1. United States
2. Texas
3. Letter

The Trump administration has been looking for an excuse to declare the November a national emergency. And it seems the SCOTUS has handed it to them. Because of the recent Louisiana v Callais decision undoing generations of civil rights progress by declaring racism dead at the ballot box, allowing gerrymandering for political and ‘colorblind’ purposes, chaos is ensuing. And our votes and voices will be the victims. In Louisiana an election was in progress when the decision came down. Votes cast will be discarded. Ballots already sent out includes a race the governor just postponed. Also, LA legislators advanced a congressional map eliminating one of the state’s two Black-majority districts. In Tennessee the Republican governor immediately called the Tennessee legislature into emergency special session to get rid of the state’s only Democratic member of Congress. The one representing Memphis. Sixty percent of the people who live in Memphis are Black. Once back in session, the TN lawmakers then repealed their own law that prohibited mid-decade redistricting. On May 7, they cracked Memphis into three districts, diluting Black votes by swamping them with voters in white suburbs. The state had similarly cracked Nashville in 2022, flipping that seat, as well, from Democratic to Republican. On May 8 the Virginia state supreme court voted along partisan lines to strike down a plan THEIR VOTERS had approved to redraw the state’s congressional districts temporarily to counteract GOP partisan gerrymanders in Texas, Florida, Ohio, and other states. On May 11, a week before elections are due to start there, SCOTUS cleared the way for Alabama to use a 2023 district map that lower courts had ruled unconstitutional because it diluted Black voting by spreading Black voters across three districts. Which violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Yesterday Georgia’s Republican governor called a special session of the Georgia General Assembly for June 17 to redraw Georgia’s congressional maps before the 2028 election. He said it was too late to change Georgia’s maps for 2026, but that the Callais decision required Georgia to change its electoral maps. South Carolina’s Republican governor is expected to call for a special session to eliminate the state’s only Black-majority district and only Democratic seat. Mississippi’s Republican governor said MS lawmakers would eliminate the state’s only majority-Black district before 2028. We are watching, in real time, the re-creation of a one-party state in the American South. Words from a GA Rep summed it up… “If Republicans ever used their power to help Georgians, they wouldn’t have to waste time and money redrawing the maps every few years to keep their majorities. June will be our third redistricting since 2021. Republicans need to undo their last gerrymander because it wasn’t good enough to keep their waffling political party in power. Most parties would try out some new ideas. Republicans choose to strip political power from Black people and undo the progress the South made in the last 60 years. Let’s sum it up for everybody. The biggest bloc of middle and working class voters are Black people. When Republicans strip Black people’s political power away, it doesn’t just strip one community of power. It strips political power from every single middle and working class person and hands it over to billionaires and big corporations. That’s what redistricting means for you.” All of this from a party that screams ‘unfair’ at every opportunity. This is the opposite of fair. And it stinks.