Here is part of how Steve Vladeck describes the Texas unfair redistricting at MSNBC.com:
The Justice Department sued Texas on Monday, challenging its newly drawn electoral maps at both the state and congressional levels. At its core, the lawsuit claims that Texas’ new maps discriminate against the state’s “growing minority electorate.” And clearly, they do. The problem with the lawsuit is not its factual premise; it is the significant steps the Supreme Court has taken in the last eight years to make it easier for conservative states to get away with exactly such anti-democratic (and anti-Democratic) manipulation.
And although Congress could fix much of the damage the Supreme Court has caused, its efforts to do so remain mired in Senate Democrats’ inability to overcome or eliminate the filibuster. Simply put, the latest front in the battle between the Biden administration and Texas reinforces just how fragile our democracy is becoming — and how directly the Supreme Court is responsible.
Texas fared well in the 2020 census: The second-largest state added 4 million residents between 2010 and last year’s count. Most of that growth came from minority groups, which now constitute a majority of the state’s population. Indeed, the statewide population of “Anglos” (non-Latino white Texans) was responsible for only 5 percent of that growth. Among other things, this population boom netted Texas two new seats in the U.S. House — it will now elect members from 38 districts, second only to California.
When the Texas Legislature met to redraw both the U.S. and state house districts in response to the new data, it adopted maps that, put most charitably, do not reflect the actual sources of population growth. As the Justice Department’s lawsuit explains, the two new congressional seats both have Anglo majorities; a West Texas district with a large Latino population was redrawn to turn a Latino majority into a minority, and minority communities in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex were, in the Justice Department’s words, “surgically excised” by being attached to different districts with Anglo majorities — some stretching over a hundred miles from Dallas-Fort Worth. And the redrawn lines in the state House are even more, shall we say, aggressive.
The unabashed goal of this gerrymandering was to entrench as large a Republican majority as the Legislature could. The FiveThirtyEight redistricting tracker predicts that, with these maps, Republicans would control 24 of the 38 U.S. House seats, or 63 percent of the delegation, and have a good shot at a 25th in a state former President Donald Trump won last year by only 52 percent to 46 percent. That’s achieved by expanding the voting power of non-Latino white voters, who are about 40 percent of the state’s total population but now control 3 of every 5 districts.
As Ari Berman has documented, Latinos, in contrast, make up 39 percent of the population but control only 20 percent of the districts. And only 2 percent of the districts have Black majorities, even though Black Texans are one-eighth of the state’s population. More fundamentally, the maps completely ignore the source of Texas’ explosive population growth, reducing the voting power of the very minority groups who are responsible for virtually all of the state’s gains in size.
Before 2013, Texas’ map would never have made it into force. Texas was a “covered jurisdiction” under the federal Voting Rights Act, meaning changes to its districts would need to get “preclearance” from the federal Justice Department. But in 2013, the Supreme Court, in its 5-4 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, neutered the preclearance requirement by invalidating the formula Congress used to decide which jurisdictions it applied to.
Although the court’s analysis focused on the claim that the formula was outdated (and therefore was unduly harsh to jurisdictions that no longer had demonstrated patterns of discrimination), as the Justice Department lawsuit points out, “in every redistricting cycle since 1970, courts have found that one or more of Texas’s statewide redistricting plans violated the United States Constitution or the Voting Rights Act.”. . .
The Biden administration’s new suit against Texas may be a bellwether. If the Voting Rights Act can no longer prevent a state that gained seats in Congress almost entirely because of minority population growth from redistricting to reduce the voting power of those minority groups, it will be a powerful testament to how much the Supreme Court has denuded that landmark civil rights statute.
That the case has to be filed at all shows how imperative it is for Congress to fix it, even if eliminating the filibuster is the only way to accomplish such reform. So long as these maps remain in effect, they will provide only further evidence of the fragility of our democracy — and how increasingly unrepresentative our “representatives” are.
Here's how Jennifer Rubin describes the situation in The Washington Post:
The 2020 Census shows that while Whites remain the largest ethnicity group in the United States, the demographic decreased by 8.6 percent over the past decade. Those identifying as multiracial, by contrast, grew by a stunning 276 percent. Hispanic, Black and Asian American populations all grew at a rapid rate, too. Now, the country is nearly 19 percent Hispanic, 12 percent Black and 6 percent Asian American.
The country grew at a slower pace than in any decade since the Depression. It is also aging. Nearly all the growth took place in urban centers (up nearly 9 percent) as rural populations shrank. The Hill reports: “Fewer than half of the 3,143 counties in the United States added population over the last decade, the new census data shows. The share of Americans who live in nonmetropolitan rural areas dropped by 2.8 percentage points, the Bureau said Thursday.”
The results speak to a truism that millions of Republicans would like to ignore: America is never static. It is — and has always been — in a state of flux, whether it comes to race, religious affiliation (or lack thereof), the divide between native-born and immigrant, or the geographic spread of the population (e.g., the Great Migration of Blacks from the South in the early 20th century or the rise of the Sun Belt population over the last few decades). Indeed, that is the essence of America — a country not defined by racial or religious identity.
That reality has, of course, freaked out a significant share of White Christians who do not see “their America” as predominate. It was never “theirs” to begin with, and the assumption that something is amiss if White Christians are not in charge is the essence of white supremacy and Christian nationalism. It is also fundamentally un-American; our country is defined, as President Biden rightly says, by an “idea.”
It is easy, then, to understand why a political party based increasingly on its appeal to White Christians has adopted so many anti-American traits. The sanctity of elections has given way to a sentiment that violence is sometimes necessary (for Whites to retain power). The decline in their numbers has led to worship of totalitarian thugs around the world and disdain for a free society. The desperation for a make-believe world of yesteryear has led tens of millions down the rabbit hole of right-wing media propaganda, where their worst fears and darkest impulses are amplified.
Less remarked upon, but equally important, is that the growth of urban areas (generally more productive, more tolerant and more diverse) leaves rural Whites increasingly at odds with the national ethos. The latter are also poorer, sicker, less educated and have shorter life-spans than their metropolitan counterparts.
A rational, pro-democracy party would recognize it needs a broader base of support and move to adjust its policies to appeal to a more diverse, more secular and more urban America. That’s not the GOP game plan.
The GOP is so dependent on the right-wing media generator of White angst and resentment, and so fearful they will lose their grip among Whites, that they have chosen instead to try to hold back the demographic and cultural tide washing over them. They resort to voter suppression, assault objective reality, disdain majority rule and weaponize apolitical institutions, such as the courts or the Justice Department. Moreover, given their White, wealthy donor base, they can offer only rhetorical populism while pursuing plutocratic economic policies (going so far as to refuse to increase funding for the Internal Revenue Service to enforce tax laws).
There is no single solution to solve the growing urban-rural divide. However, unless and until Americans in rural areas demand responsible governance, embrace the true “idea” of America and reject the temptation of racism and authoritarianism, little will change.
In the meantime, urban Americans, who constitute a greater share of the population than ever before, will lose patience with anti-democratic techniques (e.g., the filibuster, voter suppression) designed to give rural Whites disproportionate power. Demography may not be destiny, but it brings the weaknesses of American democracy into focus.
The following is from The Washington Post:
For the first time in the history of the country’s census taking, the number of White people in the United States is widely expected to show a decline when the first racial breakdowns from the 2020 Census are reported this week.
For five years now, the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual updates of the 2010 Census have estimated that the nation’s White population is shrinking, and all population growth has been from people of color.
The new census data, planned for release on Aug. 12, will show definitively how the ethnic, racial and voting-age makeup of neighborhoods shifted over the past decade, based on the national house-to-house canvass last year. It is the data most state legislatures and local governments use to redraw political districts for the next 10 years.
If the White decline is confirmed by the new data, that benchmark will have come about eight years earlier than previously projected, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.
“Twenty years ago if you told people this was going to be the case, they wouldn’t have believed you,” he said, adding that the opioid epidemic and lower-than-anticipated birthrates among millennials after the Great Recession accelerated the White population’s decline. “The country is changing dramatically.”
The United States is also expected to have passed two other milestones on its way to becoming a majority-minority society in a few decades: For the first time ever, the portion of White people could dip below 60 percent and the under-18 population is likely to be majority non-White.
But little has been said recently about a voter suppression effort by Republicans that is already in place, and affected many voters in the 2020 election -- having to wait in line for hours to vote.
This primarily affected minorities. In White precincts, there were lots of voting machines and no one had to wait very long to vote. But in minority areas, there were few precincts and few voting machines, and people were forced into lengthy waits to be able to vote.
This mostly happened in states where Republicans controlled the voting process, and although they deny it, seems to be an obvious effort to suppress the votes of minorities. This needs to be rectified. A federal law should be passed to mandate that no voter have to wait in line over 30 minutes to vote -- and any state violating that law should be severely punished (and required to fix the problem before the next election happens).
Here is some of what Jennifer Rubin had to say on this subject in The Washington Post:
The Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group completed a voluminous study of the 2020 election. Among its most stunning findings: “Sixty-two percent of white, 47 percent of Black, and 51 percent of Hispanic voters waited 10 minutes or less to vote; 7 percent of white, 13 percent of Black, and 8 percent of Hispanic voters waited an hour or more.” Put differently, “Almost twice as many Black (31 percent) as white (18 percent) or Hispanic voters (17 percent) reported waiting 31 minutes or more.”
The Brennan Center for Justice’s study of the 2018 midterms also showed: “Latino and Black voters were more likely than white voters to wait in the longest of lines on Election Day: some 6.6 percent of Latino voters and 7.0 percent of Black voters reported waiting 30 minutes or longer to vote. ... More generally, Latino voters waited on average 46 percent longer than white voters, and Black voters waited on average 45 percent longer than white voters.”
Similarly, a Georgia study of the June 2020 primary found that “the average wait time after 7 p.m. across Georgia was 51 minutes in polling places that were 90% or more non-White, but only 6 minutes in polling places that were 90% white.”
The 30-minute mark is critical. The bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration declared in a 2014 report that no voter should have to endure more than a 30-minute wait. The causes for the excessive wait times in Black precincts include fewer polling places, misallocation of resources and older machines.
Several measures might address the problem. The Justice Department could start filing suit against states with significant disparities in waiting times between White and Black voters. Congress could pass a law requiring states to adhere to the 30-minute rule. Voting rights litigator Marc Elias explains how this might work in a post for Democracy Docket: “If the state or a locality fails to meet this time limit, it must pay the affected voter for the time the voter spent waiting in line in excess of 30 minutes. Voters could seek the actual cost to them of waiting in line (lost wages, childcare, etc.) or accept an hourly minimum that each state could set by law.” Alternatively, states could be mandated in subsequent elections to increase the number of polling places or increase early voting and mail-in options.
Reduction of wait times should theoretically be agreeable to both parties and all voters. It has nothing to do with “voter security,” and everything to do with eliminating barriers to voting. If Senate Republicans will not agree to even reduction-in-waiting-time measures, perhaps Manchin will finally lose patience and agree to prioritize voting rights over Senate procedures.
Here is part of what the EPI had to say:
In February 2021, a year into the pandemic recession, the U.S. economy remained down 9.5 million jobs from February 2020, the last month before the economic effect of COVID-19 began. Repairing employment levels requires more than regaining those 9.5 million lost jobs; we must also consider how many jobs would have been created since February 2020. During the 12 months prior to the pandemic recession, job growth averaged 202,000 new jobs per month. Absent the COVID-19-driven recession, an estimated 2.4 million additional jobs could have been created. Adding these to the actual job losses since February 2020 implies that the U.S. labor market in February 2021 was short 11.9 million jobs. . . .
For this reason, we believe that police killings should be considered a public health concern. Public health agencies and researchers should play an increased role in collecting data on police-involved deaths and police use of force. Conversations about the incredibly high homicide rate in the U.S. must acknowledge that police are responsible for about one in 12 of those deaths. Reducing overall homicide risk, particularly among men of color, appears to require reform that explicitly targets interactions between police and civilians.