Don’t let the New York Times fool you about GOP gerrymandering

If you and I could find even the slightest bit of comfort in what has been yet another truly, truly awful year in America, it was that 2026 is an election year. The 2024 election went disastrously, of course. But in the wake of that tragedy, the American people have been sending out clear signals that they would like a correction. Current polls show that voters despise President Trump’s ongoing desecration of the White House building, that they rightfully see the Iran War as a needless disaster, that they think President Naptime has made their economic prospects significantly worse, and that they’ve grown tired of Trump himself. 

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Under normal circumstances, these polls would presage the mythical blue wave, with Democrats seizing control of both the House and Senate in this fall’s midterms, thereby nullifying the remainder of Trump’s final term in office. Yay.

But, two weeks ago, the Supreme Court screamed “f—k you” to all of that, and issued a landmark ruling that all but removed the heart of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In the wake of their decision, GOP lawmakers have now staged a furious effort to redraw electoral maps in their favor, potentially disenfranchising millions of voters in the process.

Here’s what that currently looks like. The state of Florida immediately used the SCOTUS ruling to gerrymander its electoral map in a way that could potentially turn four congressional seats Republican. The Supreme Court of Missouri just greenlit a freshly gerrymandered map, drawn up by that state’s Republicans, that could turn another congressional seat there red. When voters in the state of Virginia approved a referendum in late April that redistricted their state to favor Democrats, that state’s majority conservative Supreme Court threw out the result about two weeks later for reasons that basically boiled down to four right-leaning slobs on the bench strategically micro-parsing the definition of the word “election.” Outraged Virginia Democrats are now going to the federal Supreme Court in the hopes that SCOTUS will reverse the lower court’s decision, which is like going to Dracula for help because the Wolfman won’t stop biting you. Meanwhile, Virginia Senate leader L. Louise Lucas, who championed the original referendum in refreshingly profane terms, was rewarded for her efforts by having Trump’s FBI raid her home.

Oh, and on Monday, SCOTUS granted the state of Alabama permission to go ahead and disappear a majority-Black congressional district of its own. And let’s not forget how, last December, SCOTUS also granted the state of Texas its blessing to enact a similar gerrymandering law that would give that state five more red seats.

All of this is disgusting of course, but even more disgusting has been seeing our captured national media frame this crisis in terms of a political horse race. The New York Times declared SCOTUS’ Alabama ruling “a victory for Republicans.” Not content to whitewash merely that injustice, the paper also published a longform analysis of the broader picture on Saturday with the vomitous subhed, “Republicans are charging ahead in the nation’s redistricting race, and showing new bullishness after months of growing midterm fears.” The Times always loves to talk about what this flagrant evildoing means for the Democrats, and not for democracy itself, and its takeaways from this crisis were no different. A few miles due south, the editorial board at Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post took time out of its day to voice its support for the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision, because Bezos prizes darkness far more than he does democracy. 

So not only are you and I being subjected to a coordinated plan by the GOP to nullify this fall’s election results before Americans have even gotten a chance to vote, but also to an accompanying disinformation campaign from the establishment media to posit this as just another political tussle. It is not. It is villainy, villainy of the crassest sort. Thus, it’s incumbent upon other journalists such as myself to explain what’s happening here in clearer terms. So here I go.

In the year 1870, in the aftermath of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the federal government approved the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which granted Black men the right to vote (women’s suffrage would come later). Sorry to play middle school teacher here, but that amendment states, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Clear enough, yeah?

This country’s embittered whites didn’t like that new policy one bit. So they schemed their way into blunting its impact by passing the now infamous Jim Crow laws, which codified segregation and — more important to the topic currently at hand — disenfranchised otherwise eligible Black voters by subjecting them to poll taxes, literacy tests or cumbersome voter ID laws. It took nearly 100 more years before Jim Crow was formally outlawed thanks to the 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act, parts of which were written, and later amended, to explicitly state that the right of Black voters could neither be denied nor abridged. Gerrymandering, in which government officials redraw voting district boundaries in a manner that is demographically favorable to them, is one of the oldest and nastiest ways to abridge that right. It’s nigh impossible to prevent gerrymandering altogether, but the VRA was written to curtail the practice as much as was feasible.

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With their decision in Louisiana vs. Callais two weeks ago, the Supreme Court took a sledgehammer to those protections, fulfilling Chief Justice John Roberts’ lifelong dream of undoing as much of the VRA as he could get away with. With the help of his fellow conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch — he’s gotten away with a whole lot. All he and his cronies had to do to finish the job was say, in essence, “Actually, giving Black people proper representation is racist against white people,” and VOILA! Jim Crow lives! What a victory for the Republican Party! Democrats must really be beside themselves right now!

There’s a good chance that none of this late maneuvering will prevent Republicans from losing their majority in November. After all, Trump himself isn’t on the ballot, and Republicans have recently gotten their lunch handed to them in such off-year elections. Furthermore, California voters approved Proposition 50 last November, which redrew the Golden State’s maps to favor Democrats, in an effort to fight fire with fire. That measure was specifically written by Gov. Gavin Newsom to go into effect only if Trump’s election rigging gambit in Texas went through, which it did. So as long as SCOTUS doesn’t magically undo that Prop. 50 vote — and I’m sure they’re tempted — Democrats in California could potentially make up the difference for whatever seats the GOP euchres out of the courts elsewhere. 

But that’s not the point here. This isn’t about whether or not all of this Republican treachery will work, as the Times and Post have focused on, but rather that it was allowed to flourish at all. It’s the principle, dammit. You and I should be able to vote, and every vote should count the same. Anyone who tries to “abridge” that right, to use the procedural term, is scum of the highest order. Democrats too are guilty of gerrymandering, but you’ll note that the two recent examples of them doing so were approved by voters in free and fair elections. They weren’t conjured into existence by a bunch of looney-toon justices who hate your f—king guts.

That goes especially for Roberts’ SCOTUS, which is beyond reform and now a permanent cancer upon the republic. But it also goes for power brokers using Roberts’ court as a shortcut around the rigors of democracy, including Florida Top Gov Ron DeSantis, his fellow red state governors, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Bezos, Times leadership, the Supreme Court of Virginia and, of course, the entire Trump administration. These people are losing, and they know it. So they brought back Jim Crow to ensure that they can never lose again.

That’s what you need to know here. In 2026, a majority of Americans now know, and are willing to say, that Republicans are evil, that SCOTUS is even worse, and that anyone who enables them deserves to rot in hell. They should be able to vote like it.