Supreme Court Colludes with Alabama Racists

Congratulations, Alabama.

The Supreme Court has favorably ruled the federal government is no longer needed to monitor elections in states with a proven history of racism.

It took two and a half centuries for America to free its slaves, five more years for blacks to win the vote, 95 MORE years to remove the encumbrances of voter suppression so blacks actually could vote, and nearly 50 years more for the Supreme Court to strike down the Voting Rights Act, surmising recently that racist states under the federal boot have mended their evil ways.

It took just one year more for the Alabama legislature to prove the Court wrong.

Alabama's bigoted Republican majority (sorry, that was redundant) found a clever way to use what remains of the Voting Rights Act against its framers. A hastily passed new law with a racial twist resurrects democracy's greatest tool for black political disenfranchisement—gerrymandering.

The effect of the law is to do exactly the opposite of its intentions--to further limit African-American influence by packing super-majority black districts, and guaranteeing bleached-white Republican dominance in all the others.

The new law has reduced the white Democratic Senate caucus to one.

The Supreme Court has largely tipped its hand in how it will rule on the Alabama law pending before it, brought by African-American legislators and related groups.

In its 2012 hollowing out of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Court's public reasoning was that the dark impulses of prejudice dominating elections in the South have vanished with the passage of time; that now the New South, with its upright moral character has set right the errors of its past ways .

Except it hasn't.

It is sickening to witness the gutting of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court in one year and watch the Alabama legislature cunningly de-construct what remains of the law in the next.

Expect SCOTUS to rule next year in favor of racism by classifying the gerrymandering as a legal political exercise, and not one originating in racial perfidy.

To this Court it is likely to be an easy, unambiguous call.