Louisiana v. Callais

The end of the Voting Rights Act, brought to you by the Supreme Court. If you're not a 5-4 Premium member, you're not hearing every episode! To hear this and other Premium-only episodes, access to our Slack community, and more, join at fivefourpod.com/support http://fivefourpod.com/support. 5-4 is presented by Prologue Projects. This episode was produced by Alli Rodgers. Leon Neyfakh provides editorial support. Our website was designed by Peter Murphy. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips NY, and our theme song is by Spatial Relations. Transcriptions of each episode are available at fivefourpod.com https://fivefourpod.com Follow the show at @fivefourpod on most platforms. On BlueSky, find Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social, Michael @fleerultra.bsky.social, and Rhiannon @aywarhiannon.bsky.social. Our Sponsors: * Check out Mint Mobile and use my code mintmobile.com/fivefour for a great deal: https://www.mintmobile.com * Check out Quince and use my code FIVEFOUR for a great deal: https://www.quince.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Michael Liroff?

  We will hear argument first this morning in case 24109, Louisiana versus Calais.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Hey, everyone. This is Leon from Prologue Projects. On this episode of Five to Four, Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael are talking about Louisiana v. Calais, the decision from just last week that essentially ended the Voting Rights Act. Five Four started this year with a two-part series on the VRA, which was designed to eliminate racial discrimination in voting, and was long considered a crown jewel of the civil rights movement. Part of the VRA allowed, and sometimes required, race-conscious redistricting to protect against racist gerrymandering that diluted the power of minority voters. But in Calais, the Supreme Court took up the question of whether the creation of these majority-minority districts as a remedy for vote dilution was an unconstitutional, race-based classification. In a 6-3 decision,

• 0:54Speaker 01

  the court ruled that it was, effectively gutting what was left of the VRA once and for all. This is Five to Four, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks.

• 1:10Peter Shamshiri?

  Welcome to Five to Four, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have lost track of our civil rights, like my doctor losing my test results. I'm Peter. I'm here with Michael. Hey, everybody. And Rhiannon.

• 1:23Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 1:25Peter Shamshiri?

  Brief story, folks, before we get started.

• 1:28Speaker 03

  No, no, Michael and I didn't ask a follow-up question or anything. I'm happy to jump into the content of the episode today.

• 1:37Peter Shamshiri?

  No, I'm gonna complain because I've got a minor surgical procedure coming up in a few days, and as part of that, I had to get an EKG in advance so that they know that it won't kill me or whatever. And then they're like, hey, where are the EKG results? I called the doctor that took them, and they're like, you know, we just can't find them. And I'm not gonna extrapolate on this. I'm just gonna tell you and our listeners that I'm gonna lose my fucking mind. That I'm gonna lose my fucking mind, folks.

• 2:11Michael Liroff?

  And you know Peter's upset about this because he already, before we started recording, just complained extensively to me and Rhiannon and then was like, you know what, I'm gonna complain some more. I'm gonna do it.

• 2:22Peter Shamshiri?

  I asked you guys, if you had any ideas for opening metaphors and you guys just sat there fucking fully silent, okay? So this is what it is.

• 2:31Speaker 03

  Michael said Olivia Rodrigo.

• 2:33Peter Shamshiri?

  That's not a metaphor idea. That's just, you're just naming people.

• 2:38Michael Liroff?

  You asked what was going on in pop culture, that is.

• 2:40Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. And you said Olivia Rodrigo's going on tour. That does nothing for me.

• 2:46Peter Shamshiri?

  All right, everybody shut up. This week's case, Calais v Louisiana. This is a case from just last week about the Voting Rights Act and it made some headlines, which is why we're dropping this episode a few days early.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a big one.

• 3:01Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. The Voting Rights Act allows for voters to sue for racial discrimination in voting. And this case is really all about what that means. How are we defining discrimination in voting? For over 40 years, courts have implemented a test where they would assess whether there is a politically cohesive group of minority voters in an area that could be a voting district. And if so, generally, a state would be required to create a voting district for those voters. This was a way to prevent southern states, especially, from gerrymandering black voters out of representation, right? But then along comes the Roberts Court,

• 3:43Peter Shamshiri?

  which has now functionally altered this test to make it almost impossible to show racial discrimination. The latest decision in a long line meant to gut the Voting Rights Act.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, we started this year, 2026, with a two-part series on the Voting Rights Act, kind of like the history, knowing that this case was coming down the pipeline, knowing that the Supreme Court was about to rule in this way. It was like our- Pre-eulogy-eulogy for the Voting Rights Act.

• 4:12Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, we pre-wrote its obituary.

• 4:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So here we are.

• 4:18Peter Shamshiri?

  If we ever opened the year with like the history of a law or something like that, you know, we just predicted it. It's going down that year.

• 4:25Speaker 03

  Exactly. We did it with Dobbs first.

• 4:27Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 4:28Speaker 03

  In my section here, background that we're gonna talk about is the background to this case, Calais. What happened in Louisiana, how it went up and down the federal court system, and the facts that give rise to this specific case. But of course, we just mentioned, we did two episodes on the history of the Voting Rights Act. And after I get done with the facts of Calais here, we're going to go back and talk about the history a little bit because there's just so much background. And we know, of course, that this is a years, a decades-long project by conservatives to gut the Voting Rights Act. So, turning to Calais, let's start in 2020.

• 5:08Speaker 03

  The census in 2020 revealed that about a third of Louisiana's population is black. The Louisiana legislature adopted a new congressional map in 2021, based on the new census. The state of Louisiana has six seats in the House of Representatives, so the state has six congressional districts. That new map that the Louisiana ledge adopted in 2021 gave Louisiana five districts with white majorities and one district with a black majority of voters in that district. Now, note, that's one out of six.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  Now, that's not one out of three, which is what Louisiana's population of black people is. One out of six is in fact half of one-third, meaning the black vote in Louisiana with that 2021 congressional map was being diluted by 50%, right? This is a huge dilution of the black vote. So that map got challenged in federal court in a couple of different cases. Those lawsuits argued that the congressional maps violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act because of that dilution of the black vote. Now, the lower court agreed that it was a violation of the Voting Rights Act. The lower court puts a hold on those congressional maps being in force, being, you know, going into effect.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  And it went up to the Supreme Court, then back down to the Fifth Circuit. And that case actually ended with the Fifth Circuit affirming that original lower district court ruling that those maps in Louisiana did, in fact, violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. And the state of Louisiana was ordered to draw a new map in early 2024. The federal courts actually said, Louisiana, you better draw a new Voting Rights Act compliant congressional map by the time of the 2024 elections, or we, the federal courts, will draw the map for you. So Louisiana redrew the maps in such a way that a second district had majority black voters.

• 7:16Speaker 03

  So that's two out of six districts in Louisiana with majority black vote. Great. Except you're listening to this podcast, you live in this America, we have this Supreme Court. Of course, that's not the end of it. A group of white voters in Louisiana challenged the redrawn map. The newly compliant with the Voting Rights Act map in Louisiana, a group of white voters took it to court. But they weren't-

• 7:45Peter Shamshiri?

  These are Louisiana whites, folks.

• 7:47Speaker 03

  To clarify.

• 7:48Peter Shamshiri?

  Their veins running thick with French blood. All right? Disgusting.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  That's the problem.

• 7:54Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. Well, no one talks about that.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  The original sin, the original sin of Louisiana.

• 7:58Peter Shamshiri?

  The other podcast won't tell you.

• 8:02Speaker 03

  While we're on this note of whites in Louisiana, Philip Calle, like the guy who is the named plaintiff here, one of these white voters challenging the map in Louisiana, he was at January 6th. He was in Washington DC.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  This reporting just came out.

• 8:25Peter Shamshiri?

  So good. And is like, you know, a right wing lunatic who's like quote tweeting Elon Musk being like, "Non-citizens are voting in our country."

• 8:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, like all the, like, he's like a, like a voting conspiracy theorist, like thinks elections are rigged, like, hmm, coincidentally suing for new election maps.

• 8:49Peter Shamshiri?

  America is not about non-citizens voting. America is about Andouille sausage, shrimp, crawfish, corn, you know, just...

• 9:02Speaker 03

  And white people voting.

• 9:05Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 9:06Speaker 03

  And so, back to the case, what are Calais and this, and this class, this group of, of white voters in Louisiana, trying to challenge? They're not challenging the new map on the basis of the Voting Rights Act. They're not saying it violates the VRA. They can't obviously really do that at this point because the map had just been ordered to be redrawn to get into compliance with the VRA. Instead, these white voters say that the new map is unconstitutional, that it's a violation of the 14th Amendment because this is racial gerrymandering. They're saying, "Well, the state of Louisiana redrew these maps based on race. The equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment," they say, "prohibits that.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  You can't classify based on race in this way. You can't use race to make decisions this way." You know, think of affirmative action. Think about the arguments that conservatives make about how like, just the consideration of race is unconstitutional, even if consideration of race is used for the purpose of like, remediating past unfairness, right? So, the legal question here, in Calais, it's not anymore about if a voting law or congressional redistricting is in compliance with the Voting Rights Act, but whether essentially the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional, because what Louisiana was required to do by the Voting Rights Act, these white voters are saying is actually a violation.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  Of the 14th Amendment. So for Calais, that's the question that is going up to the Supreme Court. But like I said, there's a lot of history and background to understand before this. So I think, Peter, you're definitely going to go into like, what was the status quo? What did the VRA say at this point before Calais got to the Supreme Court?

• 10:55Peter Shamshiri?

  Right. So in order to understand the dispute here, you need to understand the history of the law. Voting Rights Act passed in 1965. Broadly speaking, makes racial discrimination in voting illegal. That includes discriminatory gerrymanders, you know, dividing up congressional districts in a way that discriminates against minority voters. But the question becomes, what exactly does that mean? What's a discriminatory gerrymander? How do we identify one? In 1980, there's a case called Mobile v. Bolden, which we covered last year, where the Supreme Court held that in order to prove voting discrimination, you have to show that a state intentionally discriminated on the basis of race. The problem with that is that it's basically impossible to do, right?

• 11:39Peter Shamshiri?

  There's rarely straightforward evidence that the government is engaging in racist gerrymandering. Even when there is, courts can ignore it like they did in that case.

• 11:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:49Peter Shamshiri?

  And you can imagine that if state legislators know that that's the rule, they'll just hide their motivations, right?

• 11:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. They're not going to write into the like state ledge record. Like, we want to make sure black people's vote gets diluted because they're black.

• 12:04Peter Shamshiri?

  So in response to the Supreme Court in 1982, Congress amends the Voting Rights Act to specifically say, no, you don't have to prove intentional discrimination, right? You can just show that the impact was discriminatory, and that's enough to establish a violation of the Voting Rights Act. A few years later, in a case called Jingles, the Supreme Court creates a test for evaluating these claims. They say that if there is a minority group that is sufficiently large in a single geographic area that generally votes together, and a majority group is consistently voting as a block to defeat the minority group's preferred candidate, that is presumptively voter discrimination, right? So basically, if there's a minority group that could easily have its own district,

• 12:49Peter Shamshiri?

  but doesn't, and they're being consistently denied a representative because of a majority voting block, that will usually violate the Voting Rights Act, right?

• 12:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:59Peter Shamshiri?

  And the result of that is that you can sue for voter discrimination, basically saying, for example, hey, there's a black area in our state, it's big enough to have its own representative, but they're gerrymandered to hell, so they don't, right? And the courts will tell the state, hey, you need to create a district for them, right? You need to create a majority-minority district, they call it. And that's the status quo before this case, that that's how these situations get remedied under the Voting Rights Act, right? Justice Alito enters the, enters our narrative here. He writes the majority opinion. His big-picture argument is basically like, hey, it's actually the Voting Rights Act that discriminates on the basis of race, right?

• 13:41Peter Shamshiri?

  Because in order to find a violation of the Voting Rights Act and then remedy it, you need to do all of this analysis of different racial voting blocks, right? You're creating a district for black voters. That's kind of doing racism, right? And according to him, we need to be very careful about this because the Constitution forbids us from discriminating based on race. And this is the classic conservative argument, right, that Ree, you were referencing?

• 14:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:10Peter Shamshiri?

  These laws and programs designed to alleviate racism are actually racist themselves because they treat people differently based on race, which I think is obviously inherently stupid because how do you adequately alleviate racial discrimination without factoring in race? But this is the conservative world for you, right?

• 14:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:30Peter Shamshiri?

  So Alito says, we need to create a new test, or clarify the old test. He sort of very consistently says throughout the opinion, like, I'm not, we're not overturning the prior case law.

• 14:43Speaker 03

  It's not a new test.

• 14:44Peter Shamshiri?

  We're just clarifying it, we're just sort of like sharpening it, meanwhile, very obviously overturning it.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:50Peter Shamshiri?

  He says that in order to show that a given electoral map is racist, you need to show that there is no legitimate explanation for the map other than racism, right? Basically, rule out everything other than racism if you want to prove voter discrimination. And the biggest part of his argument is really just, you say this is racial gerrymandering, but how do you know it isn't just partisan gerrymandering, right?

• 15:15Speaker 03

  Isn't this just based on parties?

• 15:17Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 15:18Speaker 03

  Democrats versus Republicans duking it out in the political sphere?

• 15:22Peter Shamshiri?

  Because back in 2019, in Rucho v. Common Cause, the court functionally said that partisan gerrymandering is allowed. So Alito is saying, look, if you want to argue that this is racial discrimination, you need to prove that it's not partisan gerrymandering, right? Because we've said that that's acceptable. And that's really the heart of this case. The idea that if you can't tell the difference between partisan gerrymandering and racial gerrymandering, you can't just assume that it's racial gerrymandering.

• 15:52Michael Liroff?

  Right.

• 15:52Peter Shamshiri?

  You can't assume that it's racial discrimination. Now, aside from the fact that in a sane world partisan gerrymandering would be illegal.

• 16:00Michael Liroff?

  Right.

• 16:00Peter Shamshiri?

  And it only is legal because the Supreme Court said it is, right? This is absurd because you can't disentangle these concepts. You can't disentangle race and partisanship, right? Race and partisanship are overlapping categories. They relate to one another. The reason that black people so often vote as a partisan block is that they view their interests as black people as intertwined politically, right? You might think that they're wrong or misguided about that, right? If you're some dumbass Republican like Alito, you probably think, well, black voters should probably embrace the Republican Party or some dumb fucking shit like that. But that's the fact of it. They don't, right? They believe that their interests are represented largely by the Democratic Party.

• 16:42Peter Shamshiri?

  So to say that you have to prove that a certain gerrymander is based on race rather than party, it's just sort of nonsensical.

• 16:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:49Michael Liroff?

  Yeah. And I want to add, like, look, in Louisiana, white people are the same, right? They vote Republican at comparable rates as black people vote Democrat. Like in Louisiana, it's like 88%, 90% of white voters vote Republican consistently. Like, they also understand their racial interests as intertwined with their political and partisan interests. Like, who the fuck are we kidding?

• 17:15Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. And you could imagine this as even more absurd, right? Like, to present a hypothetical. In the mid-century, we had a couple of political parties that were explicitly racist and founded on that racism, right? Right. In 1948, you had the states' rights Democratic Party, right? The Dixiecrats, which existed for the duration of the 1948 election. In 68, you saw the presidential campaign of George Wallace under the American Independent Party, right? They had an expressly segregationist platform. Mm-hmm. And that campaign, by the way, won five states. So imagine a world where that party persisted and took control of a state government and instituted a gerrymander.

• 17:58Peter Shamshiri?

  Under this standard, that party could do a quote-unquote partisan gerrymander and be fine, right? Yeah. Even though the actual effect would be identical to a racial gerrymander. And in fact, the purpose of it is racist, right? The purpose of the partisan gerrymander is inherently racist. There's another point that I think needs to be made, even if it's a little subtle and legalistic. In Rucho, the case about partisan gerrymandering, the court didn't actually say that partisan gerrymandering is constitutional. What they said is that it's non-justiciable, meaning that it is a political question that the court cannot answer one way or the other. Yeah. But then here, Alito pretty plainly says that partisan gerrymandering is a legitimate state interest.

• 18:42Peter Shamshiri?

  How can both of these things be true? How can it be that the court cannot weigh in on it? Right. But then, at the same time, it's a valid practice that is presumptively allowed and in fact is capable of outweighing racial gerrymandering, which is, like, in the Constitution, illegal. Right. Explicitly, yeah, disallowed by the Constitution. And so, the net effect here is that it's nearly impossible to bring a claim of racial gerrymandering, right? Unless every state legislator just raises their hands, like, "We're doing racism, right? Let us all say it on the record." Uh, then you're pretty much never gonna prove it. But also, remember, I mentioned Mobil v. Bolden, the 1980 Supreme Court case, where the court

• 19:25Peter Shamshiri?

  held that you need to show intentional discrimination to prove a VRA claim. And then Congress amended the law to specifically say, "No, you don't." Yeah. And Alito is returning us to that standard, saying you need to prove that there is no explanation besides intentional discrimination.

• 19:40Peter Shamshiri?

  He's overturning Congress without saying that that's what he's doing, right? He's overturning this amendment without actually mentioning it, without being like, no, that's what I'm doing.

• 19:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:50Peter Shamshiri?

  There's something about this that's very weird to me. I feel like the conservatives are obsessed with the idea that you can't show racism by the impact of it. Because when they think about racism, they think of it as a moral judgment, right? So if you're like, this is racist. The way in which these districts are drawn is racist. They think that what you're doing is accusing them of like a moral failure of some kind. And so they get defensive and they're like, you have to prove that it's intentional, right? But if you have a structural understanding of racism, you could say, well, not necessarily, right? The intention may or may not be racist. It's sort of beside the point, right?

• 20:31Peter Shamshiri?

  Which is what Congress was trying to say when they amended the VRA. Right. And before we move on to the Thomas concurrence, which we'll talk about, we need to mention one thing, which is that every time there's like a Voting Rights Act case where they undermine the Voting Rights Act in some significant way, they need to like do a thing where they're like, racism isn't so bad anymore, right?

• 20:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:55Peter Shamshiri?

  Yes. Alito says, vast social change has occurred throughout the country, and particularly in the South, which has made great strides in ending entrenched racial discrimination. Which, so first of all, you're basically just saying, just like Roberts did back in Shelby County, that this is like a policy thing you're doing, right? Like, I think racism is over. I don't give a shit what Congress thinks. So we're gonna sort of, we're gonna just let it, let things get a little looser, right? We don't need to worry about this so much. He says, by 2004, the racial gap in voter turnout and registration had largely disappeared.

• 21:36Peter Shamshiri?

  The way that he's presenting this is as if the problem was essentially solved by 2004. But actually, that's a pretty strategic choice of year, because in recent years, the racial turnout gap has gotten worse. It's increased. So the Brennan Center looked at voter data and found that the turnout gap between black and white Americans actually doubled between 2010 and 2022, from eight to 16%.

• 22:04Peter Shamshiri?

  That gap grew twice as fast in southern states with histories of voter discrimination, which used to be subject to federal oversight, but are now not due to the court's decision in Shelby County in 2013. So what a coincidence that this region that made such great strides, according to Sam Alito, is now seeing the largest turnout gaps. But like, I mean, he's just saying, look, the racial gap in voter turnout had largely disappeared by 2004, which it depends on like what data you're looking at.

• 22:36Speaker 03

  Right.

• 22:37Peter Shamshiri?

  It's like, there's some data where you could say, yeah, that's like basically true, but it doesn't speak to now 22 years later, by the way, which is like not a super small amount of time.

• 22:48Michael Liroff?

  No.

• 22:49Peter Shamshiri?

  Like, I don't think, I don't think, I don't think you should be allowed to say that. Like, we solved this problem back in 2004. It's like, yeah, like, look, in 2004 was great, you know? It's like, I didn't shoplift at all in 2004. When, when you spent the next 10 years shoplifting every day.

• 23:07Speaker 03

  Personal shoplifting on my own behalf was largely eliminated by 2004, you know? There's also no reference whatsoever to like, oh, why would this, you know, huge problem in racist voting laws have been solved by 2004? Well, it's because of the Voting Rights Act, of course. And then the Supreme Court dismantled it bit by bit by bit. And now you see the effects of that.

• 23:32Peter Shamshiri?

  Harkens back to the famous RBG line about throwing away an umbrella in a rainstorm because you're not getting wet, right? They're, they're like, wow, look, racism has ended. It's like, no, actually, what, what happened was the South was forced to not do it.

• 23:47Michael Liroff?

  Right.

• 23:48Peter Shamshiri?

  That's what happened.

• 23:49Michael Liroff?

  The South was brought to heel by the federal government.

• 23:52Peter Shamshiri?

  All of these institutions in these states, and in other states, for the record, were engaging in racism, and then the federal government made them stop. And now you're saying they don't have to. Yeah, I'm not a, not a fucking rocket scientist. I'm just sort of piecing together what I'm looking at here, right? And I mean, it's just, it's crazy how disingenuous this is to just point to 2004, which is like the single best data point that they have.

• 24:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 24:20Peter Shamshiri?

  It's just, it's crazy.

• 24:21Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, so we should talk about the Thomas concurrence. It is only like one page. It's two paragraphs. Nonetheless, I think there's a lot to say here. I'm going to read just a couple of sentences from it and then, and then tell you what I think. He says, "This court should never have interpreted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to effectively give racial groups a, quote, 'entitlement to roughly proportional representation.' By doing so, the court led legislatures and courts to systematically divide the country into electoral districts along racial lines." And then he says, "That interpretation has rendered Section 2 repugnant to any nation that strives for the ideal of a colorblind constitution.

• 25:04Michael Liroff?

  Today's decision should largely put an end to this disastrous misadventure in voting rights jurisprudence." So I wanted to read this because in this telling, all of this, Thomas believes the original Voting Rights Act did not prohibit racial gerrymandering and vote dilution claims, and this has all been a judicial misadventure, and that they are now correcting the judicial record, which is bullshit because, as we discussed in Mobile v. Bolden, the court basically made racial vote dilution claims very difficult, and Congress responded not by being like, "Yeah, actually, racial vote dilution claims aren't even legible."

• 25:49Michael Liroff?

  Congress responded by correcting the Supreme Court, explicitly allowing these vote dilution claims, and making them easier, right? And the only nod Thomas has to this is that he says courts led legislatures into doing this, as if they are passive actors who've been manipulated

• 26:08Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 26:08Michael Liroff?

  by the dastardly liberals of the Warren-era Supreme Court. It's a ridiculous way to read the history of the Voting Rights Act. What it reminds me of in a way is back in Shelby County, during oral arguments, Scalia complained that the law had passed like 98 or 99, nothing in the Senate, which he took to be like evidence of something nefarious going on. And I think in both instances, what you're seeing are conservatives who are angry that like their party got overtaken by the politics of the moment, right?

• 26:41Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. They were like, we were too cowardly to stand up for our racist principles.

• 26:46Michael Liroff?

  Right, right. I believe that a lot of those senators didn't really like this, but they felt they had to vote for it. And so we should give them that no vote back. Mm hmm.

• 26:57Peter Shamshiri?

  That's what courts are for, stepping in when they feel like the vibes are off on a particular congressional vote and just overturning it.

• 27:04Michael Liroff?

  Right. And so I think that's the best way to read this, is him being like, look, the Warren Court basically said this stuff is racist and nobody wanted to be called racist. And so all these legislatures had to pretend like they were going to go along with this and they were led astray by these dastardly courts and now we're correcting the record. But that is just, that's not how, yeah, courts should or do operate, right? Like, Congress acted and the only question is, what did they do? And is it permissible under the Constitution? Those are the only two questions. And he doesn't answer either of them. He's not interested in either of them. No. Because what he's really getting at is we never, when he says, "We never should have done this," he doesn't mean the court, he means the country.

• 27:47Michael Liroff?

  He doesn't think the country should have engaged in this project.

• 27:50Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 27:50Speaker 03

  It's so demeaning, too, of the claim of racism, of what structural racism is, of the understanding of racism, like the tone here, right? That this created like racial entitlements, right? It's basically saying like, a bunch of libs got to play the race card. You know, it's like, so, it's so insulting. There's no treatment whatsoever. I mean, in the majority, or obviously in Thomas's concurrence of like, why was the Voting Rights Act passed?

• 28:22Michael Liroff?

  Right.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  What did the Voting Rights Act intend to ameliorate? Or why would Congress want to pass the Voting Rights Act? It's like, it's so demeaning of classes of people who have been subordinated on the basis of race that, you know, it's like, you, you guys were lying. You guys were making up this stuff and it transformed everybody and it made state legislatures have to act in this way. And now people are entitled to vote on the basis of their race. Like, it's, it's, it's quite, um, it's really dehumanizing and just demeaning and, and like, it's mean. It's, it's mean.

• 29:00Peter Shamshiri?

  And just to, you know, just to be as specific as possible. So Thomas is saying he doesn't believe that gerrymandering is covered by the Voting Rights Act at all.

• 29:08Michael Liroff?

  Right.

• 29:09Peter Shamshiri?

  Right. He's saying that it only applies to things like ballot access, right? Your, your ability to literally cast your vote. Yeah. So, you know, as long as you can cast a vote, the state can use gerrymandering to make it functionally useless, right? Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter at all. Doesn't matter if it's partisan. Doesn't matter if it's racial. Doesn't matter. He does not give a shit about that. He doesn't think the voting rights covers it. But you also have the fact that when states do try to deny ballot access more directly, he upholds it every single time, right? We just had Bonovich a couple of years ago, uh, out of Arizona, right? Where they were talking about, um, different forms of ballot collection and shit like that. And he was like, ah, it's fine. Yeah, it's great.

• 29:53Peter Shamshiri?

  When it, when it comes down to it, there is no impediment to voting that they won't get behind as long as it hurts the side that they don't like.

• 29:59Michael Liroff?

  That's right. That's right.

• 30:01Peter Shamshiri?

  There's sort of like the suite of voting restrictions that was like very common in the Jim Crow South, right? Literacy tests, poll taxes. Some of them are now expressly outlawed. But on the other hand, some of them are not. And I, I have a hard time seeing someone like Thomas as opposed to them, right? If you just take, in a vacuum, the concept of like a literacy test, right? Which we all know was meant to target black populations in the turn of the century, uh, Jim Crow South. Race neutral on its face, right? Which means it would get a lower level of scrutiny from Thomas than the Voting Rights Act.

• 30:39Michael Liroff?

  Right.

• 30:41Peter Shamshiri?

  I mean, it's, it's just ridiculous.

• 30:43Michael Liroff?

  It's, it's nonsense. Yeah. The way I always think about the claim that, um, it's all about ballot access and it's not about like being able to elect representatives is, is sort of like, yeah, the idea that sure, like you're at like a carnival and you can fire the little air rifle and it doesn't matter if the things that you're firing that actually cannot be knocked down and you can never actually win a prize, right? Like you're still getting to play the game, right? Like that's, that's how they treat voting. It's like a fucking carnival act. Like,

• 31:15Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 31:15Michael Liroff?

  It's, it's so offensive.

• 31:18Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, it's about the experience. It's about the sticker that you get. If you get the sticker, the Voting Rights Act does not apply.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  Your constitutional rights have been protected. Yeah.

• 31:27Michael Liroff?

  Quite literally. Yeah, it's, it's, you get to go through the motions. Like, you get to, you get to cast a ballot and it doesn't mean anything, but you get a little sticker and you get to be, be like, I partook in voting. And that's it. It's so offensive.

• 31:57Michael Liroff?

  Kagan has a very long and thorough dissent. It's, it's got a very good history. It starts not just at the Voting Rights Act, but it starts in Reconstruction, like post-Civil War. Talks about the Reconstruction-era Congress, talks about all the challenges to protecting minority voting throughout the Jim Crow era and failed efforts that predated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Very thorough, appropriately sort of taking shots at the majority for just enacting its own policy preferences here, for hiding what it's doing.

• 32:39Michael Liroff?

  At one point, she writes something like, this isn't grounds to cancel, I mean, quote unquote, clarify, an act of Congress, or something like that.

• 32:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:51Peter Shamshiri?

  Voting cases are always Kagan at her strongest, right? This is like where she, she really has no weaknesses on voting issues.

• 32:58Michael Liroff?

  Yeah. It, it's, this sort of opinion is really well-suited to her sort of professorial style.

• 33:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:04Michael Liroff?

  She makes a couple of good points that, that I just, I think are worth emphasizing. We talked about the inability to disentangle race from partisanship, or the, or the fact that it's often difficult to disentangle them. She makes the point that, like, this has turned things on its head, Alito's opinion, that before, highly racially polarized voting was evidence of vote dilution.

• 33:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:34Michael Liroff?

  But now, it's the opposite. Now it's evidence against because it makes it partisan, right? Because it make, it creates more of a partisan valence. So it's totally... Switched the way we think about or the way

• 33:51Speaker 03

  Right.

• 33:51Michael Liroff?

  People need to think about this, where essentially you can only prove a racial vote dilution claim if it doesn't change the partisan makeup of the congressional district you would elect, which is so nuts. Like, it's nonsense on its face when you think about it, right? Like, for even two seconds. Right. She's very good on that. She talks about how, like, stare decisis, where you defer to precedent, has like, extra strength in the realm of statutory interpretation, because Congress has a chance to weigh in, to correct the court, unlike in constitutional cases. So, I know you wanted to talk about the interplay between court and Congress.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a trick here that we've mentioned, referenced a couple of times, that the conservatives are doing here, which is basically going back to a Mobil v. Bolden status quo. Court ruled in Mobil v. Bolden that you had to show racist intent in order to make a VRA Section 2 claim. And Congress came back. Congress came back in 1982. Two years later, amended the Voting Rights Act, said, "No, that's not what we meant," right? And I just think, like, this shows a really important interplay in, like, I don't know, healthy democracy, or whatever the fuck you want to call it, but an interplay between the branches, where the Supreme Court says, "Okay, we interpret the laws."

• 35:16Speaker 03

  It's a shitty decision, Mobil v. Bolden, right? It's a bad decision, but Supreme Court is saying, "We're interpreting the Voting Rights Act to say this, to require this." Congress comes back and is empowered to come back and say, "No, okay, we're going to amend the law to clarify, so that you don't interpret it like that anymore." This is the interplay between the branches that is supposed to be happening. With this case, Alito, the majority, the conservatives here...

• 35:44Speaker 03

  Not only saying we are going back to what we said in Mobil v. Bolden, fuck Congress's amendments, right? They're not only saying that and sort of overturning congressional action without saying they're overturning it, they're also prohibiting Congress from responding to this case, right? Because of the constitutional nature of this decision. They're saying it's a violation of the Constitution. So we're no longer fighting about what the Voting Rights Act says and how it can be interpreted. The majority here is saying the Voting Rights Act, what it requires itself is unconstitutional. It is a violation of the 14th Amendment.

• 36:29Speaker 03

  It's a violation of the 15th Amendment, according to the way the conservative Supreme Court has interpreted the 15th Amendment. And so Congress can't change the Voting Rights Act to like respond to this, right? So it's prohibiting congressional action in response. So, you know, not just going back basically and saying, no, we, we want Mobil v. Bolden. It's saying, and also Congress, you can't come back and fix it. There's nothing for you to do. The VRA is unconstitutional.

• 36:57Peter Shamshiri?

  Right. Another sort of like technical kind of constitutional point, but the predicate of this whole opinion is that we need to be extra careful when we're trying to handle racial redistricting because in order to do it, you need to factor in race and the 14th Amendment says you can't do that, right? But the 14th Amendment doesn't literally say that you can't factor in race when addressing inequality. That's just how the court interprets it, right? Meanwhile, the 15th Amendment does say that you can't discriminate based on race in voting and expressly authorizes Congress to pass legislation to enforce it, right? And that's what the VRA is. So. Alito is like weighing a fictional version of the 14th amendment heavier than

• 37:42Peter Shamshiri?

  the fairly explicit words of the 15th amendment, right? And you get left with this complete absurdity where the court is applying strict scrutiny to the Voting Rights Act, right?

• 37:54Michael Liroff?

  Right.

• 37:55Peter Shamshiri?

  Strict scrutiny is of course, the most intense form of judicial scrutiny, meant ostensibly as a tool for ensuring that our laws are not discriminatory.

• 38:07Michael Liroff?

  Right.

• 38:07Peter Shamshiri?

  And here they are, ruling that this law, the capstone of the mid-century civil rights movement, actually violates equal protection principles, right? Yeah. Just ridiculous and obscene. It's so fucking annoying because I think, I think there is like a good faith like complaint about the way that we handle racial gerrymandering. Sure. That's basically sort of like, well, this is quite messy, right? It's quite difficult to identify a group of people that you think should have a representative and what exactly that means in different contexts, right? But rather than sort of reckoning with the fact that like, yeah, this actually is complicated.

• 38:47Peter Shamshiri?

  It's hard to disentangle various factors and that's why the policy that we implement needs to be intelligent. It needs to, you know, reflect the work of Congress and maybe also input from the courts, right? Which is sort of where we were before. Yeah.

• 39:02Michael Liroff?

  This is why the jingles factors were like super complicated. There were several steps. The steps had like subparts, like it wasn't easy to get a vote dilution claim.

• 39:10Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, exactly. And, you know, and I think it's very easy to say that the status quo was not perfect, of course. Really difficult to handle these issues. But what the conservatives do is basically say, well, does the way that we're handling all of this align with like a baby's view of racial discrimination? Yeah. Right? And if not, then we're just going to say it's unconstitutional. And that's their solution here.

• 39:31Michael Liroff?

  Another reason why this is so like-

• 39:35Michael Liroff?

  The idea of applying strict scrutiny to the Voting Rights Act is so absurd. Is you have to understand the structure of our government and Congress. Congress is, for our lay listeners, or all you law students will know this. Congress can only act pursuant to what's called its enumerated powers. Like, Congress can't just pass laws on whatever they feel like.

• 39:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:57Michael Liroff?

  The Constitution gives them specific areas where they can legislate. The original Constitution gave them, I think, like 18, and like, over half of those are shit. Like, they can mint money, they can prosecute people who are counterfeiting money. They can raise an army, they can raise a navy, they can do maritime, shit like that. It's like, sort of, whatever. There's only a few, what they call heads of congressional power, that like, actually reach into your everyday life and affect how you conduct yourself, how you run a business, or whatever, right? Like, the ability to regulate commerce, interstate commerce, for example. So the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, all three of those add enumerated powers to Congress.

• 40:38Michael Liroff?

  Each one says that Congress can pass laws to give effect to that amendment. And it's a very broad enumeration. It's basically like, Congress can do whatever it wants to make sure that slavery is abolished. Congress can do whatever it wants to make sure due process and the equal protection of the laws are protected, that, you know, citizens get all the privileges and immunities and, you know, of the Constitution, that you can't discriminate based on race in voting. The Amendments are just like, Congress, pass a law, give this effect, whatever. These are very broad grants. So it's a big fucking deal when you amend the Constitution to give Congress a new power, right? This is like, a massive expansion of congressional power.

• 41:23Michael Liroff?

  It's why a lot of people call the Reconstruction Era, the post-Civil War Era, the Second Founding, because it changed the structure of the federal government. It changed the relationship between it and the states. It vastly enhanced congressional power. And in that context, to take such a narrow reading of, and such a hostile stance towards the signature piece of legislation, enacting the 15th Amendment, is absurd. It's, I'm sorry, it's fucking anti-constitutional. It's anti-constitutional. Like, there's no other way to put it. Like, this is an assault on the post-Civil War Constitution.

• 42:04Michael Liroff?

  I also want to note, like, in voting rights cases, there's this thing called the Purcell Principle, which is basically that you're not supposed to make big changes in voting laws very close to elections. What very close to an election means is very elastic.

• 42:21Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, they know it when they see it.

• 42:22Michael Liroff?

  Oftentimes, when it's things that will benefit Democrats, oh, the window for Purcell is very big, and maybe we shouldn't be making that change just now. Whereas when it's to benefit conservatives, it's like, well, how close are we really to an election?

• 42:37Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. Maybe everyone can redistrict a few months before the midterms.

• 42:41Michael Liroff?

  Right. Do you know that time is relative?

• 42:46Michael Liroff?

  Einstein said. And, but setting aside hypocrisy, I do want to note, like, this case was argued in October, so you could, you could make the case that, if anything, this opinion was overdue. But this does feel like the sort of case they would usually save for the end of the term, end of June?

• 43:06Speaker 03

  Because it's so big, because it's so substantive, because it really is. I mean, it's, it's like a landmark decision.

• 43:12Peter Shamshiri?

  I mean, we thought it was going to drop at the end of the term.

• 43:14Michael Liroff?

  Right. And because it will inflame political tensions, and they don't want to be around during that. They drop these and fuck off for the summer. You know, like...

• 43:24Speaker 03

  Dobbs is dropped at the end of the term. You know, all of these cases, they drop them and they go on vacation.

• 43:29Peter Shamshiri?

  Bohemian Grove.

• 43:31Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 43:32Michael Liroff?

  So I do think it's worth considering whether this came out a little early, precisely to give red states a little more time to get some redistricting in before the midterms, you know?

• 43:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:43Michael Liroff?

  And if you think that sounds a little conspiratorial, I want you to consider something. Earlier this term, the Supreme Court put a stop to election changes because they were too close to the eve of election, and that was 15 weeks out. Um, in this case, uh, Louisiana has come to the Supreme Court, asking them to speed up what's called the issuing of the mandate, uh, which is basically the making the judgment official, uh, which usually takes about a month to give parties the chance to motion to reconsider and do other little procedural things. And Louisiana is like, hey, we've

• 44:22Michael Liroff?

  got an election going on right now and we want to pause it to redraw the maps during an election. Can you speed up the issuance of the mandate? And the Supreme Court said yes. Uh, so earlier in the year, 15 weeks out is too close to the eve of the election. Right now, they're like, fuck it, the election's ongoing. Who cares?

• 44:44Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 44:44Michael Liroff?

  Who cares? Mandate, let's get that out. Let's get that out. So Louisiana can redistrict their black people out of representation entirely. So yeah, I do think this came out as early as they could get it to come out in order to give red states as much time as possible to rat fuck the midterm elections. Law nerds might take exception to this, but you know, when have they been right? Uh, recently? Not, not a lot.

• 45:07Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 45:08Michael Liroff?

  Um, I, I, I think you can't really rule out that it, there's that level of partisan gamesmanship going on here.

• 45:14Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 45:14Michael Liroff?

  It's not a surprise that right as the Republican Party is becoming sort of an explicit white supremacist party, all of a sudden racism and partisanship have to be disentangled in this.

• 45:26Peter Shamshiri?

  Right. And can you disentangle these concepts that no one on earth could possibly disentangle? Yeah.

• 45:32Michael Liroff?

  Right.

• 45:32Peter Shamshiri?

  It's like, I, I do wonder whether, just a small digression, but is this that much different from being like, well, how do you know that they're not doing cultural discrimination?

• 45:42Michael Liroff?

  Right.

• 45:43Peter Shamshiri?

  Like, right? It's not racial, it's cultural discrimination. Uh, can, can you prove that it's not? It's just fucking nonsense.

• 45:51Michael Liroff?

  Yeah. I mean, I, I just, I think so much of this opinion is so laughable. Like, it's, if you think about it for two seconds, it's just, it's not even good sophistry, you know? It's like laughably bad sophistry. And I don't think Sam Alito is that stupid. I don't think John Roberts is that stupid. I don't think, well, I don't think Amy Coney Barrett is that stupid.

• 46:16Michael Liroff?

  I don't think Gorsuch is that stupid. I'm not going to lay in on Kavanaugh.

• 46:19Peter Shamshiri?

  To be fair, there's actually no evidence that John Roberts can like follow a thread of syllogistic reasoning.

• 46:25Michael Liroff?

  That's true. He might be that stupid. He might, he might. But I do think there is a very parsimonious explanation for the timing, for the sophistry, for all that, which is just that these guys are, they're not even, they're not even fooling themselves here.

• 46:38Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 46:38Michael Liroff?

  What they're doing, right? They know what their party is up to. They approve of it. They want to help, right? Like, I think that's, and that means getting this out early, right? That means pushing it out early and giving states time to do this.

• 46:52Peter Shamshiri?

  And not just that, but they didn't have to answer this question, right? The challenge brought to the Supreme Court was just the challenge by the French blooded whites in Louisiana. They were like, this is discriminating against us specifically, right?

• 47:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:08Peter Shamshiri?

  And can you please resolve the issue of our district, right?

• 47:12Speaker 03

  And wasn't that last term?

• 47:14Peter Shamshiri?

  Yes.

• 47:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:15Peter Shamshiri?

  And the Supreme Court ordered briefing on the larger constitutional issue, right? They were like, we're not just going to answer the narrow question. We want to answer the big constitutional question about the Voting Rights Act. So it's not like this was thrust upon them, right? Very similar to Citizens United, where they had this really narrow question presented back in 2009, 2010. And they were like, actually, we would like to handle the much larger, more important constitutional question, right? Just the opposite of what the Supreme Court is supposed to do, what you're taught in law school at the Supreme Court will do. And the, the net effect, I mean, you look back at the last 12, 15 years,

• 47:54Peter Shamshiri?

  Shelby County in 2013, Rucho become a cause in 2019, and now Calais. Between these three, the near complete destruction of the Voting Rights Act as it applies to gerrymandering, right? And then you have cases like Branovich, which are a direct attack on other forms of vote suppression, right? We've really seen this project evolve. Some credit to us. I think people always ask us, what are the worst cases of the last 25 years or the century so far or whatever? And I always throw Rucho on that list. Because it's so shameless that they would allow partisan gerrymandering and just say, oh, we can't, we can't even address it. And look what they're building on the back of that bullshit.

• 48:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:38Michael Liroff?

  Right?

• 48:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:39Michael Liroff?

  I mean, it's worth saying like, what's what happens now and what happens next. What's happening now is a bunch of southern states are rushing to quickly gerrymander before the election this year, including Louisiana, which is so close to having their primaries run that they would be locked into a map, that they had to put a hold on their primaries, which is essentially cancelling elections to try to redraw the maps. Like, these states are like, they they were waiting for this ruling, which is one of the reasons why I do think they tried, like Alito tried to get it out as quick as possible, actually. They were waiting with their engines running.

• 49:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, another example from Texas, of course, where I live. Last year in 2025, the state ledge in Texas adopted new, highly racist, gerrymandered congressional districts. And then, at the end of the year, the Supreme Court said it was okay, lifted lifted a stay on those. And so those maps are moving forward anyway, but certainly with this case, like, there's no, there isn't a VRA Section 2 claim against these congressional maps in Texas. So Texas, just to give, you know, a kind of a lay of the land, obviously, it's a huge state. We said Louisiana has six congressional districts. Texas has 38.

• 49:58Speaker 03

  It used to be that 13 of those 38 congressional districts had majority minority voting population. Texas's population overall is 60% racial minorities. With these new congressional districts, with this new map, Texas has, down from 13, now eight congressional districts that are majority minority, again, out of 38, even though 60% of the population of this state is a racial minority. So, you know, those maps kind of going full steam ahead.

• 50:33Peter Shamshiri?

  That's such a good example of why this approach to the Voting Rights Act that previously existed before this case made a lot of sense. Because, on one hand, yeah, it's difficult to say, okay, these sort of pockets of people who are of a certain race and vote together generally, they need their own representative, right? That's very, that feels very awkward as a policy prescription. On the other hand, you can zoom out and look at that status quo of a majority minority state. Where the minorities have been clustered into eight districts and say, oh, that's clearly unfair.

• 51:11Michael Liroff?

  Right.

• 51:12Peter Shamshiri?

  That's clearly disenfranchising large chunks of those people. Right. And an approach that does not reckon with the second problem is not serious. Right.

• 51:22Michael Liroff?

  Exactly.

• 51:23Peter Shamshiri?

  It's just not a serious, it's not a serious way to address the issue.

• 51:27Michael Liroff?

  So that's what's happening now. I've heard some people wonder what happens next and you hear voting rights orgs saying, well, like, we're not giving up the fight and we're going to do X, Y, and Z and all that. And more, more power to them. I believe you always got to fight the good fight and all that. For sure. But realistically, what happens next is like one of two things, which is the Democratic Party either becomes a true party of, you know, anti-racism, a true civil rights warrior party, one that opposes segregationists, opposes neo-confederates, and aggressively tries to enact institutional reforms and policies that ameliorate structural racism, or we

• 52:11Michael Liroff?

  live in a new Jim Crow. Like, that's it. Those are the choices. That's what happens next. And that Democratic Party is not going to manifest itself. It has to be created in primaries. It has to be created in protests. It has to be created by you putting massive amounts of pressure on your representatives or giving them the fucking boot. I don't, I don't care if they've been your representative for 20 years and you like them. If they're not on board with expanding the Supreme Court, they got to fucking go. If they're not on board with aggressively disciplining the Supreme Court, they got to go. If they're not on board with a new Voting Rights Act, they got to go. Like, that's it. Like, same

• 52:53Michael Liroff?

  with your senator. If they're not on board with ditching the filibuster, goodbye. That's it. No, there's just no room for this bullshit anymore. Like, you cannot have any tolerance for the old legalistic shit that we have put up with from the Democratic Party for decades. That party needs to die.

• 53:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, we talked about the interplay earlier between like Congress and the Supreme Court. And, you know, you get a bad Supreme Court ruling and people say like, Congress must act. You know, Congress should respond, you know, pass something else. And we talked about how in this case, like the Supreme Court is very, in this like sly kind of way, prohibiting Congress from acting on this specific thing because they've said, you know, the VRA is essentially unconstitutional. But Congress does need to act, that Congress needs to act in a different way, right?

• 53:41Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 53:41Speaker 03

  Like, it, it, it isn't about amending the Voting Rights Act anymore, obviously. Congress needs to act in structural reform, serious reform of the Supreme Court.

• 53:51Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 53:51Michael Liroff?

  If you want to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, that's great. You have to protect it and you have to protect it by expanding the Supreme Court to like 17 people and doubling the number of appellate circuits and cracking the Fifth Circuit and the 11th Circuit and, and all that shit. Like, you just need to destroy all their homes of power in the courts to protect that legislation.

• 54:11Peter Shamshiri?

  Right. There, there's a criticism of our point of view that has like some sliver of truth to it that's sort of like, uh, the Supreme Court's not the real problem. You're just noticing it because Congress is sort of dormant, right? Congress is so locked up that it can't engage in the interplay with the court that it should. And so the court appears to be unchecked, but that's really Congress's fault because they're non-functional, right? I think a case like this is where you see that argument start to fray because Congress did act, right? This isn't about Congress and the Supreme Court not having like the right amount of interplay or something.

• 54:53Peter Shamshiri?

  This is the Supreme Court taking advantage of the gridlock in Congress, right?

• 54:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:58Peter Shamshiri?

  There's, they are saying, oh, hey, Congress is, uh, too bogged down with partisanship. No one can agree on anything. Let's rewrite the, the VRA, right? Uh, because they're not going to act, right? Even though they've, they already acted to correct the court before. The court steps back in now, right? Taking advantage of what's happening in Congress. Not acting in good faith, but taking advantage of the fact that Congress is bogged down.

• 55:25Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, I mean, I think the flip side of that and the discussion about congressional dysfunction is you need a you need a party that that doesn't care about the other side, right? You need a Democratic Party that says, we're going to do this with 50 votes in the Senate, plus the VP, and a one vote a majority in the House. We don't care. We will expand the Supreme Court to 15, 17, whatever, with those numbers, right? Like, we don't care about the filibuster. We don't care about we're we're going to have that discipline. If that's not the party, you're not going to get there with 55 votes and a 30-seat majority either. Like, I like, I just, I don't believe it. I I don't believe it. You need that attitude. You need that attitude.

• 56:09Michael Liroff?

  You need that approach. Without that approach, somebody's always going to find some reason to, well, you know, they're these guys, they're fucking losers. They're losers who don't want to do anything, and you have to make them do shit. And that means you need, like, a top-down approach to disciplining them into doing shit. And that's so that's the attitude they need, is to make Congress functional, at least when they're in charge.

• 56:35Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. One of the wild things about modern politics is we're seeing, you know, Kagan calls it a race to the bottom in gerrymandering, right? The Democrats and Republicans across the country are just gerrymandering their states to shit in response to one another. We are exiting our status as a democracy. That could be undone by just reversing Rucho, right? You reverse Rucho, and not only does this case basically go away, but all of that anti-democratic gerrymandering across the country, all of those now millions of people functionally disenfranchised, enfranchised again. It's wild how much damage has been done by this court's jurisprudence on gerrymandering,

• 57:20Peter Shamshiri?

  and how completely unconcerned the majority is, because they are not interested in democracy per se.

• 57:27Michael Liroff?

  No. They're not interested in democracy because the status quo where they sit above the democratically-elected branches is working just fine for them. They're the they're the philosopher kings of the government right now, and they know it. And so, yeah, they don't want democracy. They want to retain their place of privilege at the top. Judicial supremacy.

• 57:52Peter Shamshiri?

  All right, folks. Next week, there will be no episode because this is counting as your next week episode. We just expedited it.

• 58:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, we moved quick on this one.

• 58:02Peter Shamshiri?

  But then the week after that, we're doing a Patreon episode on the Mr. Beast sexual harassment lawsuit.

• 58:11Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 58:11Peter Shamshiri?

  This is going to force me to research Mr. Beast.

• 58:16Speaker 03

  What is a Mr. Beast?

• 58:18Peter Shamshiri?

  I am aware of him. I know roughly what he does. I've seen those soulless little eyes.

• 58:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, guy looks like a thumb.

• 58:28Michael Liroff?

  Freaky smile, nothing behind the eyes, goes by Mr. Beast, has an army of children behind him. I feel like, I'm not a religious scholar, but I feel like this screams the Antichrist. It feels like...

• 58:41Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 58:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, he looks like a haunted house employee.

• 58:44Peter Shamshiri?

  It does feel like a bad omen for society that almost everyone I see these days is giving me Antichrist vibes. You know what I mean? I'm getting them from Mr. Beast. I'm getting them from Trump, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Elon Musk.

• 59:01Speaker 03

  Getting them from that guy Sour.

• 59:01Peter Shamshiri?

  All of these guys are a little bit Antichrist-y, right? It's hard not to notice that we're rocking with like, a dozen Antichrists right now. Like, one of them's gonna hit. You know what I mean?

• 59:15Speaker 03

  Probably says something.

• 59:18Peter Shamshiri?

  Follow us on social media at 54pod. Subscribe to our Patreon, patreon.com/54pod, all spelled out, for access to premium and ad-free episodes, special events, our Slack, all sorts of shit. We'll see you next week.

• 59:32Speaker 03

  Bye, y'all.

• 59:33Michael Liroff?

  Bye, everybody. Five to Four is presented by Prologue Projects. This episode was produced by Alison Rogers. Leon Nafok provides editorial support. Our website was designed by Peter Murphy. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips NY, and our theme song is by Spatial Relations.