It Could Happen Here - The Return of Jim Crow

Episode Date: May 14, 2026

Mia discusses the impact of the Supreme Court dismantling the Voting Rights Act and how it marks a return to overt Jim Crow white supremacy. Sources: https://www.naacpldf.org/case-issue/louisiana-v-callais/ https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-4/ https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/05/court-gives-immediate-effect-to-voting-rights-act-decision/ https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/04/after-major-voting-rights-ruling-parties-dispute-whether-the-court-should-finalize-decision-imme/ https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/05/court-clears-way-for-alabama-to-use-congressional-map-blocked-by-lower-court-as-racially-discrim/ https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/supreme-court/5872963-supreme-court-voting-rights/ https://www.ms.now/opinion/supreme-court-louisiana-callais-black-vote-warning https://www.democracynow.org/2026/5/12/voting_rights_scotus https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/05/supreme-court-alabama-voting-sotomayor-dissent-alito.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to If It Happened Here, a podcast where the thin veneer of democracy that has hitherto veiled the settler colony of the United States in the mask of humanity is being increasingly. ripped away leaving behind. I think calling it a new Jim Crow is that title's already been used for something else, but it's a return overtly to some of the worst discrimination of the Jim Crow era. So I'm your host, Mia Wong. Let's talk about what is actually at issue here. And that is a recent Supreme Court ruling called Louisiana v. Calais. On a sort of micro level, this is about the question of can Louisiana just eliminate the two majority black districts that it had in its congressional map in 2024? Getting to this map in the first place was a subject of really intense civil rights litigation

to get to the point where there were two majority black districts in 2024. On a macro level, what is that state here is can a state? create an electoral map where they spread all of the black voters across different districts in order to make them a minority in every district, thus making it impossible for black voters to select the candidate of their choosing. Until now, the answer was no, because this is specifically what the Voting Rights Act was passed to stop. Like this specifically, like this is one of the very specific things. I cannot emphasize this enough. This specific thing, which is spread out the black vote across a whole bunch of districts where everyone else is white so that black people

cannot choose who they want to elect. This is like one of the specific things. It was designed to stop. Again, up until now, you have not been allowed to do this. And this has led to the creation of what are called minority majority districts. This is a long and complicated history that frankly could be its own, probably is like multiple people's doctoral dissertations. The short, short version of what a minority majority district is, is it's a district where the majority of voters are from a minority group, thus allowing people from a minority group to select a candidate of their choosing. There are a lot of these districts in the South specifically to prevent Republican politicians from making it impossible for black voters to elect anyone they chose.

And fundamentally, what's at stake here, right, is the constitutional right to elect a candidates of your choosing if you are part of a minority group. Right. This is why all of this stuff was passed in the first place, because under what we call Jim Crow, it was extremely easy for a white majority to simply effectively deny the rights of black people. And this is other non-white people too, but like this is primarily black people. It was very, very easy to simply deny them from ever getting to elect anyone by just drawing maps where a candidate that they would vote for can never be elected. This is, this is, this is, one of the bases of Jim Crow over discrimination. The Supreme Court has decided no, actually. What they've decided is that if the Republican Party that controls a legislature draws a map that does the thing we've been talking about, where they spread out all of the, like specifically the black vote,

into a bunch of districts so that black people can't elect a representative, in order to challenge this as violation of your voting rights, you have to prove, definitively prove, that the intent was racism and not literally anything else. So, for example, and this is the thing that's really at issue here, right? You have to prove that they specifically wanted to do this out of racism and not just because they want to elect Republicans by gerrymandering it partisantly, which is amazingly a thing that's legal to do in the United States

for reasons that are incredibly baffling. And also, you have to be able to prove that they created this map specifically out of the intention to disenfranchise a minority group. And also, you have to create a map that would allow them to achieve whatever other goals they supposedly want.

Like, for example, again, making sure that Republicans have all the seats in a state, but also not be racist. So you have to create a map for them that would allow them to do this. to prove that there could be another map that achieves their goals of, like, partisan gerrymandering that isn't also racist? It's completely unhinged. Legally, this is a shambles. We have covered

some downright, like, hideous nonsense on this show in terms of Supreme Court decisions, right? Like, this Supreme Court has just the lowest level of legal literacy in, like, living memory of any Supreme Court. It is astounding. kinds of just absolute horseshit they are popping out with. This is maybe their worst ruling, which is difficult to prove because there have been so many abhorrent ones, even just from a pure legal perspective. This one is so bad, it defies belief. So, okay, one of the main issues here is section two of the Voting Rights Act.

I'm just going to read what it says, quote, no voting quality. or prerequisite to voting or standard practice or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any state or political subdivision in a manner which results, keep that in mind later, which results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color or in contravention of the guarantees set forth in Section in 1973 B. So again, can I emphasize this enough, right? The way this is written is that it says

that you can't apply qualification or prerequisite to voting or have any standard or practice or procedure cannot be imposed by the state or any other political subdivision that results in the denial or abridgment of the rights of citizens to vote an account of race, right?

It specifically says results. It does not say intent. Now, this is incredibly important because Alito is like, no, fuck that. Actually, you have to prove intent. I'm going to quote from a piece in SCOTS blog by Edward Foley, who has an extremely long title of the Charles B. Ebersold and Florence Whitcomb Ebersold Chair in Constitutional Law

is the director of election at law at Ohio State University. He written a book on electoral law. He is a constitutional law professor. He specifically does election law. He is, like, by no means, a leftist. He's coming in to the right of, like, Justice Jackson in her dissent in this case, right? But even he, I'm going to quote what he writes about this. He calls this ruling an abomination, which is like a thing that you don't really get

from like legal people. They don't say shit like that. I'm going to quote what he says about this. The ruling purports to interpret the Voting Rights Act section two, but it destroys the central meaning of the section, converting it into the exact opposite of what Congress meant for it to do. The one thing that is unambiguous about Section 2 is that the 1982 amendment to the Section's test creates a, quote, results test for determining whether there is liability under the section. Replacing the intent test that the Supreme Court had previously adopted for Section 2 claims. As the text states, quote, no standard practice or procedure shall be imposed, that, dot, dot, which results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen to vote. on account of race. Yet the case defiantly converts Section 2 back to an intention inquiry rather than a results analysis.

So what happened here, right, to make this extremely clear, is that Congress in 1982 had amended this, they amended what this thing said, right? Because Supreme Court had been adopting a standard of intent, right, which means that you have to prove that, like, these people were like mustache twirling, saying the N-word in fucking clan robes doing Nazi sluble. lose. You have to, like, prove that they intentionally did this for racist reasons and not any other reason. And

Congress went back and went, no, fuck that. If the result of it is racist, then you can't do it. Even if, like, nominally what you're saying out loud is that you're doing this for non-racist reasons. If the result is racism, then

you have to not do it. And Alito goes, yeah, no, fuck that. We're just, like, flipping it back to an intent standard for no reason other than I want to be able to do racism and help Republican Party win seats. The other thing that fully talks about is the court is arguing that Congress can't draw from the 15th Amendment in order to have the Voting Rights Act work in the first place. I'm going to quote him again. Yeah, the court in this decision did not need to consider the

question of congressional power to enforce the 15th Amendment. That is because the power of Congress to enact Section 2 with the Voting Rights Amendment for the purposes of the case could have been sustained not under the 15th Amendment, but under Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution. Congress has full power under Article 1, Section 4 to enact laws governing the, quote, time, place, and manner of congressional elections. Thus, Congress can enact a prohibition against minority vote dilution for congressional districts under a disparate impact theory without any consideration of discriminatory intent and not rely on the 15th Amendment. at all. So, okay, what does this mean? Right? What Alito is saying is that like, oh, well, actually, Congress doesn't have the authority to, like, write the section of the voting rights amendment. They don't have the authority to do it under the 15th Amendment because it, like, oversteps the rights of states to, you know, like run their own elections, right? So I'm going to do the thing I did last time with Foley's thing and just read the full Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution. By the way, when something says, like, Article 1, Section 4, you have to remember that all of the amendments, right, the amendment that got rid of slavery, even like,

the First Amendment, right? The freedom of speech. That's an amendment. That's not in the original text. That had to be added onto it. And obviously we have something called the Bill of Rights that was like the first hand amendments that was passed with the Constitution. But that's not stuff that was like put like freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship. That was not in the original text of the Constitution. That was the amendments put on. This is something that the people who wrote the Constitution were like, fuck it. This is going to be in the original thing. Right. So Article 1, Section 4, this is from like the original fucking body of text of the Constitution says, quote, the times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and

representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof. But the Congress may at any time, by law, make or alter such regulations except as to the places of choosing senators. So yes, obviously they can fucking do the voting rights amendment. They literally have the like it says in section one Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations by such regulations they mean the

times, places, and manner of holding elections they could just do this right? So obviously they can fucking do the voting rights amendment. It's literally just there in the Constitution. It just says that. It's all like this. It's gibberish. It's like, oh my God.

You can just read the text of the Constitution and it says you can do this is God. Holy shit. Even from the perspective of like if you treat the law as real, this is just pure Calvin ball shit. Like I mean, it's just Jesus Christ. Okay, you know what's real and not Calvin Ball?

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on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. We are back. So, okay, what has the result of this been? It's been about two weeks since the court did this decision. the court immediately followed this up by allowing Alabama to gerrymander the shit out of their upcoming election.

They're doing this via, again, the shadow docket, which is their ability to just be like, no, fuck you, we're not ruling on this case without actually issuing a decision. An unsigned one paragraph thing from the court can just dictate what the law is. It's great. It's amazing.

And by amazing, I mean Jesus fucking Christ. This happens about a week after the original Supreme Court decision. This shadow docket allows Alabama to put in place a map that was already found to be explicitly racially motivated. A thing Alito said in the decision that he wouldn't do, right? Alito says in a decision that he won't overturn A, cases that are like overt discrimination and B, that he wouldn't overturn this exact case.

And then they did it anyways. like, Jesus Christ. I just like, oh, my God. So the short version of the Alabama conflict, I'm drawing here from Slate's story on this thing, is that Alabama tried to do a map that would let them get rid of both of the black congressional candidates in the state

by gerrymandering the black vote. There's a whole bunch of court cases about this. In 2023, the Supreme Court said that they couldn't do this and they had to make fairer districts that didn't violate the Voting Rights Act. So this was three years ago. This, like, the Supreme Court said they had to do this. Here's some slate, quote, Alabama, however, refused to comply with that order.

Again, like, they got an order from the Supreme Court and refused to do it. Quote, so the lower court imposed its own map featuring two districts where black voters had a real shot at choosing their representative. The court also found that in defying its previous mandate, the Alabama legislature had engaged in intentional racial discreet. discrimination, violating the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause in addition to the Voting Rights Act. Up until Monday, this decision had prevented the legislature from joining the former Confederate states now raising to eliminate black representatives from their congressional delegations. Alabama Republicans pressed the district court to lift its bar, but it refused. So they filed an emergency request at the Supreme Court asking permission to re-jerrymandered

black communities in light of this decision. Now, I can't emphasize enough. This vote from when they were granted this position, this vote is in like eight days, right? People had already started voting for candidates and primaries, right? And Supreme Court was like, yeah, sure, yeah, you can fucking re-jerrymander this thing eight days before the election. That's absolutely fine. Even though, again, I can't emphasize this enough. In the ruling, Alito specifically said in the majority opinion that they wouldn't overturn this exact case and then they did it.

it's mind-boggling. It used to be, like it really truly did used to be that if you were going to do shit like this, you had to like sort of like pretend that you were following some kind of legal order. And now you just don't. You can just fucking do Calvin bullshit. You can just literally lie about what you're doing

in your decisions. And then just fucking do whatever you want about it. And obviously, you know, as Slate points out, this has been pointed out by a whole bunch of different outlets. the Supreme Court also had used another legal principle to prevent states that would have, were trying to like make more democratic maps, both in the sense of like not being racist and also that would elect more democratic politicians. And even though it was three months before the

election, the court was like, well, it's actually too soon. It's like it's too close to the election for you to be changing this stuff. But then also now they're just letting Alabama do one of these like eight days before an election. So it's so incredibly clear about what's happening here is that the court is trying to allow Republican politicians to just straight up rig elections for them by doing gerrymandered districts in a way that lets them eliminate the ability of non-white people to vote. And this is a huge fucking deal. Getting the 1965 Voting Rights Act was one of the major achievements of the civil rights movement, right? It's like one of the biggest goals of the moderate wing of the movement was to have elections in which black people got to actually actually

fucking votes and not have their vote intentionally diluted so they could never actually elect a candidate. And that's what's being done here. Right. And this has been pointed out. It's like anyone who's read any kind of analysis of racial politics in the U.S., one of the consistent themes of the sort of, you know, what you would call, I guess, like the era of Black uprising, right? the sort of modern era stretching from roughly Ferguson, I thought I guess you could talk about the stuff in the Bay before that, roughly from Ferguson through 2020, was that the U.S. was not a democracy before the 1965 Voting Rights Act

because the principle of one person, one vote, was not real because you could simply disenfranchise anyone from a minority group. And that was the status quo of the South, and also, like, a lot of other parts of the country, too, was this very overtability of these people to, you know, not only just, like, this is one of the components of segregation, right? It's not just, like, imposing segregation legally in public spaces, right? It's also, you know, like, preventing, it's preventing black people from voting.

And this is the thing that the Supreme Court ruling has just a, effectively destroyed. Right? It's the thing that like made it possible to even sort of like in the loosest sense possible called this country a democracy. And it's gone. It's just gone. And now, you know, it's like, okay, like what, what fucking is this now?

And, you know, I don't know. It's like it's an even more just extremely overt Jim Crow state. This is what the goal of the Republican Party has always been. Like they want resegregation. It's been the basis of modern Republican politics forever, right? It's, you know, dating back to you if you want to look at what Trumpism descends for. We've talked about this at length on the show. The thing that became the sort of religious right was originally born out of like the school choice movement.

And the thing about the school choice movement was that it was an anti-integration thing. After losing their fight to be able to have whites-only schools, a bunch of these sort of right-wingers were like, okay, well, we'll just do private schools or we can do that. And that's the basis of modern Republican politics, right? Of, you know, sort of both evangelicalism and sort of Bush administration and Trumpism and Reagan, too, is this shit. And this has been what the Republicans have done when they've been in power, right? This is a lot of the Trump administration, like what they were doing, like all of the stuff about DEI, all the stuff about wokeness. But this is also a lot of what Doge was doing was trying to make it so that black people, like, couldn't work for the U.S. government. right was a huge purge of black women from the U.S. government.

And, you know, now we're seeing this on the level of elections. And on this level, what the Republicans are trying to do with these gerrymandered maps is remove non-white people and especially black people from Congress so they can just have untrammeled white supremacist rule. And they're doing it by claiming both that it's actually partisan, it's just partisan gerrymandering, which is legal to disenfranchise black fetters, because black voters won't openly vote for the party of white supremacy. And they're also claiming that, like, not doing this is, like, infringing on the civil rights of white people.

A thing that, like, is completely, you know, just gibberish world turned upside down nonsense. But if they can just do that now because they're in power and because the court will just let them do this shit. And so I think in a way that really has not been conveyed, in the media and in the discourse. This is one of the leekest moments of this administration, right? You know, on top of just the multiple genocides they're committing, right? On top of, you know, just like the ethnic cleansing of not my people from the U.S. that ICE is doing. What they're doing right now is attempting to end multiracial democracy in the U.S.

And obviously, politically, I have my critiques of like electoral democracy as a concept, but having it just revert back to only white people get to decide who politicians are is something even worse than what we've had so far. You know, it's a seismic shift in just literally what this country is toward something that unbelievably unfeithably weak state of pure white rural. And the people who are talking about this, think that it can be reversed just by voting more. But no, it can't.

The whole point of this, right, is to make sure that elections and, you know, whatever the will of the people is, is incapable of actually affecting the white supremacist state because non-white people just don't get votes. You can't just vote harder your way through all of this shit. You have to actually do things. And, you know, if we don't want to live in a white,

supremacist society, we're going to have to actually take action to combat and actually resist the fact that this is, like, this is just a pure white supremacist Jim Crow state now. Yeah, so this has been, it could happen here. I don't have a non-bleak way to end this, but the common refrain is if you've ever asked yourself what you would be doing in Nazi Germany, it's right now. And I think you can also add to that, right? If you've ever asked yourself, what would you be doing? Dream Jim Crow, the answer is whatever the fuck you're doing now. And if you're not happy with that answer, then it's time to move.

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Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and Friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter.

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