Supreme Court Makes Major Ruling on Midterms

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1:00Michael Popok:That sounds you hear. That's a starter's pistol that the United States Supreme Court MAGA Majority 6-3 just fired to start the race to the bottom to remap federal congressional maps based on a new decision that we were expecting. But now we've got it in a case called Calais coming out of Louisiana that is effectively is going to allow states, primarily red states, to redo their maps for congressional districts in a way that dilutes the power of black and brown and Asian and Hispanic Americans. because now, according to Justice Alito, who wrote the majority decision, we live in a post-racial world.

1:48Michael Popok:We don't have racism anymore. It's all gone since the 1960s when the Voting Rights Act was originally passed. And the Voting Rights Act has been the bane of the existence of Chief Justice Roberts. And his main goal, along with Clarence Thomas, has been to destroy the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965 in order to effectuate the 14th and 15th Amendment of the Constitution and the Equal Protection Clause. And to make sure that first Black Americans, later Brown, Hispanic, Native American, were not going to be abused by the white majority in their state, and they would have sufficient representation in Congress, but forget it now with the Calais decision.

2:40Michael Popok:What we're going to see, now that it's come out here at the end of April, is a race between now and August to remap and remap and remap. We thought it was sort of over with Virginia and Florida, but no, there's going to be attempts to try to squeeze out seven or 10 or 12 or 15 more red MAGA seats before the midterms, because of course, what they can't earn, the Republicans will try to steal. I'm Michael Popak. I'll go through Alito's majority decision, joined by Chief Justice Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Thomas, and Amy Coney Barrett, and the scathing rebuttal and rebuke in the dissent by Kagan, joined by Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown-Jackson.

3:32Michael Popok:Think of this concept of the broken circle, because that's at the heart of Justice Kagan's dissent. You're on the Midas Touch Network and Legal AF. Take a minute, hit the free subscribe button here, and on Legal AF YouTube, where we're building to 1.2 million subscribers talking about cases like this. We ran the oral argument live stream on Legal AF YouTube channel of this case. And I said at the time and throughout that we were worried about Calais, that it would be an opportunity if not to throw away the Voting Rights Act, to shrink it so small that it could be drowned in a bathtub, because that's been the goal of the Supreme Court and John Roberts for the last 20 years, chipping away brick by brick at the protections of the Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965, signed by Lyndon Johnson as part of the Great Society, promoted by civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr.

4:33Michael Popok:and Medgar Evers, and now it's in the trash bin. Because hooray, everybody, don't wrench your shoulders, pat yourselves on the back. We live in a post-racist world. Black people sometimes vote for white people and white people sometimes vote for black people. And there's something called computers that do all the mapping for us. So we're all good now, right? That's sort of Alito's approach. Now, under very limited circumstances, the majority is going to allow some race consideration to come into the mapping, but very, very slight. And this all rise just to show you where it came from. All Louisiana wanted to do, and this is what their own state wanted to do.

5:15Michael Popok:When they did their first map, it came out 6-1, six white districts, one predominantly black district in a state that was about a third black people. They said, well, even they thought, even Louisiana was like, that's gone too far. Let's redo it. So they redrew the map and came up with two, not even three, two primarily black districts. Now, one of them is gerrymandered, meaning it's got an odd shape. It sort of connects predominantly black communities that are maybe 200 miles apart from Shreveport to Alexandria, Lafayette to Baton Rouge. OK, but it created a congressional district where they could vote and get somebody that looks like them elected to Congress.

6:08Michael Popok:Now black Democrats are going to be, are an endangered species, and it's now hunting season. Because that's what the red states are going to try to pick off in their new remapping, which Calais has just given them permission of. When that new map came out, the state then flipped because Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, comes from Louisiana. The Trump administration gets in, puts pressure on them to effectively try to oppose their own map in the case. They flipped. And so it led to a series of back and forth at appellate levels of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals back to the United States Supreme Court.

6:50Michael Popok:Then we had the oral argument and we knew the goose was cooked. Here's how Kagan puts it. I think Kagan, in her dissent and the broken circle hypothesis, kind of gives you everything you need to know about what's wrong with Alito's decision. Here's what she says. And because there's two major concepts when you're dealing with districts and minorities. There's the concept of packing and there's the concept of cracking. Packing is you pack all the minorities into one district, so they get one district, and then you dilute their power in voting in all the other districts, which primarily go white.

7:35Michael Popok:That's packing. And then there's cracking. You take the black vote and you divide it. You crack it and you sprinkle it and divide it among all the white districts to dilute their power so there is no black district. And sometimes states do both. they pack and they crack. Here's what Justice Kagan says in her dissent. This is the start. Consider the story of a hypothetical congressional district and a hypothetical state. Let's say the district is a single county in the shape of a near-perfect circle sitting in the middle of a rectangular state. Okay, got the image? The state is one with a long history of virulent racial discrimination and segregation and political division.

8:18Michael Popok:The population of the circle district, right? The county is 90 % black. The rest of the state is 90 % white and voting has been polarized. Blacks vote for Democratic candidates and whites vote for Republican. The circle district thus enables the state's black community to elect at least a representative of its choice.

8:43Michael Popok:Election after election, black citizens' votes are wasted. The state legislature that in her hypothetical, the state legislature then decides to eliminate the circle district, slicing it into six pie pieces and allocating one each to six new still solidly white districts. That's called cracking. That is racial dilution in its most classic form, says Kagan. A minority community that is cohesive in its geography is split or cracked so that it loses all its electoral influence. And because that is so, Congress in the Voting Rights Act made the practice illegal. Section 2, until today, of the act guarantees that members of every racial group have an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice.

9:34Michael Popok:But no longer, she says on page three, under the court's new view of Section 2, a state can, without legal consequence, systemically dilute minority citizens' voting power. Of course, the majority does not announce today's holding that way. Its opinion is understated. The majority opinion only says it's going to update Section 2. But they can't disentangle race from politics, she goes on to say, and talks about the fact that this court has had its sights on the Voting Rights Act to disable it. and to not recognize the racial divide that still exists in this country. In fact, in Alito's majority opinion, he goes so far as to basically say, hooray, we live in a post-racial country.

10:35Michael Popok:Bad things happened in this country in the 1800s. That's why the 14th and 15th Amendment after the Civil War came into play. I understand that, but it's over now, everybody, because since 1965 and the Voting Rights Act, we've made tremendous strides and there's things called computers and the computers with certain algorithms can just make a new map and we're all better now, right? I mean, I'm barely summarizing his position about what's happened since 1965. We love our cat Chanel, but for the longest time we were dealing with, well, the classic scarf and barf situation. She'd eat too fast, throw up, and I just thought, well, that's normal.

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11:53Michael Popok:Forbes ranks Smalls the best overall cat food. BuzzFeed. It said, my cats went completely ballistic for this stuff. And after switching, 88 % of cat owners reported overall health improvements. So stop serving your little carnivore a bowl of process shortcuts for a limited time because you're a Legal AF listener. Get 60 % off your first order, plus free shipping and free treats for life when you head to smalls.com slash legal AF. That's 60 % off your first order, plus free shipping and free treats for life when you head to smalls.com slash legal AF. The biggest part that he focuses on is a decision that was made about 10 or 15 years ago by the Supreme Court in which they effectively said that partisan gerrymandering, creating congressional districts based on a party and to benefit or advantage a party, the Republicans or the Democrats, that's okay.

12:59Michael Popok:Not only is that okay and not a violation of the Civil Rights Act or the 14th or 15th Amendment or equal protection, but they went further. Courts need to stay out of that fight. That issue is not justiciable, which is the fundamental way of shutting and locking the courthouse door and saying, don't even bring us a case because we can't get involved. Blinders on. That's for the parties to work out. We will never find anything wrong with black, sorry, red and blue redistricting, even if it screws black and brown people. That was the decision that he heavily relies on when he says, hey, there's been a lot of changes since the 1960s.

13:49Michael Popok:And he cites to this case, Rucho versus Common Cause from 2019 to allow partisan gerrymandering. And in this way, he says, this is Alito for the majority, he says, you know, good news. We've had a lot of changes. Black voters now, here's what he said on page 26 over to 27. He says,

14:41Michael Popok:of yours that happens to be black or brown or Asian or Muslim and ask them if they feel that way. I assure you they don't, that they will tell you that they live in a slightly different America than you do because of what they have to deal with on a daily basis. I'm going to tell a story in a minute about Louisiana. But the Voting Rights Act, Alito continues, led to great strides. Oh, here's where we wrench our arms and pat ourselves on the back for solving racism in America. Voting tests were abolished. African-Americans attained political office in record numbers. I mean, he doesn't say Barack Obama got elected twice, but he wants to.

15:23Michael Popok:And then Alito says black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate. And in the last two elections in Louisiana, two out of five, they came out in higher numbers than the white voters. I have a feeling that's the Obama reference. And we have a full-blown two-party system has emerged. And when the vast majority of voters, regardless of race, favors the same political party, a map that is disadvantageous for members of one racial group cannot be explained on the ground that it was drawn in favor of a particular political party. So we're going to allow a little bit of racial component to making maps, but not a whole hell of a lot.

16:05Michael Popok:Now, what they're going to do off of this and their complete revision of what was referred to as the Gingles preconditions named after a case and the way they have now recast Gingles is you're now going to see a race to the bottom. If it hasn't started by the time this video goes up, It will by tomorrow, with Republicans pressured by Donald Trump moving quickly to try to remap between now and August before the primaries. And map and remap and map and remap to try to get a Republican advantage before 435 individual elections for the House are up for grabs at the midterms in the next several months.

16:58That's what they're going to try to do, because they're going to try to steal what they have not earned from the American people.

17:05Michael Popok:To try to put up on the board that they're up by 10 points or 12 seats even before the basketball game has even started. Now, there's backfiring that happens, right? It's called dummy mandering, and that's what the Democrats think is happening now. You try to stretch your electorate too thin. You try to stretch the concentration of Republican and white voters too thin. And then that meets a changing demographic with a Hispanic vote, for instance, that is completely against 70 % or higher against Donald Trump in a way that it wasn't four years ago. But you map with assumptions from four years ago.

17:44Michael Popok:And then the Hispanic vote turns against MAGA. And then the women vote turns against MAGA in large numbers. The under 30 vote turns against MAGA. The Hispanic vote, the women vote, the black vote, the under 30 vote, the tech bro vote, all votes against. And now instead of having, hey, we're going to have 24 red seats against two Democrats. No, no. The electorate speaks and it meets a tidal wave election. And it becomes 17 to 11 or 16 to 12. Because you piss off the electorate and they stand in line to vote you out and run the bastards out on a rail. That's the backfiring component that can't be put into a computer algorithm, that can't be captured in real time to do your map.

18:38Michael Popok:Even the Republicans in state houses are very, very concerned that they're going to be losing their seats because they're getting shoved and pushed by Donald Trump and those around him to remap when they don't want to because they're the closest to their constituency, right, to their voters. I just did an interview yesterday with Mark Elias of Democracy Docket. He's up to his elbows or his neck in voting rights law and litigation. And we had that. I think that interview goes up tomorrow on Democracy Docket and Legal AF. and he and I talked about where he's getting the signal from state houses they don't want to do this but they're being compelled to do it now let me end my hot take and this opinion both Kagan's opinion joined by Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown-Jackson and the Alito majority opinion are up on Legal AF sub-stack for paid members of Legal AF for you to read you should read it Talk about you have to walk in another person's shoes occasionally.

19:47Michael Popok:I had a very close friend that I started my law career with. We, from different paths, ended up in the same law firm in New York, a firm called Skadden. I was there as a first year. He was there as a second year. We were working in the same department. He came through his own processes and law schools and undergraduate experience, and so did I. But we met together and worked shoulder to shoulder, became close friends. And his name was Omar, a black American. And Omar told me a story, and it's been repeated to me since, that his family was from New Orleans, Louisiana. and he would drive through New Orleans from New York to go see family.

20:41And he would wear around his neck, like dog tags, his driver's license.

20:49Michael Popok:And he told me that story. And I said, I'm thinking to myself, I'm hoping it's not the reason I'm thinking. And I go, why do you do that? He says, I have to do that. I go, why? he says because if i get pulled over for a broken taillight or some sheriff doesn't like what i look like driving in my car and i i don't want any excuses to that i went to the glove compartment to give him my license and my registration or went for my wallet and i get shot because he thinks I'm going for a gun. And never in my 60 years on this planet have I ever thought about being shot in a car because of what I look like.

21:35Michael Popok:And yet, people like Omar think about that every day. And so for Sam Alito, who grew up in a privileged environment as a white guy in New Jersey, to say, good news, everybody, between computers, technology, and the advancements of the Voting Rights Act, we're beyond racism, and there's no more needed protection to stop the dilution of minority votes in congressional districts is a falsehood, is a lie that they're willing to tell to the American people in order to shove these policies down our throat and to undermine and weekend, the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act.

22:16Michael Popok:We got other Supreme Court cases that we're waiting on. Birthright citizenship coming right out of that same group of post-Civil War amendments. Yes, the 14th Amendment. Now let's see what they do with that, having now ripped away voting rights protections. I'm Michael Popok. You're on Legal AF and the Midas Touch Network. Take a minute, hit the subscribe button everywhere. Until my next report, This is Michael.

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