Reform Elections Now is a nonpartisan organization of professionals concerned about the current political dysfunction that prevents government from working to solve the nation's biggest problems. We feel election reform is the key. Our mission is to facilitate election reform through education and engagement, with practical solutions that will enhance informed discourse, increase voter participation and motivate better representation by our elected officials. In addition to preparing 'white papers' on various reform initiatives, we hold monthly sessions open to all on timely relevant topics.
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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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Our Nation’s Teachers: Appreciated in Name, Dishonored in Practice
May 27, 2026
Earlier this month, the United States celebrated Teacher Appreciation Week, the one week during the year when a Starbucks discount is supposed to stand in for respect. This week is often filled with corporations praising teacher sacrifice, but the Department of Education had a different idea.
Across its social media, the DoE shared images of Ms. Fowl, Ms. Hoover, Mrs. Puff, Miss Nelson, and Ms. Frizzle, fictional teachers who are often well-meaning but marred by burnout, incompetence, eccentricity, and paranoia. If they truly wanted to honor teachers, they could have chosen Ms. Keane from the PowerPuff Girls, Mr. Ratburn from Arthur, or Miss Grotke from Recess — teachers depicted as competent, caring, and respected. But they didn’t. The selection offered plausible deniability. The characters are beloved enough to pass as celebration, but flawed enough to communicate contempt. The White House couldn’t have made its disregard for educators plainer if it tried.
And it did try.
The following week, the Department of Education celebrated National Charter Schools Week, and the posts looked strikingly different. Images of children reaching for the stars, families showing care for one another, and teachers as guides to smiling children provided a foil to the broken teachers depicted the week before. This was the visual language of aspiration following a week filled with the visual language of disorder. The malady was public schools and the teachers therein. The cure? Charter schools. Same administration, different week, and an unmistakable message about which version of education this country should want.
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has made her disregard for teachers a feature of her tenure. At the beginning of May, the Department of Education released its final rule redefining which graduate degrees qualify as “professional” for federal student loan purposes. Effective July 1, students in eleven designated fields — medicine, law, dentistry, and others — may borrow at higher federal levels. Students pursuing degrees in education, health, and social work will not. On the surface, the rule just limits borrowing, but beneath it lies a message about which professions this country considers worth investing in. It sends a message that what teachers do is not specialized, not significant enough to be funded, not a profession.
To be sure, the deprofessionalization of education is not new. For decades, policies have systematically stripped teachers of their professional judgment by pressuring them to teach to standardized tests rather than to children, funneling underprepared recruits into the most under-resourced schools, and handing them scripted curricula that leave no room for creativity, flexibility, or expertise. The message has always been the same: teaching is a task, not a profession. What’s new is how openly this administration is saying so.
What was once the concern of teachers and education scholars is now center stage, posted on governmental social media accounts for the world to see. No longer is the disrespect and lack of care for teachers a conversation in the teachers’ lounge or an argument in an academic journal. Now, it’s on a platform followed by millions.
But this visibility was not a celebration. It was a broadened exposure designed to undermine teachers at scale. And with millions of followers witnessing this deskilling in real time, citizens are given permission to engage in that same practice of devaluation. It’s what gives school boards the authority to override teachers' expertise in selecting books. It’s what emboldens parents to dismiss teacher judgment. It’s what allows government officials to dictate how and whether teachers can honor the children in front of them.
As a teacher educator, I watch preservice teachers in my classes wrestle with whether they will have the power to tailor instruction to their students or whether they’ll just have to teach from the textbook. They fear being fired for helping a student find the right book. They’re scared of being labeled as ineffective if they choose to bring art and imagination into their classrooms. They are terrified of public attacks that might come if they acknowledge the lives and experiences of the children in their care. These are not irrational fears. This administration has made them reasonable.
Linda McMahon knows what real appreciation looks like, and she chooses dishonor instead. We don’t have to do the same. We can acknowledge that teachers are deliberately and professionally trained, that they carry knowledge, care, and sacrifice into classrooms every day to help the next generation reach their potential. We can acknowledge that even when they get it wrong, they are still out there fighting for our communities and our futures against considerable odds. We can choose to see them clearly in a world that villainizes them.
Because if we appreciate teachers the way McMahon has, we won’t have many left. But perhaps that’s exactly the goal.
Stephanie Toliver is a Public Voices Fellow and a member of the OpEd Alumni Project sponsored by the University of Illinois.
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Why I Stopped Being Angry and Started Being Alert
May 27, 2026
Earlier this year I found myself doing something I'm not proud of: posting angry screeds on LinkedIn about the state of our democracy. The posts felt good to write. They changed nothing.
Then I noticed my feed filling up with similar posts from similarly frustrated professionals - lawyers, executives, consultants, educators - and it hit me: anger without organization is just noise. And noise doesn't move people.
So I took a deep breath and asked myself: what was I actually trying to accomplish?
The answer was clear. I believed that many of our business leaders were badly misjudging the level of concern among the people around them. Shielded by a professional culture that discourages political expression, they were interpreting silence as acceptance. And that silence, our silence, was making it easier for them to look away as democratic norms eroded around us.
The problem wasn't that professionals didn't care. It was that we had no appropriate way to show it.
I thought about the millions of Americans who had shown up at rallies to express their concern. That kind of visible, organized expression of shared values is how norms shift and how leaders are moved to act. But rallies don't speak the language of the professional class; LinkedIn does. And yet LinkedIn, the one platform where business and civic leaders actually pay attention, remained oddly quiet.
So a small group of like-minded professionals and I built something.
It's called We Are Alert. The initiative asks professionals to do one thing: add a WeAreAlert.org frame to their LinkedIn profile photo. No petition. No donation. No party affiliation. Just a visible signal, in the most professional context we inhabit, that we are paying attention.
The hardest part of building it wasn't technical. It was figuring out how to create something genuinely non-partisan in this uniquely polarized moment in American history.
I'll be transparent: our founding group’s political views are mostly left of center. We say that openly because we believe these principles belong to everyone, and because an initiative like this only means something if it grows beyond the people who started it. The We Are Alert statement takes deliberate care to avoid targeting any party, policy, or leader. We are not here to fight a partisan battle. We are here because democratic norms - honest leadership, equal application of the law, the peaceful transfer of power - are not liberal or conservative values. They are the foundation on which our democracy and prosperity are built.
The theory behind We Are Alert is simple: when enough professionals make their values visible in the spaces where their leaders actually pay attention, it shifts norms. The #MeToo movement showed what happens when silence breaks in professional spaces. The Business Roundtable's 2019 statement on stakeholder capitalism showed that when enough business leaders signal a shift in values, it changes the conversation. Visible, organized professional expression matters.
We are not naive about what a LinkedIn frame can and cannot do. It will not by itself restore democratic norms. But it can help break the silence that makes those norms easier to erode. It can signal to business and civic leaders that their employees, colleagues, constituents, and peers are paying attention. And it can create the kind of visible clustering that makes the concern impossible to ignore.
That is the modest but meaningful ambition of We Are Alert.
We launched last week at wearealert.org. The response so far has been what you'd expect from any early-stage civic initiative: a small but growing group of professionals willing to make their concern visible, and a much larger group who are interested but hesitating.
That hesitation is itself worth examining. It reflects something real about the professional culture we've built: one that has so thoroughly separated work from civic life that even the most basic expression of civic concern feels risky. We have normalized a silence that serves no one except those who benefit from it.
Democratic norms are not self-enforcing. They depend on enough people being willing to defend them: visibly, consistently, and in the spaces where it counts.
We are professionals from across the political spectrum who believe those norms are under serious threat. We choose not to be silent.
Stand with us. Be alert.
Gary Forman is a retired speechwriter, communications consultant, and creative director based in New York. He is a cofounder (with Lin Shearer) of We Are Alert, a non-partisan civic visibility initiative for professionals at wearealert.org.
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Audience members listen as U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at the Coosa Steel Corporation on February 19, 2026 in Rome, Georgia.
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Heil Trump!
May 27, 2026
Stop. I am not implying that Trump is the equivalent of Hitler. As I have said in two previous posts suggesting an analogy between Hitler and Trump, while Trump has an evil streak, he is not even close to being as evil as Hitler (see "The Hitler-Trump Analogy" and "Another Hitler-Trump Analogy"). However, Trump has characteristics, and his supporters have characteristics, in common with Hitler and his followers.
Trump is a megalomaniac; his self-aggrandizement knows no bounds. See my article, "Trump - Poster Child of a Megalomaniac." Trump clearly thinks of himself as a man who can do no wrong, the brightest person in the world, a king, a master of the universe. There are no rules that apply to him. As he said in a New York Times interview, "My own morality, my own mind. It's the only thing that can stop me."
He has taken this country to war without consulting or getting authorization from Congress, disrupting not just America's economy and causing price increases, but disrupting economies around the world. And when asked whether he has considered the impact of the war on the prices people have to pay, on Americans' finances, his response was "not even a little bit. I don't think about Americans' financial situation."
Trump demands total obeisance from everyone around him. Trump will brook no disagreement with him or failure to follow his orders. And because he has made clear what will happen to you if you do cross him, just about everyone—whether in the Executive Branch or Republicans in Congress, and even many judges that Trump appointed—bends his knee and does Trump's bidding. Clearly, almost everyone fears Trump's wrath.
Trump destroys his enemies. Depending on whether you are a disloyal Republican or a Democrat, Trump's retribution differs. If you are a disloyal member of Congress, he will encourage a primary challenge to you and endorse your opponent. If you are a government official, he will fire you; that you attempted to follow his orders but came to the conclusion that it wouldn't work—such as DOJ attorneys who can't get an indictment or think the case is not warranted—does not lessen Trump's anger.
If you are a Democrat who has been a thorn in his side or has in the past been involved in efforts to discredit or punish him, he will order the DOJ to find some reason for indicting you.
Trump is a racist. I am not using the term as it is generally used in the United States, to indicate that someone is biased against Blacks. Trump's racism is broader—he is biased against everyone who is not White. Whether Mexican, Haitian, Muslim, or from other "shit-hole" countries (his term), Trump has used a stream of vitriol to degrade immigrants from such countries/areas, referring to them as rapists, criminals, drug dealers, among other things. As for Blacks, he has referred to them as lazy, stupid, or low I.Q.
To Trump supporters, he can do no wrong. Despite all these negative characteristics of Trump, and despite his actions having worsened their financial situation by causing the prices they pay for everyday food and supplies to increase and his not bringing back their jobs, as he promised, Trump supporters—not just his hard-core base, but Republicans in general—continue to support him.
While the latest New York Times/Sienna poll shows him to be at his lowest approval rating ever—75% of independents and virtually all Democrats now disapprove of his performance—he continues to draw solid support from Republicans. It appears that nothing he does will weaken their support for him; they are like members of a cult.
So even as he causes havoc in the United States and around the world, even as his policies have worsened the' economic plight of America's blue-collar middle class and poor—whether White or people of color—he is worshipped by the average Republican voter and either worshipped or feared by the average Republican elected official or government employee.
They are almost fanatical in their support of him. So the title of this article, "Heil Trump," is not inappropriate. He is, in the minds of most Republican voters, "der Führer," the exalted leader.
Ronald L. Hirsch is a teacher, legal aid lawyer, survey researcher, nonprofit executive, consultant, composer, author, and volunteer. He is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Chicago Law School and the author of We Still Hold These Truths. Read more of his writing at www.PreservingAmericanValues.com
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