ALL AGAINST ALL: Will Democrats take the House this fall?

SATURDAY, MAY 16, 2026

Not so fast, Cook says: A funny thing happened to Black representation in the House on our way back to the summer of the year 1965.

Full disclosure! Based on current estimates, we actually aren't on our way back to that distant time. But before we revisit that fact, let's review a disastrous new prognostication from the Cook Political Report. 

The prognostication concerns the likely outcome of the great civil war in which we're now engaged. We refer to the current mid-census redistricting war==the current embarrassing, dumb but ongoing war of the all against all. 

Amy Walter delivered Cook's prognostication in an interview for the New York Times. The news she delivered was very bad, as the headline itself suggested:

The Midterms Ground Has Shifted

What are we to make of the midterms? Republicans are in a jam; inflation has jumped; the war in Iran is not going well. President Trump’s approval numbers are abysmal.

This year is different. Decisions from the Supreme Court have set off a wave of extreme partisan gerrymandering in G.O.P.-controlled Southern states — in some cases, like Alabama, while primary voting was already underway.

Amy Walter, the publisher and editor of The Cook Political Report, assessed the normal and unusual aspects of the 2026 midterms in a written conversation with John Guida, an editor in Times Opinion. It has been edited for length and clarity.  

John Guida: What have the redistricting struggle and the past two weeks done to change your sense of what we might expect from the midterms?

[...] 

Amy Walter: Before the court rulings, our Political Report rated 217 House districts as solidly Democratic or leaning toward Democrats and 16 seats that were tossups. In these tossup districts, each side had a 50-50 chance to win. They are seats that are the most vulnerable. Under that scenario, Democrats would need to win just one of those 16 tossups to reach a majority in the House.

Today we rate 207 districts as solidly Democratic or leaning toward Democrats and 18 as tossups. To win a majority, Democrats need to win at least 11 of the 50-50 contests (and hold all those leaning their way) in order to get a majority.

Good God! According to Walter, Democrats will have to win 11 of the 18 toss-up seats, without losing a single "solid or leaning Democratic" seat! 

That strikes us as a disastrous prognostication, especially since no one knows what sorts of election-tilting schemes the White House may put in effect. 

In a nod to lingering sanity, let us quickly add this:  

No one knows what else the sitting president may do to make himself even less popular. He may create a political environment in which it will be impossible for the Dems to fail to win.

That said, the sitting president won't be on the ballot this year. Hundreds of Democrats will be, and the Democratic Party is almost as unpopular as the sitting president is.

"We still see Democrats as the favorites for House control next year," Walter went on to say. "But they are no longer overwhelmingly favored," she felt she had to add, 

That strikes us as horrible news. And those predictions, however fallible, are coming from the Cook Report, the mother of all down-the-line, not crazy political think tanks.   

In the wake of recent court decisions, the Democrats may not retake the House! And of course, even if they retake the House and the Senate, the sitting president will remain in the Oval Office until early 2029, with all the uncertainty and all the danger that state of affairs suggests.  

But so it now seems, according to Cook, as the current war of the all against all continues to unfold. Dems are still favored to win, but 

Does President Xi see the United States as a nation in decline?  Please! We've suggested to you, for quite a few years, that we may already have attained the status of "failed state."  

Others see that as inanely alarmist—as a silly idea. It could always turn out that those people are right—or it could be that they're unable to see the situation which has slowly crept upon us, just as the fictional denizens of Camus' Oran were unable to see the signs of the plague which had invaded their seaside town as normal life sputtered along.

“We're going to look back in ten years and call this about the dumbest time in American history," Adam Kinzinger has recently said. You can see the video of his statement here. 

He quickly added these words: "I hope, at least." We're going to call him a dreamer.

That returns us to the funny thing that happened on our way back to the summer of 65. We refer to an overstatement by a high-profile Democrat, but also to a bit of news about a quartet of Republican members of the House.

As we noted yesterday, NBC News filed the report:

Democrats warn a third of the Congressional Black Caucus could be wiped out by redistricting wars

The Congressional Black Caucus, a power center in the Democratic Party for decades, saw its membership rise this Congress to an all-time high of 58 House members.

 Now, thanks to a Supreme Court redistricting ruling that’s expected to dramatically diminish Black representation on Capitol Hill, the CBC is fighting a five-alarm fire that could devastate its membership.

CBC Chair Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., said as many as 19 of the caucus’ members could be affected by the redistricting wars in a worst-case scenario, though she noted it’s still fluid given that states are still drawing new maps in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling. 

[...]   

“It’s Jim Crow 2.0,” said longtime Rep. Bennie Thompson, who as the only Democrat in the Mississippi delegation is being targeted by Republicans. The court decision “potentially takes us back 60 years.”

[...]

Black representation isn’t dwindling on just the Democratic side of the aisle. All four Black GOP House members are either retiring or running for higher office, possibly leaving the Republican Conference with zero Black members next year.

Rep. Byron Donalds, a close Trump ally, is running for governor of Florida, while Rep. John James is running for governor of Michigan. Rep. Wesley Hunt lost his primary race for the Senate in Texas. And Rep. Burgess Owens of Utah is retiring.  

Rep. Thompson is a good, decent person—but he's also a person person, just like everyone else. Meanwhile, for the record:

Whatever you may think of the current warfare, there's no sign that we're on our way back to 1965, when there were only six Black members in the 435-member House of Representatives.  

"Jim Crow 2.0" or not, we won't be going back to that. That said:   

Several of the original 58 Black Democrats will, in fact, be losing their seats when their majority Black districts get dismantled in the coming weeks. For ourselves, we'll admit that we were struck by that additional passage about the career profiles of the four (4) Black Republicans currently in the House.  

It's hard to miss those numbers. There are way more Black Democrats serving in the House. In the House, Black Democrats outnumbered Black Republicans by 58-4 at the start of the current Congress.

That shouldn't be hugely surprising. Dating back into the 1960s, African Americans have much more commonly been Democrats, as everyone already knows. Still and all, this:

As is true of quite a few of the 58 Black Democrats, all four of the Black Republicans were elected to the House in majority white districts. For starters, here's the Cook Report's profile of Florida's 19th congressional district, the district which elected Rep. Donalds:   

Florida's 19th congressional district
69.7% White
19.1% Hispanic
5.9% Black

R+14

It's a solidly Republican district. But it's also heavily white, and it elected Donalds. 

By the same token, here's Cook's profile of the Michigan district which elected Rep. James:  

Michigan's 10th congressional district
72.8% White
13.3% Black
6.1% Asian
3.0% Hispanic

R+3

That's closer to a toss-up district. But like Donalds, James got elected in a district which is heavily white—and each man is now the likely GOP nominee for governor in his state.

(Rep. Hunt was elected from the Texas 38th congressional district; it's 9.6% Black. This year, he sought the GOP nomination for the Texas Senate seat; he gave it a shot and he lost. Rep. Owens, who is retiring, was elected from Utah's 4th district. According to Cook, the district is 74.2% white, 1.2% Black.)

We ourselves wouldn't have voted for any of those candidates. But Rep. Donalds will likely be the next governor of the Sunshine State—and given the uncertainty of the time, we'd give Rep. James a chance in Michigan. Through whatever acts of legerdemain, they seem to be movin' on up!

Is a lesson possibly lurking there for us, the frequently hapless Blues? For the political tribe which may not be able to retake the House this year, even in the face of the madness surrounding the GOP?

Xi thinks our nation is "in decline?" We'd float the term "failed state."

At any rate, the dumbness is general over the nation, much as Kinzinger says. But does some of that lack of insight come from us, the infallible Blues?

There's much more to be said about this war of the all against all—about this current redistricting war, a war we Dems may end up losing.  Different aspects of this situation seem to pile up as the days move along.

For that reason, we'll continue with this topic next week. We assume that the discussions, or in some cases the pseudo-discussions, will continue through the week.

Down in Memphis, Justin Pearson is staying in the race. Could he be the first since Gary Hart to come up with a new idea? 

Next week: Among quite a few other things, what the professors said.

Also, what Carl Hulse wrote about the way we got here. Also, have you seen a single discussion of the Callais ruling itself? Or have you seen nothing but agitprop—scripted cries all the way down?

We may even review the fuzzy judicial and journalistic language of the last quite a few years!

ALL AGAINST ALL: Black membership will be reduced next year!

FRIDAY, MAY 15, 2026

But it won't be reduced like that: What will happen to Black membership in the House in the wake of Louisiana v. Callais?   

Before we offer a current estimate, let's recall where membership stood at the start of the current Congress. This report, from Spectrum News, appeared in January 2025: 

A record 67 Black lawmakers are serving in the 119th Congress—a four-fold increase since 1975.

The number represents a historic milestone since the first Black member of Congress, Sen. Hiram Revels of Mississippi, was elected in 1869. Black representation in Congress rose during Reconstruction, fell during the Jim Crow era, then grew through the 20th century due in part to the civil rights movement and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  

The 67 total Black members of Congress in 2025 include 62 Democrats and five Republicans.

The five Republicans serving on Capitol Hill—four in the House and one in the Senate—match the number in the last session of Congress and also represent the most since Reconstruction.  

Let's be clear on the overall numbers. Five of those 67 members were (and still are) members of the Senate. As the current Congress started, there were 62 Black members of the House—58 Democrats, but also four Republicans.  

How will those numbers be affected by the scramble to eliminate majority Black congressional districts in the wake of the Callais decision? In this recent news report, NBC News reported a current estimate:

Democrats warn a third of the Congressional Black Caucus could be wiped out by redistricting wars

The Congressional Black Caucus, a power center in the Democratic Party for decades, saw its membership rise this Congress to an all-time high of 58 House members.

 Now, thanks to a Supreme Court redistricting ruling that’s expected to dramatically diminish Black representation on Capitol Hill, the CBC is fighting a five-alarm fire that could devastate its membership.

CBC Chair Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., said as many as 19 of the caucus’ members could be affected by the redistricting wars in a worst-case scenario, though she noted it’s still fluid given that states are still drawing new maps in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling. 

“It’s devastating. People have sacrificed so much to make this a more perfect union. And here we are, in 2026, seeing this massive regression in all the gains that have been made. It’s painful,” Clarke told NBC News on Tuesday.

So goes that early estimate. "As many as 19 Democratic members could be affected," Rep. Clarke said.

For the record, several of the original Democratic 58 have died or have resigned. Three more have announced that they'll be retiring at the end of their current terms. 

(Two of the Republican members—Reps. Donalds and James—are the likely GOP nominees in gubernatorial races in Florida and Michigan. Throw in a retirement and an unsuccessful Senate run in Texas and none of the four Republican members will be back next year.)  

Almost surely, there will be fewer Black members in the House next year. As is almost always the rule, overstatements have followed.

“It’s Jim Crow 2.0,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) is quoted saying in the NBC News report. Thompson is quoted saying that the Callais decision “potentially takes us back 60 years.” 

Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, is also quoted calling the situation "a new form of Jim Crow." 

For the record, Rep. Thompson's calculation is almost surely wrong. Sixty years ago, there were only six Black members in the House!

Whatever you think of the Callais ruling, it won't be taking those numbers back to where they stood in 1965, or to anything close to that number. But that's the way the discourse routinely goes within our rapidly failing nation, even among us Blues.   

The number won't be that small, but the number will almost surely be smaller. As to how we got from there to here—as to how we got from six Black House members up to 62—we'll refer you to Carl Hulse's recent retrospective piece in the New York Times.  

How did we ever get this far? Also, what explains the way those numbers grew in the aftermath of the Voting Rights Act? 

As we noted yesterday, Jamelle Bouie laid out the numbers, and the timeline recording their growth, in this recent New York Times column:

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. 

After that major amendment to the VRA, the numbers substantially grew. More specifically, majority- minority House districts were formed in the redistricting which followed the 1990 census. 

This raises a bit of a question:

Who was responsible for the creation of those new districts? Were Democratic legislatures creating those districts Were Republicans joining in?

Was this some sort of different age? Was this the dawning of an age in which the two parties chose to link hands to let a thousand flowers bloom?   

In this recent report in the New York Times, Carl Hulse explores that general question—and as was understood at the time, it wasn't quite as simple as that! In his recent retrospective, Hulse describes the political trade-offs which were involved as this remarkable change occurred. 

It's hard to imagine the current era without that impressive growth in Black congressional membership—a change which made the House of Representatives "look [much] more like America."

It's hard to imagine the current era without that significant change. We ourselves have always lived in a (naturally occurring) majority minority district—a district in which we've been represented by Kweisi Mfume and the late Elijah Cummings, with an earlier tenure by Rep. Parren J. Mitchell added in.

(They were "princes and princesses." That's what the late Rep. Mitchell would always tell the children at the Baltimore City elementary school where we were teaching fifth graders back at the start of the era. Unfailingly, he would deliver those words of affirmation, during a challenging time.)

As these things go, we've been lucky in the quality of the people we've been able to vote for. That said, Hulse describes the political complexities involved in the creation of those majority minority districts in places where "racial gerrymandering" was required to create such congressional maps.

He also describes the long, slow, steady political change in which the Republican Party took political control of the "Solid South" and seems to have acquired substantial control over the electoral map. 

There were tradeoffs involved in the gerrymandering which produced the larger numbers we have described. Based on an unusual comment Rep. Clyburn recently made, such tradeoffs may even live on today!

We want to walk you through the political history recalled in Hulse's report. We also want to tell you what we saw and heard on Velshi last weekend—what we saw and heard when the Harvard professor and the Princeton professor spoke with the (highly capable) rising star Harvard grad.  

All three of those people are good, decent people. Rep. Thompson is a good, decent person as well.

That said, we aren't going back to 1965, and this isn't Jim Crow all over again. The numbers will be down next year. But they won't be down like that

We aren't going back to 1965, and this isn't Jim Crow again! We Blues! Do we know how we look to other people when we refuse to stop making such claims?

Tomorrow: We'll have to move fast to cram it all in. 

On Monday morning, we expect to move on to the annals of headlong decline.

THURSDAY: Solon thinks Trump is "seriously ill!"

THURSDAY, MAY 14, 2026

And yet he doesn't speak: Is something wrong with President Trump? We would assume that there is.   

The unfortunate stigma associated with "mental illness" makes it a difficult topic to discuss. But Jonathan Chait has made the latest attempt to describe the president's recent bizarre behavior—the bizarre behavior in which he engaged, at great length, overnight this past Monday night.

Chait's piece was written for The Atlantic. He's describing only one small part of the president's overnight meltdown:

Big Brother Is ReTruthing You

[...]

Trump's strange, symbiotic relationship with the world of lies was in evidence last night, when he experienced one of his periodic social-media crashouts. From 10:15 to 10:53 p.m. EST, he shared more than two dozen posts on his Truth Social account alleging a blizzard of conspiracies. Roughly half of them centered on Barack Obama, whom the posts accused of having committed treason, having attempted a coup, having personally used Hillary Clinton’s email server under a pseudonym, and having personally collected $120 million from the Affordable Care Act.

The rest of the messages contained attacks on various targets—such as Mark Kelly, James Comey, Jack Smith, and Hillary Clinton—whom Trump wishes to be arrested, including demands that the Justice Department move more quickly to apprehend these or other targets, as well as a handful of random videos that appear to show Black people misbehaving in public.

These messages, collectively, do not alter our understanding of Trump’s mindset. His accusations against Obama, as is typical, seem like reflected confessions. Obama never ordered investigations of his rivals, tried to overturn an election, or used the presidency as a vehicle of profit (the ACA charge, which appears new, seems to originate from a satirical website). Trump has done all of these things.   

Chait is describing only part of the president's behavior that night. Later that night, to cite a further example, the sitting president reposted an image of Presidents Obama and Biden, accompanied by Nancy Pelosi, swimming in human feces in the Reflecting Pool.  

The stigma associated with mental illness seems to have made it impossible to conduct a serious discussion of this fairly apparent—and presumably dangerous—state of affairs. Of the current situation, two things can be said:

Almost surely, the sitting president is indeed "mentally ill." And also, without a shred of doubt, the rest of us are just a bunch of kids.

We'll add an example of what we mean. We take our example from a news report at Mediaite which starts like this, intriguing headline included:

‘Trump Needs Medical Attention’: Congressman Says President’s Family Should Stage ‘Intervention’

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) said President Donald Trump’s call to arrest former President Barack Obama should trigger a medical “intervention.”

On Wednesday, Pablo Manríquez of MeidasTouch caught up with McGovern at the Capitol and first asked about the president’s obsession with the construction of the White House ballroom. 

[...]   

“Is Donald Trump’s ballroom a national emergency?” Manríquez asked.

“You gotta be kidding me,” McGovern responded. “It’s a vanity project..."  

The report continues from there. Eventually, Rep. McGovern is quoted saying this, just like the headline said:  

“I think he’s seriously ill. I think Trump needs medical attention, and there needs to be an intervention. I mean, you know, his family or someone in his cabinet, you know, or I would say maybe some Republicans here, but they don’t have the balls to confront him on anything. So he’s not well.”

“I think he’s seriously ill," McGovern said. “I think [the sitting president] needs medical attention." Mediaite provides the videotape of his statement.   

McGovern is a good, decent person. There's no lack of smarts to the guy. For such reasons, our question is this: 

Under the circumstances, what do you think of a member of Congress who won't call a press conference in order to make a statement lack that in a serious setting?   

We'd say it teaches an anthropology lesson:  

We human beings simply weren't built for this line of work.   

As we've noted in the past, this doesn't mean that we're bad people. Anthropologically, it simply means that we're people people! 

We don't know how to talk about matters like "mental illness." This is the best we can do!

While we're at it: Yevtushenko, in translation:

Not people die but worlds die in them.
Whom we knew as faulty, the earth’s creatures...

ALL AGAINST ALL: The fuzzy language came into our lives!

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...