Trump’s Supreme Court Gutted the Voting Rights Act — Here’s What Comes Next

Watch my conversation with Alanah Odoms, executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana, on the fallout from Louisiana v. Callais

It has been a brutal few weeks for anyone who believes in equal representation in this country. The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, one of the greatest accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement, and within days we watched the consequences ripple out: Tennessee already split Memphis’s majority Black congressional district into three, Alabama moved to erase its two districts represented by Black lawmakers, and Georgia and South Carolina are lining up to do the same. Louisiana, a state that is roughly one-third Black (and my own part-time homestate), immediately moved to halt their primary election after absentee ballots were already received to draw a new congressional map that could send just one Black representative to Washington. The speed and ruthlessness of Republican state lawmakers following the SCOTUS decision should shock and appall anyone who cares about our constitutional rights and how they are being stripped away from millions of Americans. So how did we get here?

For this week’s Gloves Off, I sat down with someone standing at the center of all of it: Alanah Odoms, the executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana, the organization litigating the Callais case. In our conversation, Alanah provides one of the smartest legal breakdowns of what’s happening I’ve heard, shares the historical context behind the Supreme Court decision, and explains where we go from here. It was by far one of my favorite episodes of Gloves Off so far, and if it doesn’t give you goosebumps, I don’t think you listened closely enough:

What stuck out to me the most is that we like to tell ourselves that what is happening right now in our politics is a temporary break from who we are as a country. But as someone rooted in the American South, Alanah explains that what we’re seeing in the news right now is “actually quite American,” and is another example of racist policies that have reared their ugly head over and over again since the Reconstruction era. She’s 100% right.

Look no further than Alabama, where last week the Republican Speaker of the House said the quiet part out loud, proposing getting rid of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution all together. The 14th Amendment is what granted citizenship to African Americans following the end of slavery, and it is the legal architecture for millions of Americans’ civil rights, from public school integration to gay marriage. These abhorrent, small-minded people are only just getting started.

So what do we actually do about it? We spoke about that too - things like ending lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices, returning the DOJ to its original mission and protecting the right to vote…and yes, building the damn matriarchy to replace this corrupt and abusive patriarchal system that the majority of Americans have had it with. But first, we have to win back the political power and build the collective will to accomplish it.

The attacks on our democracy are moving at a dizzying speed and are now completely out in the open. Our response has to be just as bold, just as clear-eyed, and just as unwilling to concede a single inch. I really hope you’ll listen to this week’s episode, and share it widely. It’s up to all of us to ring the alarm bells loud and clear.

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