making a plan to vote in November to put an end to this madness"

Calvinball is an understandable but ultimately wrong metaphor insofar as Calvin and Hobbes participated in Calvinball on equal terms

For all the talk of how Democrats aren't close enough to the mainstream, only Republicans act—consistently, through all of their members in every branch, federal and state—as if they know there is no chance they could hold power in anything resembling a free and fair election.

#BREAKING: Over dissents from the three Democratic appointees, #SCOTUS issues “GVRs” in the Alabama cases—vacating district court injunctions & remanding for further proceedings in light of Callais. In practice, this means Alabama can now redraw its congressional districts in time for the midterms:

This is absolutely outrageous. SCOTUS reinstated Texas gerrymander 15 weeks before primary because they claimed it was too close to election to block it but now allowing Alabama to gerrymander one week before primary after trial court found map was intentionally discriminatory against Black voters

We’re less than 90 minutes from Justice Alito’s entirely arbitrary 5 p.m. deadline for his administrative stays in the mifepristone case. As I explained last week, Alito is the only justice who regularly imposes these time limits—and he only does it in cases in which he doesn’t like the applicants:

this is the closest I've ever come to actually suggesting a "one neat trick" suggestion for anything, but I'm so serious here. the Virginia Constitution gives the legislature the power to set retirement ages for judges "REGARDLESS OF THE TERM TO WHICH ELECTED OR APPOINTED." make it 54 right now.

It’s telling that Alabama took 14 years to implement Brown (you MUST desegregate) and < 14 days to implement Callais (you CAN eliminate Black districts if you call them Democratic, but you don’t HAVE to).

There is no clearer case for the necessity of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 than how quickly southern states moved to eliminate Black-majority districts and dilute Black power after SCOTUS eroded Section 2. SCOTUS’s reasoning was immediately disproven by reality.

It’s important to remember in these times that Black southerners fought Jim Crow from the very beginning and built a tradition of activism that eventually bore fruit. The work of democracy is critical even when victory seems far off.

Photo by @nicolehester.bsky.social for The Tennesseean www.tennessean.com/picture-gall...

Absolutely worth reading

From Karlan's interview:

Pam Karlan’s Dire (and Accurate) Views on What Callais Means for American Democracy electionlawblog.org?p=155990

As southern states use gerrymandering to deliberately erase black representation from Congress in multiple states, the Dems need to make anti-gerrymandering a real part of messaging. yougov.com/en-us/articl...

the basic logic of plessy — that the constitution has no bearing on social inequality — undergirds every roberts court ruling on the state’s ability to deal with the effects of racism from parents involved to calais.

Bonus content for SCOTUS nerds: In his remarks tonight, Roberts said the new oral argument format has "blown up" and is "too long" and the court might revisit it this summer.

If the justices think they have too much work, we should repeat the 1920 and 1986 acts that let them shrink their dockets.

I knew the Justices were going to do this when they let the whole weekend go with mass voter confusion over whether votes cast in early voting for House seats would count or not. (They won't)

This line in particular makes me feel ill: "The dissent would require that the 2026 congressional elections in Louisiana be held under a map that has been held to be unconstitutional." SCOTUS' Republican majority has long required elections to be held under illegal maps—when it hurts Dems.

Let me be blunt: Democrats should gerrymander the ever living shit out of every state where we have unified control of government. If we need to gerrymander our way to electing a Congress that will ban gerrymandering, then we should fucking do it. open.substack.com/pub/santiago...

Professor Derek Peterson gave a commencement speech now being censored because it named Palestinian humanity. He celebrated Jewish, Black, and women students. The apology from the University of Michigan President came only for Palestinians. That’s not a coincidence. That’s policy.

“Let’s be precise about what just happened. A MacArthur Genius who celebrated Jewish students, Black students, women, and Palestinian solidarity activists in the same speech was publicly reprimanded, had his speech erased from the public record, and was subjected to a university apology”

Alabama’s lieutenant governor, who also serves as president of the state Senate, posted a 7-0 Republican gerrymander calling for his party to eliminate both Black Democrats. Every seat on a map like this would be dark red and heavily white

Top 15 TV shows, gut instinct only (dating myself, but also demonstrating wide-ranging interests) MASH Star Trek (original) Carol Burnett Show Mary Tyler Moore Show West Wing Friends Seinfeld ER Battlestar Galactica (the new one) Wire Sopranos The Americans Ozark Somebody Somewhere Taskmaster

Anyone remember the Purcell doctrine, saying courts shouldn't change electoral districts too close to the election because it might cause confusion? Remember how SCOTUS applied it six months ago to say it was already too late to invalidate the Texas districts? Funny how that didn't happen in Callais

And so, the right posture needs to be some combination of escalating the hardball while always keeping alive the offer of deescalation, provided that it's *mutual.* newrepublic.com/article/2098...

Mississippi Republicans quickly began pushing to eliminate Bennie Thompson's district in Mississippi after the VRA ruling. This would leave Mississippi—where nearly 4-in-10 residents are Black—with four white-majority congressional districts. www.mississippifreepress.org/mississippi-...

I loved The Electric Company

Top 15 TV shows, gut instinct only (dating myself, but also demonstrating wide-ranging interests) MASH Star Trek (original) Carol Burnett Show Mary Tyler Moore Show West Wing Friends Seinfeld ER Battlestar Galactica (the new one) Wire Sopranos The Americans Ozark Somebody Somewhere Taskmaster

This is what tariffs were always all about for Trump. Not about revenue, trade, domestic manufacturing, GDP - it’s about giving himself the unilateral power to decide economic winners and losers on a case by case basis, with kings and CEOs coming to him asking forbearance..

“What you’re saying to us [is]…‘You can use [race] to help yourself achieve goals that reduce particular groups’ electoral participation, but you can’t use it to remedy that situation,’” - Justice Sotomayor

This is actually a great idea

Thread.

Just hours after the ruling... These folks waste no time to advance racial disenfranchisement.