{"id":150796,"date":"2025-08-12T03:21:35","date_gmt":"2025-08-12T03:21:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/?p=150796"},"modified":"2025-08-12T03:21:38","modified_gmt":"2025-08-12T03:21:38","slug":"the-death-of-the-fourth-american-republic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/?p=150796","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;The Death of the Fourth American Republic&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/08\/06\/opinion\/supreme-court-voting-rights-act.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NY Times<\/a>: &#8220;Last Friday, the Supreme Court all but announced how it would rule on the future of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">The case in question, Louisiana v. Callais, which was\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.supremecourt.gov\/oral_arguments\/audio\/2024\/24-109\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">heard<\/a>\u00a0for the first time in March, is a dispute over the drawing of the state\u2019s six congressional districts. Nearly one-third of Louisianans are Black, but in 2022 state lawmakers drew just one district where those Black voters had a reasonable chance of electing a representative of their choice&#8230;.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">A federal appeals court sided with the plaintiffs and ordered the Louisiana State Legislature to draw a new map with a second majority-Black congressional district, which it did. But this map was challenged by a group of self-described \u201cnon-African American\u201d voters, who charged that it was an illegal racial gerrymander. It\u2019s this case that the Supreme Court has decided in essence to hear again, and it is for this case that the court wants the parties&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.supremecourt.gov\/orders\/courtorders\/080125zr_i4dk.pdf\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">to address<\/a>&nbsp;\u201cwhether the state\u2019s intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the 14th or 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">Under the current Supreme Court\u2019s vision of a rigidly colorblind Constitution \u2014 indifferent to either racial inequality or the mechanisms of color caste \u2014 the answer is very likely to be yes. There is also the matter of Chief Justice John Roberts, who has led the court\u2019s effort to curb, limit and undermine the Voting Rights Act. One assumes that having gotten the court to strike down one part of the law in 2013, he is eager to get it to strike down another, considering his\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.com\/magazine\/story\/2015\/08\/john-roberts-voting-rights-act-121222\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">decades-long hostility<\/a>\u00a0to the law, which has been in his sights since he was a young lawyer in the Reagan administration.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NY Times: &#8220;Last Friday, the Supreme Court all but announced how it would rule on the future of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The case in question, Louisiana v. Callais, which was\u00a0heard\u00a0for the first time in March, is a dispute over the drawing of the state\u2019s six congressional districts. Nearly one-third of Louisianans are&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newsstory"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=150796"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":150797,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150796\/revisions\/150797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=150796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=150796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=150796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}