What do the racist rantings of the president of the Los Angeles City Council have to do with a congressional redistricting case in front of the Supreme Court?
Everything.
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wants race to be the decisive factor in how states are allowed to draw their congressional lines. The bigoted statements of the Democratic now-former president of the Los Angeles City Council, Nury Martinez, demonstrate exactly how Jackson’s jurisprudence will play out if the court finds Alabama’s congressional map in violation of the Voting Rights Act.
DISGRACED LOS ANGELES CITY COUNCIL MEMBERS IN RACIST TAPE NEED TO QUIT, LEADER SAYS
Alabama has had seven congressional seats for decades, and one of them (the one that includes Birmingham) has always had a black majority. The lines on the congressional map have changed very little over the years, but now Democrats are suing Alabama in federal court, demanding a new map that creatively connects black neighborhoods on the Gulf Coast with black neighborhoods near northwest Georgia to create a second black-majority congressional district.
Not all Democrats are so eager to be separated from their regional brethren. State Rep. Adline Clarke, a Democrat from Mobile, Alabama, said in 2021: “I consider Mobile and Baldwin counties one political subdivision and would prefer that these two Gulf Coast counties remain in the same congressional district because government, business, and industry in the two counties work well together, with our congressman, for the common good of the two counties.”
This makes total sense. Counties from the same region have similar needs from the federal government, and they benefit from having a representative devoted to those needs.
Jackson, however, believes race should trump all other interests. Signaling her support for the plaintiffs challenging Alabama’s current congressional map, she pushed back against arguments that race should not be a factor in drawing congressional lines.
“The framers themselves adopted the Equal Protection Clause, the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment, in a race-conscious way,” the Supreme Court justice said. “I looked at the report that was submitted by the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, which drafted the 14th Amendment, and that report says that the entire point of the amendment was to secure rights of the freed former slaves.”
Except the manner in which the framers decided to secure the rights of freed former slaves was through “equal protection of the laws,” not through racial quotas or racial gerrymandering. The Voting Rights Act itself even reads: “Nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population.” But that is exactly what Jackson and the Democratic plaintiffs are trying to do: use the Voting Rights Act to guarantee the 27% of the population that is black in Alabama 28% of the state’s seats in the House.
Two thousand miles away from Alabama, in Los Angeles, leaked recordings of a meeting between three Los Angeles City Council members and an AFL-CIO official show what Jackson’s racial determinism sounds like in practice.
“F*** that guy. … He’s with the blacks,” Martinez said of LA District Attorney George Gascon. Martinez also calls the child of Councilmember Mike Bonin “that little monkey” in Spanish, adding that Bonin is effectively the council’s “fourth black member” and “a little bitch” who would never “say peep about [in favor of] Latinos.”
The union official does not object to any of these racial remarks but does add, “I get what we have to do. Just massage to create districts that benefit you all.”
The context of this meeting is the same as the Alabama case — redistricting. Los Angeles has 15 City Council seats, three of which are held by black people, even though the black population has shrunk from 15% in 1970 to 8% today. Meanwhile, Latinos have only three council seats, even though Latinos now comprise 48% of the city’s population.
By Jackson’s own logic, the 14th Amendment demands that Latinos get at least four and maybe five more council seats. The bigoted statements coming from Martinez are just the natural result of the justice’s race-conscious jurisprudence.
Let’s hope the majority of the court goes in the opposite direction.
