THURSDAY, MAY 14, 2026
It still hasn't gone away: It's as we noted in yesterday's report:
1982 was the year the fuzzy language came into our lives. Meanwhile, those were the days!
The legislation containing the fuzzy language was overwhelmingly passed by the Senate and the House! Why in the world did that happen?
As we showed you yesterday, the fuzzy language was hiding in plain sight, right there in subsection (b)—in that addition to the original Section 2 of the original Voting Rights Act. After the new language was signed into law by President Reagan, Section 2 of the VRA 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.
Where the heck was the fuzzy language? We'd say it showed up here:
"less opportunity...to elect representatives of their choice."
That may not sound like fuzzy language—but we're sorry, it actually is. We'll spell it out as follows:
Let's consider the requirements of this new subsection (b). Basically, subsection (b) contained two legislative declarations.
The first declaration was quite straightforward. At the time, pretty much everyone would have known what was meant by this:
The political processes [in State A] are not equally open to participation by [Black Americans] if [Black Americans] have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process.
At that time, everyone could picture what some such formulation pretty much probably meant! Given the gruesome history at issue, it meant that State A could no longer insult the human project in the way some southern states had traditionally done, by making it virtually impossible—Can you guess the number of jellybeans?—for a certain group of people to register to vote.
Such procedures were no longer legal! Within the context of American racial history, anyone might have assumed that that's what that language meant.
That language was reasonably straightforward, or at least seemed to be. On the other hand, how about a declaration like this:
The political processes [in State A] are not equally open to participation by [Black Americans] if [Black Americans] have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to elect representatives of their choice.
Are you sure you know what that formulation means? Are you sure you know what it supposedly meant?
To this day, we don't have the slightest idea how to paraphrase that jumbled helping of salad. We don't feel sure, not in the slightest, that we can say, with any certainty, what that new declaration was actually supposed to mean.
By now, everyone knows what it came to mean—more specifically, what it came to be taken to mean. Down through the years, it came to be taken to mean that "members of a class of citizens protected by subsection (a)"—in the immediate sense, Black Americans—could expect to be afforded something approaching proportional representation in the House of Representatives.
That's what it came to be taken to mean! We say that because of the original court order which led to the recent Supreme Court decision, Louisiana v. Callais. Here's the way that original court order went down:
The state of Louisiana (roughly 33% black) had prepared a congressional map with only one majority Black House district—only one out of six! The state was then ordered, by a lower court, to create a second such district.
When Louisiana did that very thing, the Supreme Court ruled, in Louisiana v. Callais, that the creation of that second district violated Constitutional edicts. And with that, the rush to "crack" districts which were majority Black—the rush to break those congressional districts apart—took off in various southern states, though not in every such state.
Almost surely, this will reduce the number of Blacks in the House. The numbers go roughly like this:
At the start of the current Congress, there were 62 "Black lawmakers" in the House—57 Democrats and five Republicans. In a recent column in the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie recorded the way those numbers had grown over time, going all the way back to 1965:
John Roberts Believes in an America That Doesn’t Exist
[...]
[I]t took a major amendment to the Voting Rights Act and a Supreme Court decision to give Black Americans the opportunity to win more than token representation in Congress. In 1982, Congress reauthorized and amended the V.R.A. to combat disparate impact in voting and electoral outcomes. Four years later, in 1986, a unanimous Supreme Court declared that the Voting Rights Act forbade voting schemes that impaired the ability of “cohesive” groups of language or minority groups to “participate equally in the political process and to elect candidates of their choice.” Following this decision, states across the country—especially in the South—used the 1990 census and redistricting to create majority-minority state legislative and congressional districts where Black voters could elevate Black lawmakers and officials to federal office.
At the 10th anniversary of the [Voting Rights Act] in 1975, there were 17 Black members of Congress, up from six in 1965. All but one of them served in the House of Representatives. At the 20th anniversary in 1985, there were still only 20 Black Americans in the House (and none in the Senate). By 1995, however, there were 43 Black Americans serving as voting members of Congress, including one senator, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois. This, even after the Democratic Party suffered its largest congressional defeat of the postwar era. Nonetheless, it would take another 20 years before Black Americans’ share of the House approximated their overall share of the population.
With its decision in Louisiana v. Callais last week, the Republican-appointed supermajority on the Supreme Court has delivered the latest in a string of decisions—stretching back to Shelby County v. Holder in 2013—that have weakened the Voting Rights Act’s ability to stop racial discrimination in voting and to secure fair representation in both Congress and state legislatures. Led by Chief Justice John Roberts, the conservative justices have sidelined lawmakers, invented doctrines and ignored their own rules and procedures in a relentless drive to trim the Voting Rights Act beyond all recognition.
After the 1982 amendment to the VRA, the numbers plainly took off. For what it's worth, Bouie's account of that unanimous Supreme Court decision in 1986 strikes us as almost wholly misguided, a point we'll touch on tomorrow.
In 1982, the fuzzy language came into our lives—and then, the numbers took off. As of the start of the current Congress, Blacks were actually over-represented in the House, though by an extremely slender margin.
That said, this level of membership had been achieved, in some part, by the invention of crazily gerrymandered majority-Black districts which were anything but "concise." That was one of the words that unanimous Court used in 1986 as it shot down one last pathetic attempt in North Carolina to keep Blacks out of the House.
What the heck did Congress mean in the summer of 82? More specifically, what did the House and the Senate mean when they folded in the fuzzy language we've identified above?
It may be that no one knew for sure! That's one of the ways that large groups of pols can agree to vote for legislation whose specific meaning may be a bit hard to nail down.
It may be that no one knew! But over the years, for better or worse, the understanding of the requirements of the VRA kept bending toward the idea that various demographic groups had a right to expect something resembling "proportional representation," as we saw when Louisiana was told that it had to create a second district that was majority Black.
Uh-oh! When Louisiana behaved as directed, the Supreme Court shot their new map down.
In recent decades, journalists and jurists alike have employed all sorts of murky formulations to avoid the use of the proscribed term, "proportional representation." (In his column, Bouie referred to something called "fair representation," a much less clearcut term.)
Many voices in Blue America are currently saying this Louisiana v. Callais has ushered in "Jim Crow 2.0." Tomorrow, we'll visit one example, drawn from the conversation which occurred when the Harvard professor and the Princeton professor spoke with the rising cable news star who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard.
(We refer to the conversation which occurred when the (very capable) rising star guest hosted on Velshi last Sunday.)
The Harvard professor and the Princeton professor oppose Louisiana v. Callais. As is perfectly obvious, a large number of well-intentioned, intelligent people do.
They want the various states to continue to feel obliged to create weirdly gerrymandered districts for the purpose of sending a larger, as opposed to a smaller, number of Blacks to the House. At this site, we're inclined to think something different:
We're inclined to think that this is one of about three million beliefs and practices which will make it quite difficult, in the end, for Blue America to survive the current "war of the all against all" in which our floundering, failing former nation has long been haplessly engaged.
Tomorrow, we'll show you what the professors said—and the professors and the rising star are, all three, very good, highly accomplished people. We'll also ask you to ponder this:
How did their conversation look and sound to other people around the country? Other questions about their conversation—and about the way it may have sounded—may also arise:
Does the look and the sound of their conversation help address the puzzlement recently voiced by Sunny Hostin? Speaking on The View, she said she was puzzled by the degree of support retained by President Trump, even at this late stage in the game.
We share her puzzlement, though only up to a point. That said, there's another question which may arise at this very dangerous time:
President Trump has very low approval ratings. But so does the Democratic Party as the midterms approach.
The Dems may win the House this fall, but then again, it's possible that they won't. Meanwhile, the sitting president will still be there. He'll be there in either case.
How in the world—how on earth—did we ever get into this dangerous mess?
How did it ever get this far? And might that conversation on Velshi, mixed with other discussions, possibly start to explain?
Tomorrow: Tomorrow, we'll have to hurry to get it all in! First:
Why did the two parties agree, in the way they did for all those years, to create those majority-Black districts?
We'll let Carl Hulse explain.
(It's our impression that this was all understood and discussed in real time.)
Also, do those of us in Blue America know how we look and sound? How we look and sound to others?
Admittedly, we're very bright. But do we understand how we occasionally seem?
Language from a writer: From Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast:
During our last year in the mountains new people came into our lives and nothing was ever the same...
