Voting Rights Act ruling is ‘red meat’ to Republicans in south, says Black lawmaker targeted by gerrymander

The supreme court decision that effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act (VRA) “was red meat to the Republican legislators of the south” the US House representative Bennie Thompson said. Conservative lawmakers in Mississippi , where Thompson is both the state’s lone Black and only Democratic congressional representative, have used the opportunity to explicitly target him, threatening to redraw the second congressional district, that he represents. Federal protections, those initially stipulated by the VRA, prevented states from “bad behavior”, or methods that they previously used to suppress voters – such as, Thompson noted, instances in which Black voters were asked how many bubbles were in a bar of soap. With the supreme court’s new interpretation of section 2 in Louisiana v Callais, Thompson said that lawmakers could “create an opportunity for people to not be represented or vote for the candidate of their choice”. “Mischief could creep back in, just given the hostility associated with what you’re hearing from state legislators and state elected officials,” he said. It is a hostility Thompson knows well. Representative Bennie Thompson at the US Capitol, on 15 September 2005. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/ On Wednesday, Andy Gipson, the state’s agriculture commissioner, who is running for governor as a Republican, made a lengthy Facebook post calling for the state to redraw lines to hurt Thompson’s electoral chances. …