This is a video made by the Norwegian Consumer Council that I think is pretty great and very in line with the subject matter of today's Triad (https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-enshittified-states-of-america).
I'm a regular reader of Andrew's Egger's Morning Shots and generally enjoy it. However, today's had one part about the Alito's decision in Callais that I felt deserves some push back:
"Still, there’s a reasonable argument to support Justice Samuel Alito’s conclusion that the way some courts had chosen to apply the VRA over the years had become preposterous—finding that if a state’s population could support a racial gerrymander creating a certain number of majority-minority districts, it was bound by law to do so."
While I'm sure if we were to dig through every court's application of the VRA we can find some examples that are "preposterous," the issue with Callais is Alito's remedy. Even if Alito didn't explicitly kill section 2 of the VRA, he might as well have. The Callais ruling establishes such a high bar for section 2 that it's now basically impossible to apply it at all. Clarence Thomas was actually more honest in his concurrence where he stated it should simply be done away with. Instead what Alito did is more sinister. He more or less turned section 2 into a legal quest for the Golden Fleece. Section 2 can only be applied after sowing a field with fire-breathing oxen and getting past a never-sleeping dragon. That's not reasonable solution to a minority of "preposterous" lower court rulings at all.
More that that, even if Alito was making a good faith effort to curtail problematic applications of section 2, does anyone think republican legislators are genuinely doing that? The glee with which several, like Marsha Blackburn, jumped onto twitter to talk about erasing democratic leaning districts seems to suggest otherwise. Any reasonability to Alito's arguments fly out the window when looking at the impact of millions of primarily African Americans having their voting power diluted. The GOP can claim they're drawing their maps on the grounds of partisan advantage instead of race, but in this case that's in effect a distinction without a difference.
We are supposed to be members of the pro-democracy coalition. Historically speaking, the United States didn't become a "full democracy" until the passage of the Civil Rights act of 1964 and the Voting Rights act of 1965. Those are bedrock pieces of our modern experiment with multi-racial democracy. Alito's decision is the culmination of a long effort to turn back the clock on that experiment. There isn't any reasonability behind that effort, just long standing racial animus that should be roundly denounced.