As you surely know by now, this week the Supreme Court gutted the last meaningful protections against racial gerrymandering — and within hours, Republican officials started racing to use that decision to disenfranchise millions of Black voters.
And yet, there is a persistent instinct among Democratic politicians to treat this as normal political conflict. To promise “anything and everything is on the table after the next election,” kicking accountability down the road as if us voting harder is going to fix this.
We can’t wait that long, and expecting the Democratic Party to fix this problem without a significant change in their posture towards Republicans is wishful thinking.
When a political party is actively working to dilute the voting power of Black Americans — and doing it in the open — that is not just “partisan hardball.” It’s overt racism.
And treating this problem like that overt racism isn’t meaningfully supported by every politician still calling themselves a Republican? That’s not ignorance. It’s complicity.
There’s a tendency to pretend there are “good Republicans” who are somehow separate from what’s happening in states across the South. That’s how racist policies survive politically.
I see this argument constantly about my own representative, Mike Lawler, here in New York.
He’s often framed as a “moderate,” or as somehow different from the Republicans actively pushing racial gerrymandering in the South.
But if he were actually different, he would be using his platform to aggressively oppose what his party is doing to Black voters.
He’s not.
And that matters.
Because benefiting from a system built on racist disenfranchisement while staying silent about it is not neutrality—it’s participation.
This is how the system sustains itself — local “moderates” normalizing national harm.
If members of the same party benefit from racial gerrymandering — and do nothing to stop it—they are part of the same project.
Silence isn’t neutrality here. It’s alignment.
For years, Democrats have operated under the assumption that restraint would be reciprocated.
That if they respected norms, avoided escalation, and tried to govern in good faith, the system would stabilize.
That assumption has been tested over and over again.
It has failed every time.
Meanwhile, the other side has been willing to use every lever available — courts, legislatures, redistricting — to consolidate power.
You’d be right to point out that Democrats in California and Virginia approved their own redistricting — paving the way for a balancing of the gains Republicans have already made by disenfranchisement of minorities in Texas.
But so far Democrats are merely reciprocating with equal and opposite reactions — they’re not escalating to impose real costs for them.
Democrats don’t have to adopt the same values to recognize the reality of the fight they’re in.
But they do have to stop pretending this is a shared rules environment.
Because it isn’t.
If Democrats hope to actually make gains this November — if ever again — they need to promise more than having “all options on the table.”
They need to be prescriptive: make DC a state. Expand the Supreme Court. And be willing to gerrymander the Republican party out of power with all of the shamelessness of their racist gerrymandering.
