The illusion that their fortunes are entirely their own

Last week Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported on the chaos the Supreme Court created by releasing its decision that gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the part that bans gerrymandering based on race. In Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry postponed primary elections until after that legislature redraws maps, even though early voting begins in ten days. Mass voter confusion will result. In Alabama they’re ready to redraw maps, but their case before the Supremes back in 2023, which the state lost because of Section 2, requires them to keep their existing maps until 2030. They’re trying to get that little provision removed. I’ve heard Tennessee has passed a new map destroying black majority districts around Memphis. Emily Singer of Kos reported in Florida, which just approved new maps that give Republicans a more seats, a lawsuit has been filed saying the maps were drawn for partisan advantage, which is illegal according to a state constitution amendment passed in 2010 with 63% of the vote. We know the maps were drawn for partisan advantage because important people said exactly that. Jason Poreda, the guy who drew the new districts, admitted such during a hearing. Fox News presented the map by coloring the new districts red and blue. The new districts were drawn using the standard gerrymandering principles. Tampa was divided into three districts so that the Democrats in the city are much fewer than the Republicans in the surrounding rural areas. David Horsey posted a cartoon on Kos showing this opinion was written by Justice Jim Crow while Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson looks on. In Saturday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Adam Serwer of The Atlantic discussing the gutting of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court.

What the Roberts Court is making possible is a country where white people can maintain their political dominance at the expense of Americans who are not white. The anticaste provisions of the Reconstruction amendments, intended by their authors to reverse the “horrid blasphemy” that America was a white man’s country, are being inverted to defend that dominance. This is not the color-blindness of Martin Luther King Jr., but what the scholar Ian Haney López has called “reactionary colorblindness,” the purpose of which is to maintain racial hierarchy through superficially neutral means. It takes the view that the Constitution’s “color-blindness” renders any attempt to remedy anti-Black racism unconstitutional, because by definition that would involve making racial distinctions. Similarly, the ruling in this case does not explicitly overturn the VRA’s ban on racial discrimination in voting so much as rewrite it to allow such discrimination.

David Shuster of Blue Amp media:

California’s billionaires are freaking out. Like most other obscenely wealthy Americans in this Trump era, the plutocrats have been bloated with paper wealth, fortified by legions of accountants, and possess a moral philosophy that rarely extends beyond their own reflection. They hold to the illusion that their fortunes are entirely their own. But, more than 1.5 million California voters have a different view and have now signed a petition pushing forward a ballot initiative that would impose a billionaire tax. The California proposal is disarmingly simple: If voters approve the initiative this November, the state will impose a one-time levy of roughly 5 percent on the swollen fortunes of those whose wealth has passed the billion-dollar mark. The proceeds will be directed largely towards health care, food assistance, and the assorted necessities of a functioning civilization.

See below for more on taxing the rich. In Sunday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Jermaine Fowler of his “The Humanity Archive” Substack discussing the bankruptcy of Spirit Airlines.

Spirit carried the people the legacy carriers did not want. Working class. Disproportionately Black, Latino, and immigrant. The fees, the seats, the mockery were the visible signs of the sorting. […] The hubs tell the story. Fort Lauderdale. San Juan. Detroit. Atlantic City. The Caribbean. Latin America. Spanish at the customer service line since 2001, the year of the San Juan route. The carrier the legacy airlines mocked was the one that flew the diaspora home. Thirty-seven percent of American households earning under fifty thousand dollars flew at all in the past five years. Seventy-three percent of households earning over fifty thousand did. Take the floor away and the slice that depended on it does not move up. It stops flying.

In Monday’s roundup Dworkin quoted David Daley and Eric J Segall of The Guardian:

The court has essentially ruled that unless a legislator records a confession of their own bigotry, the map is constitutional – making the only person allowed to define a racist act the person committing it. Congress understood the absurdity of this in 1982, which is why legislators wrote an effects-based standard into the law. Discrimination does not announce itself. The intent standard is the cloak of the coward. Roberts sealed the trap years ago: in Rucho v Common Cause, he ruled that partisan gerrymandering is beyond federal review. Now, any map that dilutes Black voting power hides behind partisan strategy, and the courts cannot touch it. The court has achieved something more perverse still: drawing districts to protect Black voters is itself the racial discrimination. Erasing them is not.

Dan Pfeiffer of The Message Box on why the press is harder on Democrats than Republicans.

For the press, the story of Trump and his family being corrupt is old news. The New York Times and others still do deep investigative pieces uncovering the corruption, but those stories rarely make it into the daily coverage of the Trump administration. Trump, Karoline Leavitt, and other Trump surrogates are rarely pushed to answer tough questions about it, and when they are, they just feign outrage and never engage with the substance. The second reason is that the press holds Democrats to a higher standard. This has always been sort of true, but it’s been particularly true in the Trump era. Reporters think Democratic voters care about whether their leaders are corrupt and Republican voters don’t. Therefore, a Democratic scandal could have bigger political implications, while a Republican scandal dies on the vine. Third, most of the media is VERY sensitive to accusations that they are biased against Republicans. This is less true than it used to be, but most reporters are personally liberal on issues like abortion, guns, and climate. Some end up overcompensating by being tougher on Democrats.

In today’s roundup Kev quoted Gaby Goldstein of Talking Points Memo discussing the ruling that did the gutting, known as Louisiana v. Callais:

The conservative strategy for consolidating state-level power has never been a secret. In March 2010, Karl Rove penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed literally titled “The GOP Targets State Legislatures.” The sub-head: “He who controls redistricting can control Congress.” The piece laid out the whole playbook for Project REDMAP: by flipping a few handfuls of state legislative seats in the 2010 midterms, Republicans could redraw congressional and state legislative maps for a generation. Democrats either did not believe them or had nothing to counter it. That year, Republicans gained control of 11 additional state legislatures and ran the table on redistricting. Today, they hold 23 trifectas — a net loss of just two in 15 years. But REDMAP was only one part of a larger architecture. The deeper strategy has three moves. First, build and solidify power in state legislatures. Second, strip away federal protections — through the courts, and by dismantling federal regulations, funding, and programs. Third, devolve that authority to the states where you’ve already built structural advantages through gerrymandering, voter suppression and long-term policy infrastructure. The linchpin of the whole operation is control of state legislatures.

Alphonso David of The Contrarian:

But there is also a simpler economic truth: voter suppression has a price. When districts are manipulated and voting becomes harder, people pay by driving farther and spending more on gas or transit to vote. For working people, especially hourly workers and parents without flexible schedules or support systems, voter suppression leads to increased childcare costs or missing a shift to vote. The cruelty of it all is that voters are being asked to absorb those costs when they’re already living paycheck to paycheck in a system attempting to further dilute their political power. That is the math of modern voter suppression: make voting more expensive while making each vote feel less powerful. ... A 2019 study on Black disenfranchisement and taxation in the South found that after literacy-test requirements were introduced, counties with larger Black populations saw a nearly 5.4% decline in real per-person tax receipts. Put simply, when Black people were pushed out of the electorate, local governments collected and invested less money to serve Black communities. That meant fewer resources for schools, weaker public services, and less support for the very communities whose political power had been stripped away. The result is a double economic penalty: you make less money, and then your community gets less support from the government meant to serve you.

Daniel Nichanian of Bolts Magazine hosts an Ask Bolts column where readers can ask a question and a couple experts will answer them. The column for May 5 was about the Calais decision with Kareem Crayton and Justin Levitt providing the answers. I didn’t read the whole article, jumping to the section on what are possible remedies. Here are part of the answers. Crayton noted we haven’t explored all of the 14th Amendment. The second provision is the Penalty Clause, which says that if a state denies or curtails voting rights Congress can penalize it with a reduction of Congressional representation. It has never been used. Crayton also said, “We’re not going to get better from this court, I don’t think. I think they’ve shown us who they are.” Levitt discussed what Congress can do. It still has some things it can do.

There are ways to insulate congressional bills from judicial review. There are ways to insulate current bills from review by the Supreme Court. There are ways to craft remedies that rely on things like the 14th Amendment’s second section or on the Guarantee Clause (which guarantees “a republican form of government” for all states in the union). There are ways to craft remedies that do things other than what the court has forbidden in Callais, including relaxing the assumption that the remedy has to be single-member districts. By the way, other remedies are already available under the VRA: There was a Federal Voting Rights Act claim resolved using proportional representation in Eastpointe, Michigan. But I’ll say it’s going to take a really strong push by the public to get a Congress that’s willing to reform voting rights in this way. And while we’re there, there’s an awful lot that could be done on court reform. If there is a strong enough prodemocracy movement to change Congress’s orientation, that means there is a strong enough prodemocracy movement to change the court’s orientation.

Crayton again:

Our mission is to do the “citizen work” (organizing, speaking up, and voting) without distractions. What are the distractions? They include the voices that say you must accept second class citizenship when the constitution guarantees you first-class. And it also means ignoring and sometimes pushing back on friendly voices stuck on dismay and disorder. Things are bad, but they don’t have to be if we use the power we each have to demand change.

Kevin Hardy, in an article for Stateline posted on Kos, discussed the growing effort to tax the rich. Maine recently passed a bill to add a 2% tax to those with an income more than $1 million a year. Maine joins Washsington, New Jersey, and Massachusetts that have passed such laws. A dozen states, including Illinois, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Virginia have proposed new taxes. In California advocates gathered enough signatures to put a one-time tax on billionaires on the November ballot. Proponents say these bills make the tax structure, already tilted against the poor, more fair. Opponents fear taxes on business owners will dissuade starting new companies (yep, again trotting out the smallest companies to protect the greediness of the biggest). There is also the claim that taxing the rich more will prompt them to move to a state with lower taxes. But data doesn’t show that happening. Taxing the rich in liberal states comes as conservative states are making their tax systems more regressive, placing more tax burdens on the poor. Both efforts come as the wealth gap has been getting wider for decades and made worse by last summer’s Big Brutal Bill.

The gap between the rich and poor has been widening for decades. Wealth for the bottom fifth of American households has barely moved in recent decades, while the top 0.1% have seen their wealth increase by nearly $40 million each, according to an analysis by the anti-poverty nonprofit Oxfam America. Between 1980 and 2022, the share of national income going to the top 1% doubled, while the share going to the bottom 50% fell by a third, Oxfam reported.

Thom Hartmann of the Kos community and an independent pundit started a post with:

Nikita Khrushchev famously said “We will bury you” (“My vas pokhoronim”) to Western ambassadors in Moscow on November 18, 1956. Seventy years later, it appears that Russia’s goal is being realized.

Hartmann listed several ways that this is happening. The nasty guy announced pulling 5,000 troops from Germany, harming NATO. He ended sanctions on Russian oil, giving Putin billions in revenue. Robert Kennedy is undermining trust in vaccines and disease prevention, making us more vulnerable. Pete Hegseth is purging senior career leadership of the military. DOGE hollowed out federal institutional expertise. Musk ended USAID, allowing China and Russia to secure natural resources and military outposts. Voice of America broadcasts propaganda, weakening America’s advocacy of democracy. ICE and Stephen Miller are gutting the asylum system, straining courts, devastating tourism, and destroying our reputation. Russel Vought concentrated the budget in the nasty guy’s hands, overriding Congress. The FBI has been weaponized and purged, as has the Department of Justice. The Department of Education is being vandalized, cutting school and student protections. A climate denier runs the Department of Energy and another runs the National Park Service. The Transportation Department is loosening safety regulations The Treasury Department pushes for financial concentration and deregulation. The Commerce Department is pushing tariffs and trade decisions, straining trade relationships and exploding inflation. Witkoff and Kushner have screwed up negotiations with Iran. The Department of Agriculture favors agribusiness over family farms while stripping food stamps and school meals. The Environmental Protection Agency has rolled back regulations for Big Oil billionaires. Housing and Urban Development is dropping programs for poor families. The intelligence agencies have politicized their analysis and sidelined career analysts. The State Department has hollowed out diplomatic staff, allowing Russia and China to set the agenda.

This list is an operational blueprint, the kind of document a hostile foreign intelligence service might draw up if it had been handed unlimited access to the executive branch and told to dismantle the American republic from inside without firing a single shot: — Hollow out the public health system so disease can do its work, — Demoralize the officer corps and burn through munitions in unconstitutional wars, — Terminate the diplomats and intelligence professionals who keep allies aligned, — Replace independent journalism with state propaganda at Voice of America, — Defund the agencies Congress created, — Abandon the clean energy transition that would have weakened OPEC and Russia simultaneously, — Politicize the FBI and DOJ so they target dissenters instead of crooks, and — Turn armed, masked ICE thugs loose to terrorize immigrant communities while training the rest of us to accept anonymous federal agents disappearing our neighbors into massive concentration camps. Every line item that would appear on such a plan has been checked off in the last 14 months, executed by a cabinet of grifters, ideologues, and 13 billionaires whose loyalty runs to Trump and the morbidly rich rather than to the nation whose Constitution they swore an oath to defend. ... [Khrushchev] may have been right about something deeper than ideology: a great power can absolutely be killed from the inside by people who pretend to govern while methodically removing every load-bearing wall in the structure just to enrich themselves.

This will end with “ordinary Americans deciding we’ve finally had enough.”

Khrushchev never managed to bury us. Let’s make damn sure Trump, Putin, and America’s rightwing billionaires don’t either.

Oliver Willis of Kos, as part of his series of Explaining the Right, discussed the conservative media bubble.

The point of this fake world is to keep conservative-leaning voters in a state of constant agitation, fuming about the supposed excesses of the left while being fed a steady diet of lies about right-wing leaders, both elected and cultural, fighting against these forces. ... But this isn’t reality for millions of people. Despite the success of right-wing media outlets, they haven’t fooled everyone yet.

To that last point note since Fox News launched in 1996 Democrats won presidential elections in 1996, 2008, 2012, and 2020 and won the popular vote in 2000 and 2016. There have also been several times Democrats held majorities in at least one house of Congress. Which is the reason for the current gerrymandering drive. That conservative media bubble is vulnerable when voters can see for themselves there is a disconnect, which can prompt voters to vote for Democrats.