We Promised to Fight GOP Gerrymandering Games, and We Are Getting Busy!
Publisher's Roundup 66
As I was writing this week’s column about how we are pushing back across the South on wrongful redistricting in the wake of Callais, Friday’s Virginia Supreme Court decision hit. Virginia had been one of our hopes to add seats to balance out illegitimate gerrymanders elsewhere. The decision by the Republican majority on the state’s highest court to block that made an already challenging situation even worse. I couldn’t help but think of an old joke, “it’s always darkest before … it becomes totally black.”
But then three things made me feel better.
First, I looked afresh at the math, and I was reminded that we could still see a one- or two-seat pro-democracy pickup in that state. The same majority of Virginia voters who expressed their will to counteract Donald Trump’s open theft of congressional seats is still there. And, like me, they are probably mad as hell about the Republican majority on the state Supreme Court blocking the referendum they voted for.
Second, if Virginia was a wake-up call for me, perhaps it will be one for the country as well. As we covered this week, the South is rising up, with intense protests in places like Tennessee and Alabama. But we need to do much more to wake up the country as a whole to the post-Callais redistricting crisis and the ways it is being used to push for a new Jim Crow. In fact, a nationwide mobilization in Montgomery, Alabama, to address redistricting wrongdoing has just been announced for next weekend. Pack your bags!
Third, the legitimate, voter-approved Virginia redistricting that was blocked was needed to balance out illegitimate and illegal gerrymanders elsewhere. But if we can block them, we can further limit the damage. That is exactly what my colleagues and I are doing in our litigation campaign in the South, including our cutting-edge case to stop the illegal Florida gerrymander. It is the latest of my over 300 legal cases and matters defending democracy that you make possible through your paid subscriptions.
On Wednesday, April 29, a mere hour after Callais dropped, Florida House Republicans passed a brazenly partisan congressional map pushed by Gov. Ron DeSantis. It soon passed the Florida Senate, and on Monday, May 4, DeSantis signed legislation making this new map official. Four Democratic seats were eliminated. Other Southern states have followed suit or will do so.
Florida was also one of the worst, because it is such a flagrant violation of state law. More than 15 years ago, Florida voters overwhelmingly rejected gerrymandering by adopting the Fair Districts Amendments to the state constitution, despite opposition from the Republican-led legislature. These amendments prohibit drawing districts intended to favor incumbents or political parties. The brazen gerrymander we are now witnessing flies in the face of that.
The gerrymander is clearly partisan. Yet DeSantis’s general counsel justified it by pointing to the Callais decision — which is about racial gerrymandering. However wrongly, that ruling upheld a challenge to Louisiana’s map that created a second majority-Black congressional district in the state, even though the map was drawn to comply with the Voting Rights Act.
That has absolutely nothing to do with the partisan gerrymander in Florida. You don’t need to be a redistricting expert to see that the Florida GOP has been waiting in the wings for the opportunity to rejigger the state’s congressional map. The decision was nothing more than a pretext to roll out its long-desired plans.
This is a travesty, which is why we were quick to act. Working with a tremendous coalition of clients and co-counsel, on May 4, we filed in Florida state court to block the new map. In the complaint, we explain that DeSantis and his allies openly used partisan data to increase Republican seats from 20 to 24 (out of Florida’s 28 districts). In true partisan fashion, DeSantis’s office shared the proposed new map with Fox News before it was even sent to state legislators.
As we explain in our filing, “The Challenged Plan is illegal. It is a flagrant violation of the express will of the people of Florida, who amended their constitution just over 15 years ago to ban precisely the intent that is at the heart of the Plan. The mandate of Article III, Section 20 [of the Florida Constitution] is clear, and the Challenged Plan just as clearly contradicts that mandate. It should be enjoined.”
In addition to our great regular partners LULAC and SPLC, we at Democracy Defenders Fund are fortunate to have many other wonderful colleagues on our side in this fight. Our coalition, which includes Common Cause, the League of Women Voters of Florida, and Southern Coalition for Social Justice, reflects the mosaic of America that makes our country so great.
And there is one other partner: all of you Contrarians! Because of your paid subscriptions, we are able to file cases like this one and do our part in the national effort to combat this sweeping attempt to restrict access to the ballot.
That doesn’t only mean filing litigation, of course. It also means being part of what is going on in the court of public opinion, including through supporting the vibrant, peaceful public protest that has sprung up across the South and is stirring around the nation. Protesters and the pro-democracy public alike count on The Contrarian’s coverage of the Democracy Movement to serve as a hub to understand the moment and take inspiration from it. This week was no exception as we took you inside the protests across the South, as I discuss in our weekly round up below.
We will be in Montgomery, Alabama on May 16 for the National Day of Action, participating and bringing you our great Contrarian coverage, just as we have done for No Kings and so many other demonstrations over the past 16 months.
For more, and for everything else that happened this week, please keep reading for this week’s best of the Contrarian. No other outlet in American journalism goes deeper on these issues every day – and, like our litigation, it is all thanks to your paid subscriptions. It’s the most unique bargain in American journalism, as you will see when you take a look at this week’s highlights.
Voting Wrongs
SCOTUS’s Brazen Power Grab Guts Voting Rights
Norm Ornstein argued that the Supreme Court’s overexercise of power now merits more than the usual calls for judicial reform — that it’s time to go back to the Constitution to curtail a truly unbalanced federal branch. “No option should be off the table.”
The Economic Consequences of Gutting Voting Rights Are Staggering
Alphonso David trained an economic lens on the travesty of Callais. “The math of modern voter suppression: make voting more expensive while making each vote feel less powerful.”
The GOP’s Grand Southern Delusion
Charlie Bailey, chair of the Georgia Democratic Party, offered reasons for hope in a key midterm battleground state, Republicans’ voter suppression campaign notwithstanding. “They cannot get through their heads that the impacts of their policies have turned folks against them.”
Virginia’s Redistricting Ruling Is Peak Darwin-Era Politics
Historian Jill Lawrence wrote that scruples are for sissies, and that’s why it’s important to elect the candidates who will do the right thing, even if they are flawed humans themselves: “They … offer a template for looking at the bigger picture — the biggest one of all. That would be the fate of U.S. democracy, now in the hands of an oligarchic regime intent on staying in power, no matter what it takes.”
Media Matters
Jennifer Schulze wrote on the ongoing decimation of local news sources thanks to consolidation, copycat content, and right-wing conglomerates. “Thousands of local newspapers are already gone; your local TV newscast could be next.”
‘He Put a Lasso Around the Earth in a Way Nobody Had Before’
Meredith Blake wrote on how, “for better and for worse,” CNN founder Ted Turner changed the way the world gets its news (and much more), and interviewed Lisa Napoli, author of Up All Night: Ted Turner, CNN, and the Birth of 24-Hour News.
Split Screen: The Church Is the State Now
Azza Cohen wrote on the chilling messages encoded in the Trump regime’s use of overtly religious imagery. “The visual of the word ‘science’ next to a white man in an explicitly religious pose is a poignant visual metaphor for how this administration wants to be seen.”
Worth a Hard Look
America Becomes Outraged Only When It’s Too Late
Carron J. Phillips wrote on the latest attacks on voting as part of Americans’ pattern of all-too-blind — if not fatal — optimism in the stability of democracy. “Trump 2028 isn’t propaganda; it is a preemptive campaign slogan. Republicans tip their pitches because they know Americans will ignore the signs.”
Wars Do Not Occur Within a Vacuum
Ciera Stone gave us a searing report on the humanitarian crisis being waged across multiple regions of the Middle East. “This is what the human cost of war looks like…. The stories and people profiled are merely snapshots of an unfathomably vast, brutal picture. For each day of complacency, the cost of lives and livelihoods goes up.”
Health & Science
The Evisceration of the American Mind
Jeff Nesbit wrote on the Trump administration’s recent move to fire 22 leading members of the National Science Board, the independent governing body of the National Science Foundation. “By purging the NSB, the administration isn’t just shaking up the bureaucracy. It’s dismantling the peer-review process and replacing scientific expertise with political loyalty.”
Reuben Steiger looked at some of the headlining threats of the frontier AI models — among them monopoly, autonomy, hacking — and asked: Can artificial intelligence solve more problems than it’s creating?
Fighting Back
Meet Two Candidates Fighting for Montana
Tim Dickinson spoke with two candidates in the Democratic primary for Montana’s 1st District, pro-healthcare ex-gun exec Ryan Busse and former smokejumper Sam Forstag, both of whom are finding creative ways to bring the blue wave west.
The Contrarian Covers the Democracy Movement
This week, we covered May Day Strong protests in Missouri, Wisconsin, New York and North Carolina, redistricting protests in Tennessee, Alabama and elsewhere, and more. Get help organizing from Indivisible, find protests in your area at mobilize.us, and send us your protest photos at submit@contrariannews.org. And see our Calls to Action for more ways to fight the MAGA assault on voting rights.
Culture, Cartoons & Pets
This week, our cartoonists covered the beach (86, Nick Anderson), the ballroom (Why the Long Face?, Nick Anderson), the Blame Game (Michael de Adder), and one unstable brain (Tom the Dancing Bug, Ruben Bolling).
The Devil Offers Free Two-Day Shipping
Meredith Blake wrote on Anna Wintour and her cinematic counterpart, Miranda Priestly, who, between the Bezos-sponsored Met Gala and a journalism fantasy in The Devil Wears Prada II, each did a little too much trusting of billionaires.
A Make-Your-Own-Adventure Brunch Casserole
Marissa Rothkopf Bates shared a “golden retriever of recipes: eager to please and there to bring you joy with its simple, happy-go-lucky existence.”
And last but never least: meet Daisy Shaw!
As infuriating as it is to see the powers that be trying to stop us, I really believe it's only leading to a greater desire to fight among we the people. It's really a matter of organizing and mobilizing!
I'm a native Floridian and furious. Thank you for immediately responding to this travesty. We stand together!!