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...

 

WEDNESDAY: Blake is still playing it safe!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 13, 2026

Cupp says it's Trump being Trump: CNN's Aaron Blake is a good, decent person. He's also a perfectly capable political journalist. 

That said, Aaron Blake's persistent behavior continues to get a pass! We base that assessment on Blake's new essay for CNN. The headline above it says this:   

President Trump’s bizarre behavior often gets a pass. 

Actually, that's just part of the CNN headline. Full headline included, Blake's essay starts like this:  

Trump’s bizarre behavior often gets a pass. That’s starting to change   

The week is still young. But it’s already been a humdinger for President Donald Trump.

In the span of 24 hours, he appeared to doze off (again) while his top health official espoused the dangers of declining teenage sperm. He called the White House a “shit house.” He mused about making Venezuela the 51st state (after having already captured its leader). He struggled to identify Indiana University football coach Curt Cignetti, despite standing right next to him and having seemingly looked directly at him moments earlier.

And late Monday night, he unleashed a wild social media flurry that stood out even by his often-outlandish standards: posting and reposting more than 50 times in less than an hour. Those included long-debunked theories about Dominion voting machines deleting millions of votes in the 2020 election, posts about the decade-old Hillary Clinton email server controversy, a made-up claim about a GOP senator from a hoax website, unflattering AI images of prominent Democrats, three derogatory videos about Black people (including one captioned “Always scheming…”) and two separate posts advocating for the arrest of former President Barack Obama.

It’s the kind of behavior that undeniably prompts concern. But Trump, who turns 80 in June, has so far avoided a true reckoning about it. And that’s in large part because he’s spent more than a decade doing bizarre things in public, long before he was considered elderly.  

Blake continues from there at substantial length. He cites data from opinion surveys to drive his principal claim, according to which the public is growing more concerned about the possibility that the president may be "well, a bit off."  

Could Blake's journalism possibly be "a bit off"—be a bit too soft? For the record, here are the findings in question:   

A recent poll from Reuters and Ipsos showed 61% of Americans and even 30% of Republicans said Trump had become “more erratic with age.”   

Another showed Americans said 71%-26% that Trump is not “even-tempered”—wider than the 62%-37% split that the Pew Research Center showed after the 2024 election.

A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll last month showed 59% of Americans said Trump didn’t have the mental sharpness required to serve as president—the highest such number to date and a full 16 points higher than in 2023.

And the same poll showed 67% of Americans said Trump doesn’t carefully consider important decisions. Even 30% of Republicans agreed with that statement.

Plainly, those are unflattering survey data—but citizens, is it true? Is it true that the president's behavior has become "more erratic?" 

We aren't entirely sure. He's been erratic for a good long while. Nor is that the obvious point.

We do know that Blake stays on the same old path. For better or worse, he carefully uses euphemisms to hint at the possibility of cognitive decline, and he never mentions the fact that major medical observers began suggesting, long ago, that dangerous mental health / mental illness problems may have been there all along.  

Remarkable, isn't it? Even after the experience with President Biden, today's muckrakers can't even bring themselves to use straightforward language is discussing the less complicated, more familiar matter of possible cognitive decline! 

No medical specialists were cited in the course of Blake's lengthy report.

As for the refusal to see what's right before them, there went S. E. Cupp again! Last night, she guested on Erin Burnett OutFront—and it seems to us that she took the predictable dive.  

To her credit, Burnett went out of her way in her opening segment to describe the president's many strange behaviors during the previous 24 hours.

To our ear, Cupp decided to run off and hide:

BURNETT (5/12/26): That's the president of the United States, and his behavior today came after he spent much of the night seemingly awake. Maybe that's why he's so testy, posting and reposting on social media. In fact, since 10 o'clock last night, overnight, [he's posted] more than 75 times.

Do you know anybody who does that, including posting a picture of a $100 bill with his own face on it? He posted that.

He also posted Mount Rushmore with his face being etched into the stone, and then he posted an A.I. generated image of former Presidents Obama and Biden, along with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, swimming in sewage. So, he posted all of those things in those 70-plus posts.

The president had been up all night, offering remarkably strange Truth Social posts. Below, you see what Cupp said when she was asked to comment:

BURNETT: ...I mean, 75 posts overnight!

CUPP: Yeah.

BURNETT: Look, that's disturbing. Yes. Okay. I find that disturbing. Any American should find that disturbing, right? That means you're not sleeping. It means you're not in a good place. Yes. And these include Mount Rushmore with his face, $100 bill with his face. It's not as if he's not posting deep policy thoughts.

CUPP: If our child or our parent were doing this, we'd be very worried about them. But this is a pattern of Trump's. You can always tell when his back is against the wall. He goes on these late night binges to flood the zone.

Go back to all the late-night binges. He was really up against it, either in polling or in terms of messaging, selling something that he couldn't sell, having to answer questions he didn't want to answer, whether it was Epstein or the war or tariffs. I mean, he's done this before and he really is losing a lot of the support he could once count on, both from his own voters on the war, but also you know, influencers and Fox News.

You know, he's railing against Fox News constantly because they are not helping him sell this war or this economy. And he's up against it. This is what he does. 

Our translation would go like this: 

If your parent did it, you'd be quite concerned. But this is just Trump being Trump! 

It's also the press corps doing what the press corps does. For better or worse, this familiar practice—the practice of agreeing not to see and not to say—doesn't seem likely to stop.

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

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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