ALL AGAINST ALL: In the summer of 82...

WEDNESDAY, MAY 13, 2026

...the fuzzy language appeared: We don't think of The View as a place to go for outstanding political commentary. That said:

On the Fox News Channel's Gutfeld! show, the five women who serve as co-hosts of The View are routinely compared to cows, to pigs, to cattle and horses, to whales, but also to "livestock." 

On the "cable news" program we've mentioned, a disturbed man performing behind several beards won't stop behaving this way. He won't stop behaving this as people like Kat Timpf look on.   

Everyone in Blue America's upper-end press corps has accepted this disturbed behavior as part of the modern cultural norm. Last week, one of the women of The View made a comment which we regard as worth considering.   

Sunny Hostin, age 57 and a lawyer, was the co-host in question. 

The women of the Fox News Channel join the men of the New York Times n endorsing the way Hostin is routinely insulted on the Gutfeld! program, with a sewage leak down to The Five perhaps beginning to show. Hostin's comment was cited in this recent report by the New York Times:   

How ‘The View’ Landed at the Center of a Free Speech Battle

President Trump’s wide-ranging campaign to punish his perceived media critics has come for newspapers like The Wall Street Journal, The Des Moines Register and The New York Times; broadcast outlets like the BBC, NBC News and CBS News; and the late-night hosts Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert.

But now it is bearing down on a new opponent, one that remains politically potent and has a storied place in Mr. Trump’s oeuvre of media grudge matches—the long-running ABC daytime talk show, “The View.”  

[...]

“It is unbelievable to me,” Sunny Hostin, a host, said this week, “that there are still people—despite the fact that they don’t have health care, despite the fact that the Department of Education has been gutted, despite the fact that they can’t afford to buy eggs—they are still with their guy.”  

So said Hostin last week. We sometimes have similar thoughts, in which we marvel at the degree of support the president retains.

At such times, we remind ourselves of an obvious fact—there are cultural phenomena which may be keeping some or many voters from coming over to those of us who are Blue.  

Are we seeing some of those factors on display in the (understandably) heated reactions to the Supreme Court's recent decision about the Voting Rights Act?  Do (some) people roll their eyes and move away from our own Blue American world when they turn on their TV machines and hear comments like this?  

If somebody fell asleep in 1896 and woke up today in 2026, they would simply say the only difference is now Negroes have a T.V. show and we wear nice suits. 

As we noted yesterday, an accomplished person made that remark on CNN this Monday night. Have endless remarks of that general type helped create the dangerous difficulty in which Blue America remains mired?   

We offer that as a tiny question. We would assume that the answer is yes. 

Full obvious disclosure:

The mountains of suffering created by the role of "race" within our brutal American history continues to mean that these difficulties remain hard to escape. But for today, we turn to a simpler question: 

With respect to the Voting Rights Act, how did it get this far?  

How did it [ever] get this far? How did it ever reach the point where states were ordered to create "majority minority" districts, but then were told that the districts they created were constitutionally impermissible.

How did it [ever] get so confusing? That strikes us as an excellent question. Fuzzy language plays a key role, as conceivably does a type of bad faith, perhaps on the part of both of our two major parties. 

How did it ever get this far? Please consider this: 

As everyone surely knows by now, the original version of the VRA became law in 1965. Much of the current discussion concerns Section 2 of that landmark legislation—but when the VRA was signed into law by President Johnson, Section 2 said only this:   

Voting Rights Act of 1965; August 6, 1965

[...]

SEC. 2. No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.   

There would be no more (disgraceful) requirement that potential voters would have to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar! There would be no more "poll taxes," no more "citizenship exams."

States would have to let their citizens vote! So declared Section 2 in August 1965.

Given the ugliness of our history, that small chunk of language represented a gigantic societal breakthrough. But that's all that Section 2 said at that point in time. 

Well, time passed, and now it seemed, the two major parties were sharing a dream! In 1982, Congress passed a major addition to Section 2 of the VRA. Some fuzzy language arrived on the scene, along with one rather plain assertion.

As you'll see below, the new language in Section 2 passed both Houses of Congress by very large margins. As of 1982, Section 2 now said this:   

SEC. 2. ø52 U.S.C. 10301¿ (a) No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision in a manner which results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color, or in contravention of the guarantees set forth in section 4(f)(2), as provided in subsection (b). 

(b) A violation of subsection (a) is established if, based on the totality of circumstances, it is shown that the political processes leading to nomination or election in the State or political subdivision are not equally open to participation by members of a class of citizens protected by subsection (a) in that its members have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice. The extent to which members of a protected class have been elected to office in the State or political subdivision is one circumstance which may be considered: Provided, That nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population. 

You can see the same language here.

Perhaps you can spot the fuzzy language which the Congress, by huge majorities (see below), inserted in that new part (b). We'll briefly consider that fuzzy / murky language in the next few days. For now, you can surely spot this one clear statement:

[N]othing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population. 

Please note: That provision doesn't mean that some "protected class" can't end up with "proportional representation." It does say, fairly clearly, that such outcomes are not guaranteed.

How did we get from there to here? That's a long and murky story. For today, we'll show you what the leading authority on this matter has to say about the way that last provision got into this amended / extended version of the VRA's Section 2. 

Amendments to the original Voting Rights Act involve a long and winding road. You'll have to fight through some of this on your own:

Amendments to the Voting Rights Act of 1965

[...]

As the special provisions neared expiration again, Congress reconsidered the Act in 1982.

[...]

During the nine days of Senate hearings concerning whether to amend the Act, Section 2 was the primary focus —in particular, whether to amend Section 2 to create a "results" test that prohibited any voting law that had a discriminatory effect, irrespective of whether the law was enacted or operated for a discriminatory purpose.

President Reagan opposed creating a results test because its impact would be uncertain.  Furthermore, some members of Congress, such as Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), raised concerns that a results test would fundamentally alter American democracy by requiring courts to impose proportional representation for protected minority groups as a remedy. 

To assuage this concern, Senator Robert Dole (R-KS) proposed legislative language explicitly disclaiming that a results test would require proportional representation. This compromise won support from the Senate, the House, and the Reagan Administration.  The House passed this version of the bill by a 389–24 vote, and the Senate passed it by an 85–8 vote.  President Reagan signed the legislation into law on June 29, 1982. The creation of the Section 2 results test shifted the majority of litigation brought under the Voting Rights Act from claims of Section 5 violations to claims of Section 2 violations. 

Senator Dole created the language which explicitly said that "proportional representation" would not be required. With that language added to part (b) of Section 2, this addition to the VRA passed both Houses of Congress by very large margins.

A great deal of confusion followed, leading right up to the present day.

States were told that they had to add "majority minority" districts. States were also told that they couldn't add such districts.

Journalists pretended to explain the nature of the legal reasoning involved in various rulings and cases. In recent years, we've never seen a news report which was really able to explain the legal reasoning driving a welter of court decisions under terms of the VRA. 

If not for all the fuzzy language, there would frequently be no language offered at all.

At any rate, there you see the new language passed by the Congress in the summer of 82. Tomorrow, we'll let Carl Hulse of the New York Times recall what happened from there. 

On Friday, we'll show you what happened, just last weekend, when the Harvard professor and the Princeton professor spoke with the Harvard grad. 

People out in the country were watching. With a hat tip to co-host Hostin, we'll venture a guess about what (some of) those people may have believed that they saw.

Tomorrow: If memory serves, this was all understood and discussed at the time