Mississippi Republicans are lining up the political dominos to suppress Black votes and solidify their stranglehold on statewide politics.
That’s the impression one gets from a social media post Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves sent Friday to announce a special session to gerrymander the voter map for the state’s Supreme Court districts.
Last August, a federal court ordered Mississippi to redraw its Supreme Court voter map. It concluded that existing district lines were functionally racist and suppressed Black voters’ power. Among all states, Mississippi has the highest percentage of Black residents, at nearly 38%.
But Reeves wants the legislature to delay compliance with that order until the Federalist Society–allied justices on the Supreme Court do what many people expect them to do in the Louisiana v. Callais voting rights case: that is, to further gut the Voting Rights Act by permitting racist gerrymandering, ushering in a new era of political discrimination.
And the governor appears to be counting on the Supreme Court to do just that. Reeves’ social media post included an official proclamation invoking his executive powers to stave off the court-ordered redistricting until 21 days after the Supreme Court issues its decision in Louisiana v. Callais.
Conservatives have sought to kill the Voting Rights Act’s protections against racist gerrymandering with an argument similar to the bigoted one they have used to target diversity measures: that efforts to remedy racist discrimination are themselves discriminatory. That’s how Reeves arrived at the conclusion that the VRA defied the “animating principle that all Americans are created equal.”
So even though a federal court deemed Mississippi’s Supreme Court map racist, Reeves is planning to leave that map in place just long enough for the Supreme Court to issue its ruling, which could allow Republicans to draw a new map that is even more racist than the one they are supposed to replace.
As Republicans wait to see whether they can get even more extreme with their gerrymanders, Democrats and civil rights groups are not too keen on forcing Mississippians to swallow racist election-rigging in the near term.
Mississippi Democratic Party Chair and state Rep. Cheikh Taylor called Reeves’ special session part of “a plan to exploit a pending court ruling to do what Mississippi Republicans have always done, draw maps designed to silence Black voters,” the Magnolia Tribune reported.
“We are going to call this what it is: racist,” Taylor said, “and we are going to fight it.”
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