“The country’s most important civil rights law no longer effectively exists, and that’s going to have ramifications on American democracy for a very long time.” Mother Jones correspondent Ari Berman reacts to the Supreme Court’s recent 6-3 decision rejecting key principles of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Since the court issued its ruling last week, Republican-controlled states have begun to redraw their voting maps in a “gerrymandering arms race” that “could lead to the largest drop in Black representation since the Jim Crow era,” explains Berman. “We’re returning to the days of literacy tests and poll taxes — not through those devices, but through specifically trying to eliminate Black office holders. And Southern legislators are very clear they are going to do this. They feel unshackled by the Supreme Court ruling. They are being pressured by President Trump to do it, and they feel like all the guardrails are off right now.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.