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The Republican-led efforts to dilute Black voter power ahead of this year’s midterm elections were schemes worthy of thorough investigation. And Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., is urging his party to do so, should they retake the House or the Senate.
That’s the crux of Warnock’s call for Democrats to investigate GOP officials who played a role in forcing through gerrymandered maps ahead of November — maps that some have framed as the most vicious assault on Black voting rights since the fall of Reconstruction.
Calling for officials who he says have engaged in gerrymandering to decimate minority voices is a position Warnock hasn’t called for until now, and he said in a phone interview with ABC News that the Callais decision was an “inflection point” for him to do so.
“A Democratic majority in either chamber must immediately investigate these officials, including through Congressional hearings, document requests, depositions, testimony, and, if necessary, subpoenas,” Warnock’s plan states. “We must analyze their statements, actions, and contributions to determine if there is any evidence that they broke any laws in their race to gerrymander and silence Black voices.”
President Donald Trump’s push to pressure conservative states to gerrymander their districts — and his administration’s race-based rationale for doing so in Texas — has been well-documented.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon absurdly claimed last year that Texas Republicans’ new map was designed to address “racial spoils” that Democrats have purportedly reaped from redistricting. And in a sign of how legally dubious this gambit was, the Texas mapmaker later tried to distance himself from the administration’s push when he testified during a racial discrimination case regarding the new map.
All this is to say: The extent of the Trump administration’s role in the drafting of Texas’ new map was a point of inquiry for the plaintiffs in that case. And it seems like a thread a Democratic-led Senate or Congress ought to investigate as well.
Elsewhere, Indiana’s Republican governor went so far as to suggest his state could face “consequences” and miss out on federal “benefits” unless it acquiesced to the administration’s gerrymandering demands. So there’s seemingly plenty for congressional investigators to dig into.
In the case of Indiana, this top-down pressure campaign was unsuccessful and ultimately quite embarrassing for Trump. But the Jan. 6 insurrection attempt has shown us that efforts to undermine democracy, especially when fueled by the president, can still be dangerous and worthy of investigation no matter how successful they are. And I don’t think the comparison is hyperbolic here.
It’s fair to say the insurrection attempt, premised on lies about electoral fraud in cities with large Black populations, was an effort to achieve through violence what GOP gerrymanderers have achieved through other means — the denial and dilution of Black voter power.
After Jan. 6, Democrats hosted House hearings to investigate how conservative lawmakers and activists worked together to try to subvert democracy. The MAGA gerrymandering gambits have been functionally the same thing in that regard and warrant a similar response — the kind Warnock is proposing.
Because much like Jan. 6, the gerrymandering push was an illiberal and fundamentally bigoted attack on multiracial democracy, even if there were no nooses involved this time.
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