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A pole with a sign that says polling station
Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash
The Bipartisan War on Independent Voters
May 28, 2026
The Washington Post editorial board penned a bold piece (Bill Cassidy and America’s Increasingly Broken Primary System) in the wake of President Trump’s successful vendetta against the Louisiana Senator. They could have taken the easy route and pointed a finger at the Republicans. Instead, they took issue with both parties and their insatiable appetite to control the rules of the game and punish anyone who steps out of line.
In a media landscape dominated by partisan propaganda, it’s refreshing to read an opinion piece that encourages readers to actually look at what’s happening.
The Democrats have gotten a pass on the issue of open primaries for years. For the most part, the media has bought in on (and propagated) the myth that when it comes to voting, the Republicans are into voter suppression while the Democrats stand solidly behind voting rights.
I wish we lived in such a simple world.
If you actually look at what’s happening in the country, both the Democrats and the Republicans are systematically attacking the right of independent voters - now 45% of the electorate - to fully participate. The Democrats are leading the charge in DC, Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, California, and Nevada, places where independent voters are surging. In Massachusetts, for example, 65% of registered voters have opted for “independent” on their voter registration form and 70% of state legislators run unopposed, but the Mass. Democratic Party strongly opposes the current effort to enact an all candidate primary system. And the Democratic Party of Maryland insists that Governor Wes Moore didn’t really mean it when he spoke out in favor of letting one million independents participate in Maryland primary elections.
Not to be outdone, the Republicans are on the warpath in Colorado, Tennessee, South Carolina, Alabama and Texas, where they are advancing bills and lawsuits to force voters to join a party if they want to participate in (taxpayer funded) primary elections. In Tennessee, the GOP legislature posts these signs on every poll in the state. No wonder primary turnout is 14% while general election turnout is 64% in the Volunteer State.
Both parties work overtime to rig the rules in their favor. But for some reason, the media has bought into this myth that the Republicans are the bad guys and the Democrats are the good guys, when in fact both parties, in different states and in different ways, lock the system down through gerrymandering and closed primaries. They definitely don’t want independent voices participating, and they want to make sure that their elected officials are completely loyal to the party, that they’re not going to represent their people that put them in there, but the party apparatus that gets them elected.
The other aspect of the Post editorial worth noting is more philosophical.
America is a competitive place. Good or bad, it’s a feature of our culture. And we Americans are accustomed to competition increasing as you get closer to naming a winner. Many people tune into the NBA playoffs, March Madness or the Olympics only after the preliminary rounds are over. That’s how competition works.
But the Democrats and Republicans have turned competition completely on its head. In 90% of America, competition actually decreases after the first round. The general election is an afterthought, predetermined by gerrymandering and other factors. For most of us, all the competition is in the primary - round one - and most of us are not paying attention and participating.
It’s a sorry state of affairs. And the open primaries movement has our work cut out for us.
We need to enact open and nonpartisan primaries in states that are closed. We need to defend open primaries from attacks from both major parties. And we have to educate the American people that voting in round one is how to exercise power. We can’t wait until November to make our voices heard. In most races, the game is up.
John Opdycke is the president of Open Primaries, a national election reform organization.
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How immigration policy, declining birth rates, and an aging population are pushing Social Security and Medicare toward a fiscal crisis. Explore the hidden link between immigrant labor, retirement security, and America’s demographic future.
DNY59 / Getty Images
Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Has a Hidden Cost: Social Security
May 28, 2026
The Trump administration frames the immigration debate around borders, crime, culture, and national identity. This conceals an uncomfortable reality for the administration: America’s retirement system increasingly depends on immigrant labor to survive.
That dependence is not ideological. It is demographic, rooted in the shrinking ratio between workers paying into the system and retirees drawing benefits from it.
The Demographic Squeeze
Social Security operates on a simple premise. Current workers fund current retirees through payroll taxes. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law in 1935, as a cornerstone of his New Deal, the system rested on a young and rapidly expanding workforce. There were more than 40 workers supporting each retiree, life expectancy was significantly shorter, and the ratio between contributors and beneficiaries strongly favored the system’s long-term stability.
That arrangement worked remarkably well for decades. But the underlying demographics have changed dramatically. Americans are living longer, birth rates have declined, and the massive Baby Boom generation is now moving fully into retirement. Today, fewer than three workers support each Social Security beneficiary, and that ratio is expected to fall even further in the coming decades.
To be sure, worker productivity has risen enormously since the 1930s due to technological advances, automation, and economic growth. A modern worker produces far more economic output than previous generations could have imagined. But higher productivity alone cannot fully offset the fiscal pressures created by a shrinking ratio of workers to retirees. Social Security depends not simply on productivity, but on a sufficiently large labor force paying payroll taxes into the system.
The system is already under strain. Social Security now pays out more in benefits than it collects in payroll taxes, forcing it to draw increasingly from its trust fund reserves. Those reserves are projected to be exhausted around 2033. Once depleted, the system would face automatic benefit reductions of roughly 23 percent unless Congress intervenes. At the same time, Medicare Part A, which funds hospital care for seniors, faces a similar timetable for insolvency, suggesting that the financial pressures created by an aging society extend well beyond Social Security alone.
Immigration and the Social Security Workforce
This is where immigration enters the picture in ways many Americans may not fully appreciate. Immigrants are disproportionately concentrated in working-age populations. They fill jobs, pay payroll taxes, consume goods and services, and help sustain the labor force supporting an aging society. Even undocumented immigrants contribute billions annually into Social Security through payroll deductions, often without ever qualifying to collect benefits themselves.
The Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown, therefore, carries consequences that extend well beyond the border. Reducing the number of future workers entering the labor force also reduces the number of taxpayers supporting Social Security and Medicare. The politics of immigration restriction are colliding directly with the arithmetic of an aging nation.
The Politics of Contradiction
This creates a political contradiction that neither party has been particularly eager to confront honestly.
Politicians in both parties avoid discussing the problem because nearly every available solution carries political risk. Raising payroll taxes is unpopular. Cutting benefits is politically toxic. Increasing immigration remains deeply polarizing. Even relatively modest proposals, such as gradually raising the retirement age or reducing benefits for wealthier retirees, trigger fierce backlash.
Democrats have often treated Social Security reform as politically untouchable, wary of alienating older voters and organized labor. Republicans, meanwhile, have increasingly built their coalition around older Americans while embracing policies that weaken the long-term financing of the system. Trump has repeatedly promised not to cut Social Security benefits while also proposing to eliminate taxes on Social Security income and aggressively reduce immigration.
Individually, those promises may sound politically attractive. Together, they create a fiscal trap. Taxes on Social Security benefits help finance both Social Security and Medicare, while immigration helps sustain the labor force paying payroll taxes into those systems. Removing revenue while simultaneously shrinking the future workforce places greater pressure on programs already strained by demographic imbalance.
Yet arithmetic has a way of asserting itself eventually, regardless of ideology or campaign slogans.
The Illusion of Stability
For years, the Social Security trust fund has masked the severity of the problem by allowing the government to draw down accumulated reserves. That cushion created the appearance that the system’s finances remained fundamentally stable even as the worker-to-retiree ratio steadily deteriorated underneath.
The trust fund itself emerged from reforms enacted in the 1980s, when lawmakers recognized that the retirement of the Baby Boom generation would eventually place enormous pressure on the system. In a rare bipartisan effort led by President Ronald Reagan and Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill, Congress responded by gradually increasing payroll taxes and raising the retirement age, generating large surpluses that accumulated over several decades. Those reserves were intended to help cushion the financial shock once millions of Baby Boomers began retiring.
For a time, the strategy appeared successful. The growing trust fund helped reassure Americans that Social Security remained financially secure, even as demographic trends quietly moved in the opposite direction. Politically, the existence of the reserves also made it easier for elected officials to postpone more difficult structural reforms.
But trust funds are not magic. They help mask long-term imbalance, creating the illusion of stability even as the underlying demographic pressures continue to worsen. The reserves buy time, but they do not eliminate the underlying arithmetic. Once those reserves are exhausted, the choices become immediate and unavoidable.
When Retirement Stops Working
For millions of middle-class retirees, the consequences would be severe. Consider a retired couple living largely on Social Security, modest savings, and perhaps a small pension. A 23 percent reduction in benefits could mean the difference between stability and financial distress. Mortgage payments, prescription drug costs, utilities, property taxes, and grocery bills would not suddenly fall simply because Washington failed to act.
For wealthier retirees, such cuts would be painful but manageable. For many middle-class and lower-income seniors, however, Social Security is not supplemental income. It is the foundation holding together retirement itself.
According to the Social Security Administration, roughly 40 percent of older Americans rely on Social Security for at least half of their income, while about 12 percent depend on it for 90 percent or more. For millions of retirees, the monthly check is what keeps food on the table and prevents poverty.
Increasingly, retirement itself is becoming less permanent. A growing number of older Americans are being, in effect, “fired from retirement” as rising housing, healthcare, insurance, and food costs outpace their savings. Recent reporting in The New York Times highlighted retirees returning to the workforce not because they want to stay active, but because they can no longer afford not to work. Some have taken part-time retail jobs, others returned to consulting or gig work, and many quietly depleted retirement accounts faster than expected during the inflationary shocks of the past several years.
A major reduction in Social Security benefits would intensify those pressures dramatically. Americans who spent decades believing they had reached financial stability could suddenly find themselves re-entering the labor market in their seventies, competing for work at the very moment age and health often make employment more difficult.
Without reforms, millions of older Americans could find themselves forced to delay retirement, return to work, draw down already limited savings, or make difficult choices between healthcare, housing, and daily living expenses.
The Choices Washington Keeps Avoiding
If Social Security is to remain solvent over the long term, immigration reform cannot be separated from the conversation. The politics of the issue may focus on the border, but the economics point toward the workforce.
None of the available solutions are politically easy, which helps explain why both parties have delayed serious action for so long. One option would be to raise payroll taxes, either by increasing the overall tax rate or by lifting the cap on taxable income so that higher earners contribute more. Another would involve gradually increasing the retirement age to reflect longer life expectancy, though critics argue this unfairly burdens lower-income Americans working physically demanding jobs.
But demographics suggest that some form of meaningful immigration reform will almost certainly be necessary as well. A country with declining birth rates and a rapidly aging population needs workers to sustain both economic growth and the tax base supporting retirement programs. Immigration alone cannot solve Social Security’s long-term financing problems, but without a sufficiently large labor force, the system becomes far more difficult to sustain.
Lawmakers could also reduce benefits for wealthier retirees while protecting lower-income seniors who depend heavily on Social Security for survival. Some economists have proposed partial privatization or expanded private retirement accounts, though such proposals remain deeply controversial after decades of political backlash.
Each proposal carries trade-offs. Raising taxes risks political backlash from workers already struggling with stagnant wages and rising costs. Raising the retirement age may seem reasonable to professionals working desk jobs but it feels far less realistic to construction workers, nurses, warehouse employees, or others whose bodies wear down long before their seventies.
Immigration presents perhaps the clearest example of America’s political and economic tensions colliding head-on and may ultimately become the defining contradiction shaping the future of Social Security itself. Americans increasingly want both tighter immigration restrictions and fully protected retirement benefits, even as the demographic realities sustaining those programs make those goals progressively harder to reconcile. Many voters support tighter border enforcement and lower immigration levels while also demanding that Social Security and Medicare remain fully funded. Yet those goals increasingly work against one another. Restricting the future workforce while preserving existing benefit commitments places greater strain on programs already facing demographic pressure.
But refusing to choose is itself a choice. For years, Washington has relied on the assumption that the crisis remained distant enough to postpone difficult decisions. Politicians could promise seniors that benefits would remain untouched while simultaneously assuring taxpayers that taxes would not rise. The trust fund helped sustain this illusion by masking the widening gap between political rhetoric and demographic reality.
That gap is now narrowing rapidly. The longer policymakers wait, the more abrupt and painful the eventual adjustments are likely to become.
Robert Cropf is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Louis University.
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Members of the House Judiciary Committee during the hearing on the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Credit: Olivia Ardito
Tensions were High as Representatives Debated Allegations Against the Southern Poverty Law Center
May 28, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing last Wednesday examining claims that the Southern Poverty Law Center had funded the very hate groups the center aims to dismantle. Tensions were high as Republicans and Democrats fired back at each other. Noticeably absent was a representative from the center, a non-profit that since 1971 has fought for racial justice and against white supremacy.
The hearing came after the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced last Monday that he was investigating the center. The U.S. Justice Department indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center in April for allegedly funneling money to people associated with violent extremist groups. The group has flatly rejected the accusations. While Republicans backed these claims, Democrats viewed the allegations as part of the Trump-backed efforts to hinder “DEI” and other racial justice initiatives.
Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, opened the hearing by discussing the Justice Department’s claims that the center paid members of white supremacist organizations, like the Ku Klux Klan, millions of dollars over the span of multiple years to manufacture hate and racism.
“[The Southern Poverty Law Center] said, ‘We're going to create the crisis. We're going to manufacture the crisis.’ And by so doing, they became the standard, the source for determining who’s a hate group and who isn’t. And of course, they labeled good, pro-family, conservative organizations as hate groups,” Jordan said.
Jordan’s claims also included assertions that the Southern Poverty Law Center collaborated with the Biden administration and was responsible for funding organizers of the Charlottesville white supremacist rally for the center’s own financial benefit.
The center “went from 51 million annual income to 133 million dollars. Turned out for them, creating hate was more profitable than fighting it. That’s exactly what they did. They ran a scam, they became the standard, they didn’t get prosecuted, and they made a ton of money,” Jordan said.
In a press release after the indictment, the Southern Poverty Law Center denied the allegations. “We are outraged by the false allegations levied against SPLC – an organization that for 55 years has stood as a beacon of hope fighting white supremacy and various forms of injustice to create a multi-racial democracy where we can all live and thrive,” the organization said.
In the hearing, Democrats reiterated this message. Rankin Member Jamie Raskin, D-Md., rebutted against the Republicans in his opening statement.
“For decades, the Southern Poverty Law Center shared information about racist terror plots with the FBI coming from their foreign program. The FBI was happy to receive it, and this practice frequently led to the disruption of dangerous conspiracies by the KKK and neo-Nazi groups to commit violence against synagogues, churches, African Americans, Jews, and other targeted minorities,” Raskin said.
Raskin followed his statement by expressing doubt about the indictment’s claims. His justification included that no civil lawsuits had been filed related to the charges, which Raskin said would be typical in fraud cases.
“What we’re witnessing is a Trump administration fraud on a vast and shocking scale. President Trump has coddled and cultivated the extreme right for as long as he's been in politics. After the infamous ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville in August of 2017… Trump could only bring himself to say that there were some very fine people on both sides,” Raskin said.
Tensions during the hearing reached a high point when Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., called out Raskin for this comment.
“I do need to call out the ranking member for deliberately perpetuating the Democrats’ dishonest claim that Donald Trump praised the Nazis at Charlottesville, when he said there were, quote, ‘very fine people on both sides.’ What the ranking member knows, but chose to leave out, is that Trump then said, ‘I'm not talking about the neo Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally,’ unquote,” McClintock said.
McClintock was then interrupted by Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Georgia, who asked to have these words struck from the record. After over five minutes of back and forth, they decided not to have the word taken from the record.
After passionate speeches from both sides, intense questioning sessions and heated moments, the hearing ended after four and a half hours of discussion. Investigations likely will continue in Texas and there is no set court date for the federal indictment.
The hearing ended with Raskin attempting to subpoena Blanche and other officials to testify on President Trump’s recent $1.8 billion fund to compensate people who believe they were targeted by the federal government. The motion was tabled after an 18-17 vote that, like the hearing, was divided.
Olivia Ardito is a graduate student in journalism with Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism
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President Lyndon B. Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., Clarence Mitchell Jr., Patricia Roberts Harris, and other guests at the signing of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965.
Yoichi Okamoto - Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum
How the Voting Rights Act Reshaped Texas’ Electoral Maps
May 28, 2026
In 2002, U.S. Rep. Henry Bonilla, a Republican, nearly lost his South Texas seat to Democrat Henry Cuellar. So when the GOP used its newfound majority in the state Legislature to redraw the voting maps the next year, they sawed through Cuellar’s hometown of Laredo and scattered Latino voters, who tended to vote Democratic, into other districts.
Latino advocacy groups sued under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the cornerstone provision of the law that prevents government bodies from diluting the voting power of specific groups. The Supreme Court found Texas lawmakers had taken away Latino voting power “because they were about to exercise it.”
“Latino voters were poised to elect their candidate of choice,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority. “The State not only made fruitless the Latinos’ mobilization efforts but also acted against those Latinos who were becoming most politically active.”
Bonilla’s 23rd Congressional District was redrawn, and he lost to a Democrat. Just five years later, Latino voters flipped it back to Republican control; the seat was held most recently by GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales, who resigned last month.
Nina Perales, who argued that case at the Supreme Court, sees that district as an enduring testament to the power of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
“A lot of the districts that we see in the map today were created to make sure that minority communities were not accidentally chopped up, and that minority communities could have a voice in some parts of the state,” Perales said. “In CD-23, when a majority of Latino voters support Gonzales, they get to elect Gonzales, and it’s irrelevant what Gonzales’ political party is.”
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court gutted Section 2, raising the bar for voter dilution claims so high as to make the statute a “dead letter,” as Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent. Partisan gerrymandering, like the type used to try to keep Bonilla in power, is a defense against allegations of vote dilution, the conservative majority ruled. Under the new standard, plaintiffs will have to prove mapmakers intentionally set out to discriminate against voters on the basis of their race.
Even as it diminishes in power, the legacy of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is deeply woven into Texas’ political maps, reflected in districts carefully drawn to ensure voters of color could have a say. The landmark 1965 law also gave rise to a new generation of leaders, elected from Black, Hispanic and Asian communities. From that point on, both parties would have to look out for voters of color when drawing their maps — and if they didn’t, voters would have legal recourse.
Rep. Marc Veasey, D-Fort Worth, said his career has been “defined” by the Voting Rights Act. As a young Black state representative, he was elected in 2012 to a congressional district drawn to right what a court found to be a legislative wrong: Texas had divided communities of color in North Texas across multiple majority-white seats designed to elect Republicans. Fourteen years later, Veasey is now departing Congress after GOP lawmakers redrew the district out from under him last summer.
With Section 2 of the VRA now significantly weakened, it will be harder to make the legal case that this redraw had an improper racial, rather than partisan, intent.
The recent hollowing out of the Voting Rights Act created a disconcerting full circle moment for Veasey, who recalled that his district was originally drawn for Willow Park GOP Rep. Roger Williams. Under the new lines, Veasey noted, Williams “will end up representing my neighborhood after all.”
How Section 2 remade Texas’ maps
In 1965, when Texas’ favorite son, President Lyndon B. Johnson, signed the Voting Rights Act into law, he said the vote “is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice.”
The law included two pillars with significant implications for Texas — Section 2, which prohibits voter discrimination based on race, and Section 5, which requires jurisdictions with histories of racial discrimination to get preapproval from the Department of Justice for any voting changes, including new electoral maps.
Before the law went into effect, Texas had just two people of color in its congressional delegation — Reps. Henry Gonzalez of San Antonio and Kika De La Garza from the Rio Grande Valley, both of whom were Mexican-American. They each voted for the Voting Rights Act that would enable the ranks of Hispanic lawmakers to swell significantly.
In the 1970s, Barbara Jordan became the first Black member of Congress from Texas. As a state senator, Jordan helped draw the district she would soon be elected to, a seat that provides Black Houstonians the opportunity to elect their candidate of choice to this day. Three new representatives of color joined Texas’ congressional delegation in the 1980s. By the 1990s, there were 13 members of color who served at any point during the decade. With two more election cycles to go, the 2020s have already reached a peak of 22 members of color, some of whom have represented white-majority districts.
During her sophomore term, in 1975, Jordan got Texas added to the list of states that needed preclearance for its maps. In 1982, Congress reinforced the law with an amendment that said maps ran afoul of the law if they had the effect of diluting racial or ethnic groups’ vote, even if that wasn’t the intent. These new provisions, the second of which overruled a Supreme Court decision to the contrary, opened the floodgates to litigation against Texas’ maps, at every level of government.
In each decade since the law’s passage, at least one of Texas’ maps has been found to have violated the law, and courts have ordered at least one new district to be drawn. The maps drawn in 2021 and 2025 are still under active litigation.
In the 1980s, plaintiffs successfully sued over the congressional, state Senate and state House maps under the Voting Rights Act, compelling redraws of legislative seats that were found to have diluted Black and Hispanic voting strength through packing them into just a few districts in the state’s urban counties — and into a single district in South Texas. Through preclearance, the Department of Justice also ordered Texas to redraw districts that diluted Black and Hispanic voters’ strength. The effects of those redraws can still be seen in today’s maps.
“You had charges and claims against the South Texas district, because they were packed down against the border,” said Matt Angle, a Democratic strategist and founder of the Lone Star Project who has been involved in Texas redistricting cases for decades. “That’s why now, you see South Texas districts running north and south instead of along the bottom. It’s because [of] the court rulings under the Voting Rights Act, that you couldn’t pack those districts down against the border.”
More subtle, but just as important, was the way the Voting Rights Act pushed Texas lawmakers to proactively consider voters of color when drawing their electoral maps, Perales said. In the 1990s, for example, the majority-Hispanic 28th and 29th Congressional Districts “were born out of an understanding that the state needed to comply with Section 2,” she said.
Having grasped that it would be better to comply on the front end than be hauled into court later, the Legislature used to bring MALDEF and other groups in around the decennial census to train legislators on how to draw maps that met the law’s requirements.
“Part of that legal training was always on the obligation to avoid discriminating against minority voters under Section 2 the Voting Rights Act,” she said. “The guidance was, don’t inadvertently chop up minority communities when you’re drawing lines, because even if it’s inadvertent, it could be a legal problem.”
In 2013, the Supreme Court eliminated preclearance for most jurisdictions, including Texas. The state immediately reinstated a voter ID law that had been caught up under Section 5. The decision also freed Texas’ 2011 electoral maps from preclearance, though some parts of the map were later redrawn over Section 2 violations.
“A pre-1965 posture”
The centerpiece of the court’s redrawn map was the new 33rd Congressional District, crafted to allow voters of color to elect their preferred candidate in fast-growing Dallas and Tarrant county. The new lines were later upheld after a trial, in which the court concluded that lawmakers had “acted at least in part with a racially discriminatory motive … with regard to the districts in DFW in particular.”
Veasey was a state representative planning to run for reelection — and on his way to see a pre-Thanksgiving movie with his family — when he got a call that changed his career.
“I heard, hey, they’re gonna draw a new map, and there’s probably going to be an opportunity for you to run,” Veasey said. “You’ve got to make up your mind quick over whether you’re going to do it.”
He ran, and won, giving him a chance to represent a district that was as diverse as the state of Texas — one that would last about a decade and a half before falling victim to the GOP’s mid-decade redistricting.
Several other congressional districts that were shaped by the Voting Rights Act were subsequently dismantled by Republicans last summer. Among them are Hispanic-opportunity districts in South Texas, such as the 28th District represented by Cuellar, who rebounded from his loss to Bonilla to become one of Texas’ longest-tenured members of Congress.
The VRA also helped create Houston’s 9th Congressional District, where more than four in five residents are Black or Hispanic.
Last summer, lawmakers redrew it to a “bare majority” — 50.3% Hispanic — as they did several other districts.
Early last week, the Supreme Court allowed that map to go into effect while a trial proceeds. Just two days later, the court ruled in Louisiana v. Callais that the results-based test that had been used for decades should be replaced with a new, higher bar that allows for an easier partisan defense.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, said lower courts had applied Section 2 “in a way that forces States to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids.” Under the new framework Alito laid out in the decision, a Section 2 claim must prove that the state “intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.”
Angle said Texas’ most recent rounds of redistricting demonstrate what a post-Section 2 future may look like.
“You’ve got a situation in which a state that’s over 60% people of color is only going to have somewhere between 20% and 30% of the districts where voters of color’s vote matters at all,” Angle said.
State Rep. Matt Shaheen, a Republican from Plano, said the U.S. had a long history of vote suppression that made the Voting Rights Act necessary.
“But we’ve moved on from that, clearly, and I think people recognize minority voters are entitled to equal representation but not certain election outcomes,” Shaheen said. “It really is more of a colorblind society, and elections are very much driven now by principles and policies, and not so much on skin color.”
Shaheen is among several GOP lawmakers who say they hope Texas takes up redistricting anew during the 2027 legislative session, this time with a focus on the state House and Senate lines.
Perales agrees that the Voting Rights Act is not about specific electoral outcomes. But she disagrees that the country is ready to move on from ensuring racial and ethnic voters have the opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice, regardless of political party or the ethnicity of the candidate.
“As much as Justice Alito wanted to make it seem like a case about partisanship, it isn’t,” she said. “It’s about dismantling something much more historic and much more deeply needed in our country, which is equal opportunity for everybody.”
For Veasey, the ruling was not a surprise. But now that his district has been chopped up and the VRA’s core provision has been kneecapped, the retiring congressman sees a bleak future for the representation of Black and brown voters.
“It’s going to go back to a pre-1965 posture,” he said. “We just won’t have nearly as many voices pushing. It’s just be [like] when we had one or two voices that were pushing back before the VRA was passed — that’s what it’s going to be like now.
How the Voting Rights Act Reshaped Texas’ Electoral Maps was originally published by The Texas Tribune, shared by VoteBeat Texas, and is republished with permission.
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