Blue Heron Blast: South going to do it again.

The speed at which the South is moving to rid itself of any black congressional representation is astounding. Efforts are ongoing in Florida, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. Soon there will be no minority congressmen left, at least in the south.

Going to lose Steve Cohen too in Nashville. Not black but close enough. But that is okay because as we all know and as Justice Alito assures us, racism is over and a thing of the past.

The only real racism today is that which is directed at white protestant males.

So now pretty much all black Memphis will have no black representation. But as one Southern GOP consultant stated, these people will just have to learn to vote for white people.

It is interesting to think about the subject of racism and the GOP.

Sen. Richard Russell

Now, not every Republican is a racist but pretty much every racist tends to tack towards their side of the line, at least since the Southern Democrats gave up their axe handles in the sixties.

It is funny to me that Republicans can be whining about losing voting power in Virginia, or at least they were until this morning, when the Supreme Court disallowed the voter's referendum there, but have no problem when it happens to the other side.

I guess it just matters whose ox is getting gored?

Black voting jumped exponentially when the Voting Rights Act of 1964 was enacted and we got rid of literacy tests, poll taxes, and all sorts of impediments to minority representation that were born in the Jim Crow era.

Now of course, thanks to this Supreme Court, it is not enough to prove that discrimination exists, one must prove that it was intentional and not merely the byproduct of political partisanship.

Good luck with that.

Excellent article on the subject here.

The Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The 6-3 decision effectively nullifies Section 2 and, as Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent, “threatens a half-century’s worth of gains in voting equality.”
Section 2 addresses racial vote dilution—a tactic commonly used to reduce the power of Black voters in the South after the Voting Rights Act. When states could no longer deny ballots to Black Americans, they used electoral maps and at-large election systems to give minority citizens’ votes no or minimal weight.

Just for your information, Louisiana has never had a Black Congressperson elected from a non-majority-Black district. And it looks like now it never will.

This Supreme Court has been hell bent on dismantling civil rights and when you look at the players, it is quite understandable. Like Amy Coney Barrett, who as a circuit judge authored an opinion concluding that a Black employee who was called a “stupid-ass n—” by a supervisor still had not shown a sufficiently hostile work environment. Okay then...

After the Civil War, the Fifteenth Amendment barred racial discrimination in voting, but states continued to disenfranchise Black voters through poll taxes, literacy tests, and violent intimidation—especially in the South.
Selma, Alabama, is one example of how effectively these tactics prevented Black people from voting. In 1965, half of Selma’s population was Black, but only 2% of the county’s 15,000 Black eligible voters were registered to vote.
On March 7, 1965, Black residents planned to march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery to demand their right to vote. Alabama state troopers and local police used billy clubs, whips, and tear gas to attack hundreds of nonviolent voting rights protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, stopping their planned march to Montgomery. The day became known as “Bloody Sunday.”
Two weeks later, thousands of voting rights activists from across the country gathered in Selma and set out for Montgomery. When they reached the Capitol, 25,000 people strong, on March 25, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a powerful speech demanding voting rights.
President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act less than five months later, on August 6, 1965. The landmark legislation banned discriminatory qualification laws and required jurisdictions like Alabama with the worst records of discrimination to “preclear” new voting laws with the federal government. Congress reauthorized the VRA in 2006, when Republicans controlled Congress and the White House.
In the decade after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, more than a million Black people registered to vote in the Deep South. The surge in Black voters included around 200,000 in Alabama by 1975. The number of Black people elected to office in the Deep South soared from virtually none to about 1,000.
...June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court decided in a 5-4 decision to strike down the preclearance requirement because “things have changed dramatically” since 1965—voting tests were illegal, racial disparities in voter turnout and registration had diminished, and “record numbers” of minorities held elected office.
As the dissent noted, “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

I find it funny when people like Alito, Thomas and Gorsuch pretend that racism is a thing of the past. Because while progress has admittedly been made, they and their people tended to fight it every step of the way.

Here in San Diego, Blacks, Jews and Mexicans were forbidden by covenant to live in La Jolla or Rancho Santa Fe until UCSD founder Roger Revelle's pressure on La Jolla to rescind the anti-semitic deed restrictions or risk not having professors and for not requiring Scripps researchers to sign loyalty oaths. His nemesis was a prominent attorney from the prestigious Gray, Cary, Ames and Frye law firm named Jim Archer.

In the early 1950s, Revelle had criticized the La Jolla Real Estate Brokers Association’s restrictive property deeds. “You can’t have a university without having Jewish professors,” he warned. “You’ll have to make up your minds whether you want a university or an anti-Semitic covenant. You can’t have both.” Neither Archer nor the property owners of La Jolla were happy with his stance and as UC President Kerr later said: “Archer was a terror when his sense of patriotism was aroused.”

This actually continued into the mid 1960's here in San Diego. Think about how much worse it was in the south. Rinse and repeat.

“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa)

Racism of course starts at the top. I was wondering how many times President Donald Trump has referred to a black or latino person as low i.q. but I can't count quite that high.

But let's see. Where should I start?

...researchers also scrutinized a collection of Trump’s public statements for the past 10 years, searching through a repository of C-SPAN videos that covered Trump speaking at rallies, press briefings, and other events. They found he deployed the “low IQ” aspersion at least 75 times. Forty of these instances—53 percent—targeted Black people. He also used it to describe Somali and Hispanic immigrants.Harris clocked in with the most mentions (23). Biden was next (17). Then came Waters (8), Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (5), and Crockett (3). Trump claimed Harris was too “low IQ” to be president. In October, he said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was “low IQ” and could not pass a cognitive test.

Last week, speaking at The Villages, a retirement community in Florida full of Trumpers, he also declared that Barack Obama could not pass a cognitive test. In the past, he has often derided Obama’s intelligence and suggested he was accepted at Columbia University and Harvard Law School only due to his race. The idea that the first Black president was a smart fellow seems to be too tough for Trump to accept.

Hakeem Jeffries, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Jasmine Crockett, Maxine Waters, Kamala Harris, Al Sharpton, Donna Brazile, Ihlan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Letitia James, Brandon Johnsonand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Who else am I forgetting?

Speaker Mike Johnson said last week that America needed to elect Republicans because they were "the adults in the room."

Is this how adults speak and act? Adult bigots certainly.