Vote Twice

It seems this is the quiet part being said aloud.

Note to my future self.

Sunday night Donald Trump took to social media and demanded that states cancel their elections and redraw their maps. “If they have to vote twice, so be it,” he wrote. The reason he gave: it would deliver Republicans more than 20 House seats in the midterms.

Last week we covered the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. As predicted, that ruling opened the door to what we are now seeing.

The day after the ruling, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry declared an emergency and halted the state’s May 16 congressional primaries — even though mail ballots had already been cast. The ACLU, the Louisiana NAACP, the League of Women Voters, and the National Council of Jewish Women sued Friday in separate filings. One argument: under Louisiana law, the legislature sets the election schedule. Not the governor.

In Florida that same Wednesday morning, the state House passed a new GOP map an hour after the ruling came down. The chamber had voted against pausing for two hours to consider what the Supreme Court had just done.

Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee are moving in the same direction. The target in each case is the same: Black-majority districts.

What is striking about the president’s post is what he didn’t say. No claim of voter fraud. No mention of the Big Lie. He named the goal in plain terms: 20 more seats for the GOP.

It seems this is the quiet part being said aloud.