The Court Didn’t Just Disenfranchise Blacks. It Also Disenfranchised Cities.

The Supreme Court’s revocation of the Voting Rights Act not only will reduce the representation of Southern Black Democrats in the House. It will also hasten a process already under way in Southern Republican states: eliminating their urban Democratic districts as well.

Cities, you see, tend to elect Democrats even in the reddest of states. Blacks live in cities, as do Latinos, Asians, Jews, professionals, scientists, and young people, each of them preponderantly hostile to MAGA’s cramped and cruel core beliefs. Cities also are ground zero for the concentrated economic inequality that has radicalized millions of young Americans.

Texas is red, but Austin and Houston are blue. Tennessee is red, but Nashville and Memphis are blue. Louisiana is red, but New Orleans is blue. Alabama is red, but Birmingham is blue. Mississippi is red, but Jackson is blue. Rural North Carolina is red, but Charlotte and Raleigh are blue. Rural Georgia is red, but metro Atlanta is blue.

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The boundary lines between urban and rural all but define current American politics. In August of 2023, I analyzed how Ohio voters had just cast their ballots on a measure that would effectively have made it more difficult for them to legalize abortion, by requiring a 60 percent approval rather than a simple majority. The state’s three largest counties, home, respectively, to Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati, ranked one, two, three in the percentage of their residents who voted no. The state’s seven largest counties, all home to substantial cities, all voted no; the state’s 42 smallest counties, home to no cities at all, all voted yes.

Cities elect Democrats. The countryside elects Republicans. The current Trump-initiated and now Supreme Court–sanctified spate of redistricting has enabled Republican legislators and Republican governors in Republican states to effectively end urban congressional representation in their states. Alabama Blacks and the city of Birmingham will lose their representative, as will Tennessee Blacks and the city of Memphis, as will Louisiana Blacks and the city of New Orleans, as will Mississippi Blacks and the city of Jackson.

Even before President Trump implored those Republicans to redistrict to their hearts’ content, Tennessee Republicans had eliminated Nashville’s Democratic district by breaking it into three parts, each representing just a slice of the city linked by the gerrymanderer’s art to rural Republican regions. Not only did the city’s Blacks lose a voice in Congress, so did the professionals of all races who’ve been flocking to the city due to its growth as a national entertainment industry hub and popular destination for relocating corporate headquarters. When Texas Republicans responded zealously to Trump’s order to redistrict last year, they broke up liberal Austin’s district, which had been full of University of Texas professors, researchers, and students who shared a dangerous predisposition to empiricism. Once chopped up, the district that had long elected liberal stalwart Lloyd Doggett, who’d spent decades advancing Austin’s empirically informed perspectives (and had been the first Democratic House member to call for President Biden to cease his bid for re-election in the wake of that fatal debate), suddenly overlapped that of the young progressive stalwart Greg Casar. Doggett then declined to stand for re-election. Casar, who heads the Congressional Progressive Caucus, is a rising star, but he can’t be the go-to guy on local-centered issues for those Austin liberals soon to be represented by a Republican.

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Texas and Alabama have long been negating cities’ right to set local policies. Birmingham’s ordinance to set a municipal minimum wage higher than the state’s $7.25 (that is the federal standard; Alabama, like four other Deep South and onetime slave states, has never enacted a minimum-wage law of its own) was overturned when the legislature responded by enacting a law forbidding cities from setting wage standards. Fearing similar city-spawned heresies, the legislatures and governors of both Texas and Florida have passed and signed into law a host of prohibitions on cities’ capacities to enact ordinances to which any business might object. In Texas, Austin and Dallas had enacted ordinances requiring employers to give construction workers a water break during torrid summer times; the state revoked those. Texas even compelled cities to stop enforcing any local ordinance when sued by a business arguing that that ordinance was “unreasonable”—not to suspend it when a court upheld that suit, but rather, when that suit was filed.

Now, with the Court having directed Republican state governments to run amok in their redistricting, cities in red states that have already lost the power to legislate, as in Texas, are going to lose the right to congressional representation (and hence, to legislate in support of urban interests and values at the federal level). Roughly a dozen states have laws on the books requiring those states to consider placing or preserving “communities of interest” within a district when drawing district lines, though none offer much of a definition of what the term “community of interest” means or refers to. It could be racial, though the Court has just struck that down. It could be industrial (lots of factories) or coastal or whatever. About half the states have laws on the books requiring consideration of communities of interest when drawing the boundaries of state legislative districts.

A city, it seems to me, constitutes a community of interest, with concerns and values particular to its residents. Republicans evidently believe that, too, which is why they’re bent on disenfranchising them. The redistricting fest that Trump set in motion and the Court just ordered isn’t voter suppression. It’s voter negation.