 So, here's something that I definitely did not have on my 2023 bingo card. Good news from the Supreme Court. Yes, you heard that correctly. So in the case of Alan V. Milligan, most legal observers expected the Supreme Court to basically deliver the death blow to the Voting Rights Act, which I think is a reasonable expectation given Roberts' past hostility towards it, but that didn't actually happen. Both Roberts and Kavanaugh joined the three liberal justices to not only save the Voting Rights Act, but reaffirm its importance. It feels like we're living in the twilight zone, right? Now the implications of this are broad, but first, let's get to the details. So after the 2020 census, Alabama Republicans redrew their state's electoral map in a way that intentionally diluted the power of black voters. And as HuffPost explains, the case came about after Alabama Republicans who dominate the state's politics drew a new congressional map that cracked the black community across the historic black belt named Fort Soil, splitting the predominantly black city of Montgomery into three majority-wide congressional districts, while packing the rest of the state's black community into the seventh district. Now let's pause right there so I can give you some additional context. So black Americans in this state account for nearly one-third of the state's total population. But because of the way that Republicans redrew district lines, they only made up one majority district of seven. Now to help you visualize how Republicans are able to do things like this, I want to show you this guide on how gerrymandering works. I'm assuming that you already saw this, but I think it's still a really useful visual aid for purposes of this video. So this is a hypothetical state map with 50 precincts, 60% blue and 40% red. Now if you were drawing up five districts with the goal of maximizing fairness, you would draw those lines vertically to give three districts to blue and two to red. Or if you wanted to use the majority advantage to totally diminish the minority, you could draw the lines horizontally, with blue having a majority in all five districts. However, you can even redraw the entire map so the minority are actually in the majority in three of the five districts. So there's a lot of ways that you can use gerrymandering to decrease representation if you're creative enough, and Republicans are absolutely creative in the ways in which they disenfranchise voters, particularly voters of color. So rather than giving black voters an additional majority district, which would give them another seat in Congress, Republicans decided to carve up a majority black city so whites would outnumber blacks in each of these districts, thus diluting the power of black voters specifically. And they did this because they know that black voters disproportionately vote for the Democratic Party. And this is a tactic that is not new to say the least. Now the Supreme Court said no to this, but it's not just a win for black voters in Alabama. It may be a win in other states as well, because as political reports, the ruling increases the odds that minority voters will prevail in other pending redistricting challenges in states like Georgia and Louisiana. The challenges could force those states to draw additional districts where minority voters can elect their chosen candidates, a prospect that could lead to a handful of new Democratic seats in the U.S. House. So needless to say, this is a very, very big deal. Now we're going to get into the legal reasoning and some more technical details. This is a little bit dense, but bear with me. I think this is all important. So basically this decision all comes down to section two of the Voting Rights Act, the court held that Alabama violated this provision. And as Mark Joseph Stern of Slate explains, this tactic is plainly illegal under section two of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting laws including redistricting plans that have a racially discriminatory effect, meaning a disparate impact on black voters. Robert's opinion for the court on Thursday traced the history of racist voter suppression after the Civil War leading up to the initial passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. He explained how in 1980, the Supreme Court held that the law barred only discriminatory intent not effect, a decision that produced an avalanche of criticism both in the media and within the civil rights community. Robert's wrote that some lawmakers were wary that an effects test, which measured impact rather than intent, would require a quota system or racial proportionality in districting raising equal protection concerns. And so Congress settled on a bipartisan hard fought compromise, which amended section two to require that the electoral process be equally open to participation by all racial groups. What happened? We will debate that question for decades, but one answer leaps off the page. Alabama pushed too far, too fast, too transparently. The state wanted the court to either gut the Voting Rights Act under the guise of interpretation, or simply strike it down as unconstitutional. Robert's turned down both requests and Kavanaugh went along with him. Notably, his analysis of Alabama's map itself is extremely brief, as if to illustrate that this case is not a close call. He explained that the court uses the Jingles Test to identify a violation of section two. Under that test, a minority group must be large and compact enough to constitute a majority in one reasonably configured district. The group must be politically cohesive, meaning its members generally share the same political preferences. And it must be able to demonstrate that white voters can consistently block its preferred candidate. If all these conditions are met, the group must then show that elections are not equally open to racial minorities under a totality of the circumstances. So the non-technical TLDR version is that Republicans got a little bit too brazen with their racism in the way that they redrew district maps in this state. But what makes this case even more shocking, and Mark Joseph Stern points this out, is that Roberts has a history of being against the Voting Rights Act. He wrote literally dozens of memos against the Voting Rights Act, while he was an attorney at Reagan's Department of Justice. And on top of that, on the Supreme Court he voted to narrow the scope of the Voting Rights Act. But now all of a sudden, he did a complete 180, and he didn't just vote to save it. But he reaffirmed its importance in his majority decision, which he wrote where he explains the history of this law and why it's necessary. So this is completely unexpected, but very much welcome, obviously. And I don't know why he did this, but I'm glad that he did. So this news, it just makes me feel a little bit better about the future of American democracy, even though there's so much more that we need to do to make our democracy more democratic for lack of a better word. But I mean, even though there's a lot more things that we have to do, and the Supreme Court obviously is still not legitimate, this is just genuinely good news that is worth celebrating.