Another Supreme Disappointment, Con't

As true to its nature, the Roberts Court refused to hear a challenge to Mississippi's racially motivated gerrymander of US House districts, as Republicans in the state eliminated one of the state's two majority Black districts completely last year, and the Supreme Court will simply let that stand.

The U.S. Supreme Court today declined to hear Buck v. Reeves, a case alleging that the state’s congressional maps are racially gerrymandered. The decision affirms that Mississippi is no longer required to get federal preclearance for its congressional maps.

In 2002, a three-judge panel ordered Mississippi to use court-drawn congressional maps “in accordance with the procedures in Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.” However, in 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority struck down Section 5, with Chief Justice John Roberts saying at the time that “things have changed in the South.”

Mississippi is a 38% Black state with four congressional districts; one is majority Black and currently represented by a Black Democrat, U.S. House Rep. Bennie Thompson, while the other three are majority white and represented by white Republicans.

District 1 is 65.8% white and 28% Black; District 2 is 30.2% white and 65.9% Black; District 3 is 58.7% white and 35.6% Black; District 4 is 68.7% white and 23.4% Black.

Despite being the state with the largest Black population per capita, Mississippi has only sent two Black representatives to Congress since the Reconstruction era after the Civil War: Thompson and his predecessor, former U.S. House Rep. Mike Espy. The state has not elected a Black U.S. senator or any other statewide official since Reconstruction.

The lower court's decision that there was no case because of the death of VRA Section 5 means that the rest of the Voting Rights Act is essentially dead as well. States can gerrymander districts down to individual streets in order to assure they can have as many districts favoring one party as they want, even if it means deliberately diluting and disenfranchising Black votes and voters.

This court, led by Chief Justice Roberts, will never allow the VRA to be enforced because racism "no longer exists".

Vote while you still can in red states, folks.