Literally keeps happening in the same places. But muh region gon hold it down.Sounds about South
Jim Crow is rapidly returning in the South - Mississippi, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, North/South Carolina, Texas, Alabama
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
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SadimirPutin
Superstar
Nothing the GOP wants more than black apathy
Florida’s Congressional Map Illegally Hurt Black Voters, Judge Rules
Under the ruling, Florida is forbidden to use the map in the 2024 election, and state legislators are required to draw a new one. But the decision can be appealed.
Under the ruling, Florida is forbidden to use the map in the 2024 election, and state legislators are required to draw a new one. But the decision can be appealed.
Sept. 3, 2023, 1:20 p.m. ET
The News
A Florida judge struck down the state’s congressional map on Saturday, ruling that it violated the Florida Constitution by diminishing the influence of Black voters, and ordering the State Legislature “to enact a new map which complies with the Florida Constitution.”
Under state constitutional amendments that Florida voters passed in 2010, lawmakers are forbidden to draw districts “with the intent or result of denying or abridging the equal opportunity of racial or language minorities to participate in the political process or to diminish their ability to elect representatives of their choice.”
In a 55-page ruling, Judge J. Lee Marsh of the Leon County Circuit Court ruled that lawmakers had violated that prohibition with the new maps they drew after the 2020 census.
Judge Marsh rejected the Florida secretary of state’s argument that the prohibition didn’t apply to this case because Black voters had been a plurality, rather than a majority, in a district that the new map dismantled.
The secretary inaccurately conflated two pieces of the law, he ruled. One requires the creation of new majority-minority districts in certain circumstances. The other limits the “diminishment” of existing districts in which voters from a minority group had sufficient numbers and influence to elect their candidate of choice, even if they weren’t an absolute majority — and that was the piece that applied to this case, he said.
A poll worker retrieves ballots from a drop box in a parking lot.
A judge in Florida ruled that the state’s new congressional map violated the State Constitution by diminishing the power of Black voters.Mark Wallheiser/Getty Images
Background: The new map divided one district into four, each with a much smaller Black population.
At issue in the ruling was an area previously mapped as House District 5, which stretched from Jacksonville to Tallahassee along Florida’s northern border with Georgia.
The district, whose voting population was about 46 percent Black, had elected Al Lawson, a Black Democrat, in the 2016, 2018 and 2020 elections. Its voting patterns were racially polarized, with Black residents mostly voting for Democrats and white residents mostly voting for Republicans.
In the new map approved by the Florida Legislature and signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis before last year’s midterm elections, that area was divided into four districts whose voting populations ranged from about 13 percent to about 32 percent Black. In 2022, all four districts elected a white Republican, one of whom defeated Mr. Lawson in the process.
“Under the enacted plan in 2022, North Florida did not elect a Black member of Congress for the first time since 1990,” Judge Marsh wrote in his ruling, in a list of facts that weren’t disputed by either side.
Why It Matters: The redrawn maps could have a national political impact.
In addition to having a major effect on Black voters’ representation in Congress, redistricting rulings like this one could significantly affect the national political landscape.
Given the closely divided House of Representatives, these decisions can mean the difference between a Republican or Democratic majority without a single voter changing sides. Which party controls Congress after the 2024 elections may depend on legal challenges to maps in Florida and several other states, including Alabama, Louisiana, New York, North Carolina and Wisconsin.
What’s Next: Pending an appeal, Florida may have to draw a new map for 2024.
Under the ruling, Florida is forbidden to use the unconstitutional map in the 2024 election, and state legislators are required to draw a new map that does not diminish Black Floridians’ voting power.
But this was a lower-court ruling, and Florida officials can appeal. The case could end up before the Florida Supreme Court, which is controlled by appointees of Mr. DeSantis and could reverse the ruling.
If legislators do have to redraw the map, it remains to be seen what the new version will look like — and whether legislators will comply with the ruling or seek to test its boundaries to maximize Republican advantage, as legislators in Alabama did after the Supreme Court ruled this year that their map violated the federal Voting Rights Act.
The Fade
I don’t argue with niqqas on the Internet anymore
and conservatives are the ones that scream 1984 without reading the book
They trying to destroy public schools and sebd funds to catholic schools.
Half the people that go to them schools hated it. Someone eventually is gonna reverse all the bullshyt they doing
They trying to destroy public schools and sebd funds to catholic schools.
Half the people that go to them schools hated it. Someone eventually is gonna reverse all the bullshyt they doing
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Meet the white Trump official behind the launch of Black America for Immigration Reform
The new effort will look to advance the argument that more immigration is bad for Black workers.
www.politico.com
Meet the white Trump official behind the launch of Black America for Immigration Reform
The new effort will look to advance the argument that more immigration is bad for Black workers.
A crowd of people sit in the foreground with a framed American flag and a TV screen showing Donald Trump in the background.
Then-President Donald Trump congratulates newly naturalized citizens via a recorded message at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Miami field office on Aug. 16, 2019. A former Trump official has launched a new immigration policy group, Black America for Immigration Reform. | Wilfredo Lee/AP Photo
By MYAH WARD
09/03/2023 07:00 AM EDT
A relatively unremarkable, seemingly progressive-leaning immigration policy group launched last week in D.C. called Black America for Immigration Reform.
The man who launched it is white. He has a history of inflammatory posts about matters of race. And his vision for reforming immigration is restricting it.
William W. Chip, who served as the senior counselor at the Department of Homeland Security Secretary during the Trump administration, is the only agent listed for Black America for Immigration Reform. In fact, the registration address he put on the group’s form appears to be his D.C. home. A tax attorney for decades, Chip is a contributor to the Center for Immigration Studies — one of the leading think tanks that advocates for restricting immigration — where he has routinely written about how more immigration could harm Black Americans.
The nonprofit he has helped launch is an attempt to further mainstream that idea, one critics of the argument say is merely an underhanded, if not misleading attempt to try and derail comprehensive reform efforts. In an interview, Chip said that he was merely organizing the group for two Black colleagues on the Center for Immigration Studies board of directors: T. Willard Fair and Frank Morris. Chip won’t be on the board for Black America for Immigration Reform, he said, but alongside Fair and Morris, three other people will be a part of the group.
“Anytime you have research that suggests you should reduce immigration, you’re immediately attacked by the mainstream media and the left and all the politically correct people — that oh, you’re just a bunch of white racists who want to keep America white,” Chip said in an interview. “And so the feeling was, if we had a legitimate, African American organization, whose board consisted of prominent African Americans, they might get more credibility.”
When asked how the new group came about, Fair — who is also the president and CEO of the Urban League in Miami — said it was Chip who suggested it.
“In Dade County, having experienced the Haitians coming here, I knew how if it was not controlled how it could impact negatively the progress of my constituents, who happen to be Black Miamians
,” Fair said, noting that he has been talking about this issue for decades. “And then Chip came up with the idea that we ought to begin to react again based on what’s going on at the southern border, and how it was going to impact us going forward. So he said, ‘let’s organize a group.’”Black America for Immigration Reform isn’t the first group of its kind. Organizations such as Numbers USA, the Federation for American Immigration and Project for Immigration Reform (which has since rebranded to the Institute for Sound Public Policy) have also elevated the argument that immigration harms Black workers, as a way to promote limits on immigration.
The new nonprofit is in the early stages, but the plan is to soon apply for 501(c)(3) status and get a website up and running. The group isn’t initially planning to lobby, Chip said, but it wants to highlight research suggesting less-educated immigrant workers harm less-educated U.S.-born counterparts. Their emphasis will be on Black workers, who they argue face increased competition for jobs. They want to use this argument to push forward restrictionist immigration policies, including requiring businesses to use E-Verify, an online government system that allows employers to check someone’s employment eligibility, as well as efforts to cut back on legal immigration.
While writing about immigration for the Center for Immigration studies for nearly two decades, Chip did not hide his views on race. During 2021, he posted a series of inflammatory posts on Twitter, now known as X, including one tweet that questioned whether Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis officer who killed George Floyd, was racially motivated. In another, he talks Native Americans’ concerns about European settlement in America.
“If there are some whites who are concerned about becoming the minority and having other racial groups become the dominant force in society, and so they’re basically at the mercy of the other groups — I mean, they’re not the only ones who felt that way. The Native Americans felt that way,” Chip said, when explaining the tweet.
In an interview with POLITICO, when asked about his new group’s purpose, he also talked about how immigration affects the ability for Black men to get jobs — suggesting they “leave their wives” because they can’t find employment.
“And there’s a lot of good research out there about that, but it’s not really getting the attention it needs in part because anytime you come out and suggest to limit immigration, the first thing the woke left does is accuse you of being a white nationalist,” Chip said.
Harry Holzer, a labor economist at Georgetown and chief economist at the Department of Labor under the Clinton administration, said the debate is complicated. But, in the end, he argued, most economists believe immigrants are beneficial to the labor market writ large and have minimal impact on less-educated, native-born workers, while acknowledging that there is a small cost to certain groups, including Black workers in some sectors of the economy.
Outside of the economic debate, however, advocates and some immigration policy experts see cynical political opportunism at play.
Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, argued that the newly launched nonprofit fits into an effort to try and pit core Democratic constituencies — immigrants and Black Americans — against each other. He said the effort is often misleading.
Chishti pointed to GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who according to The New York Times, recently recounted a May event in southside Chicago in which he had an illuminating exchange with Black voters. In Ramaswamy’s telling, these voters favored him sending troops to Mexico, locking down the border and had numerous questions about immigration. According to the Times, however, they actually pressed the GOP candidate on his opposition to affirmative action and systemic racism. A Ramaswamy campaign aide then implored the crowd to ask questions about immigration.
“It’s not surprising that the restrictionist movement is trying to find a strong foothold in the Black population,” Chishti said, explaining that this isn’t the first time the movement has latched on to this argument. “But it just didn’t work. And I think the jury’s out today in this chapter whether it will work, because the Rainbow Coalition in the Democratic party is still quite potent — we haven’t seen any fractures in that. But I think this is an attempt to create a fracture in that coalition.”
'Black People Are F---ing Lazy': Texas Company Displayed Hate Symbols and Nooses, Allowed Managers to Call Black Employees the N-Word, Alarming EEOC Lawsuit Alleges
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has filed a lawsuit against one of the biggest crane providers in North America, accusing them of racial
atlantablackstar.com
Yet I keep hearing brehs say how great Texas is for Black professionals..
Federal Court Again Strikes Down Alabama’s Congressional Map
Republicans failed to comply with a court order to create a second majority-Black district or something “close to it,” the judicial panel said.
Federal Court Again Strikes Down Alabama’s Congressional Map
Republicans failed to comply with a court order to create a second majority-Black district or something “close to it,” the judicial panel said.
Sept. 5, 2023, 10:16 a.m. ET
A man in a brown jacket points at a map of Alabama while a man in a black jacket looks on.
State Senator Rodger Smitherman discussed the redistricting proposal during debate at the statehouse in Montgomery, Ala., in July.Kim Chandler/Associated Press
Emily Cochrane
By Emily Cochrane
Emily Cochrane covers the American South and has reported on the redistricting effort in Alabama.
A panel of federal judges rejected Alabama’s latest congressional map on Tuesday, ruling that a new map needed to be drawn because Republican lawmakers had failed to comply with orders to create a second majority-Black district or something “close to it.”
In a sharp rebuke, the judges ordered that the new map be independently drawn, taking the responsibility away from the Republican-controlled legislature while chastising state officials who “ultimately did not even nurture the ambition to provide the required remedy.”
The legislature had hastily pushed through a revised map in July after a surprise Supreme Court ruling found that Alabama’s existing map violated a landmark civil rights law by undercutting the power of the state’s Black voters. The revised map, approved over the objections of Democrats, increased the percentage of Black voters in one of the state’s six majority-white congressional districts to about 40 percent, from about 30 percent.
In its new ruling, the district court panel in Alabama found that the legislature had flouted its mandate.
“We are not aware of any other case in which a state legislature — faced with a federal court order declaring that its electoral plan unlawfully dilutes minority votes and requiring a plan that provides an additional opportunity district — responded with a plan that the state concedes does not provide that district,” the judges wrote.
Responsibility for a new map now falls to a special master, Richard Allen, a longtime Alabama lawyer who has worked under several Republican attorneys general, and a cartographer, David Ely, a demographer based in California. Both were appointed by the court.
The decision — or the independent map to be produced — can be appealed. State officials have said that a new congressional map needs to be in place by early October, in order to prepare for the 2024 elections.
The litigation has been closely watched in Washington and across the country, as several other states in the South face similar voting rights challenges, and control of the U.S. House of Representatives rests on a thin margin. Prominent lawmakers in Washington — including Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California and Democrats in the Congressional Black Caucus — have kept careful tabs on the redistricting effort.
At least one nonpartisan political analysis has predicted that at least one Alabama district could become an election tossup with a new map, given that Black voters in Alabama tend to vote for Democratic candidates.
The decision was joined by Judge Stanley Marcus, who was nominated by former President Bill Clinton; and by Judges Anna M. Manasco and Terry F. Moorer, both named to their posts by former President Donald J. Trump. (Judge Marcus typically sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta.)
For Alabama, the ruling caps off nearly two years of litigation, marking yet another instance in the state’s tumultuous history where a court has forced officials to follow federal civil rights and voting laws.
Two decades ago, a lawsuit forced the creation of the Seventh Congressional District, the state’s sole majority-Black district, in southwest Alabama. (Under the Republican-drawn map rejected on Tuesday, the share of Black voters in that district dropped to about 51 percent from about 55 percent.)
“It’s really making sure that people who have consistently been kept at the margins or excluded as a matter of law from politics have a chance — not a guarantee — but a realistic chance of electing candidates of choice,” said Kareem Crayton, the senior director for voting and representation at the Brennan Center for Justice and a Montgomery, Ala., native. “The fact that we’re having to fight over that principle is really sad in 2023.”
After the 2020 census, which began the process of setting district lines for the next decade across the country, the Alabama legislature maintained six congressional districts with a white Republican incumbent. A group of Black voters challenged the map under a landmark voting rights law, given that more than one in four residents of Alabama are Black.
The Birmingham court said the map would need to be redrawn, but the Supreme Court intervened and said a new map could not be put in place so close to the primary races ahead of the 2022 election.
In doing so, the Supreme Court unexpectedly affirmed the key remaining tenet of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which bars any voting law that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race.” The court had gutted much of that landmark civil rights law a decade earlier, and many had expected a similar result with the Alabama case.
But in a weeklong special session, Republicans refused to create a second majority-Black district, and shielded their six incumbents from a potentially brutal primary at a moment when the party has only a slim majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Republicans defended their revised map, calling it a fair attempt to keep counties and communities with similar economic and geographic issues together, while adhering to the Constitution. Democrats and the Black voters who brought the challenge called it a squandered opportunity to provide equal representation to a historically disenfranchised bloc of voters.
At a hearing in August, the panel of judges sharply pressed the state’s attorneys on whether the revised map had done enough to adhere to their guidance on how to address the voting rights violation, making their skepticism clear.
“What I hear you saying is that the state of Alabama deliberately disregarded our instructions,” Judge Moorer said at one point.
Why would you live in these places at this point?
