GOOD-BYE “SECOND RECONSTRUCTION” - HELLO “SECOND REDEMPTION”

There are still 178 days t o the mid terms. The only way we are going to defeat the Neo-Confederates is to over-perform everywhere so much they cannot steal the election the way they are now attempting to do..

It’s hard to describe just how thoroughly awful, despicable, mendacious, malevolent and evil the news is this week to make it stand out from any other week of Trump II, but it is.

Much more evil.

And they’re congratulating themselves for how evil they are and competing for the title of Worst Of The Worst.

From the Return-to-Jim-Crow racist redistricting rush across the Confederacy - which was never Reconstructed, no matter what anyone said - to the weaponization of the now-TrumpDOJ to the criminalization of the opposition, Trump Republicans are using the power of the state to consolidate and entrench their own political power and squeeze out Democrats’ ability to meaningfully contest that power. It’s going on at the federal and state level simultaneously. Over the long term, the goal is to create permanent or near-permanent structural advantages for the GOP, with a big lift from the Roberts Court. In the short term, they want to hobble Democrats with criminal investigations - or threat thereof - from the TrumpDOJ and redistricting designed to keep them from effectively slowing down the Republican putsch by ensuring a reliable GOP House majority. Democrats may represent the will of the people, and in an actual democracy the GOP would be headed for the kind of wipeout they experienced in 1932, but we are no longer in an actual democracy, or even a simulacrum thereof.

It only took 48 hours: Yesterday, Tennessee lawmakers passed a redistricting map that carves up the state’s only majority-Black House seat and threatens the lone Democrat in the state’s nine-member congressional delegation. The Tennessee House and Senate approved the new map yesterday, after first spending the morning voting to repeal the state’s 56-year prohibition on mid-decade redistricting, a necessary step before lawmakers could move forward with the proposal. The new map splits Rep. Steve Cohen’s Memphis-based 9th Congressional District - the state’s only majority-Black district - into three congressional districts, while further dividing Nashville into five. The House passed the map 64-25, with three Republicans abstaining. As the House voted on the maps, chaos erupted in the chamber, with screams and chants pouring down from the gallery, as one member pulled out an air horn. Democrats linked arms and walked out after the bills passed. The Senate later passed the measure, 25-5, along party lines. The bills now head to Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee’s desk for his signature.

Under pressure from Trump - the Home Office of American Sedition, the state that should have been burned to the ground and every structure destroyed in 1865 as lesson to traitors - the state House of Representatives in South Carolina kicked off the process of congressional redistricting before this year’s midterms; their goal is the elimination of the state’s sole majority-Black seat, now held by Rep. James Clyburn (D). The House passed a resolution late Wednesday night on a 87-25 party-line vote to redistrict after the legislative session ends on May 14. There’s no guarantee, but this keeps GOP lawmakers’options open and allows pressure from MAGA build. The state Senate voted on the resolution yesterday. as soon as today. Republican state Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey - who has been a vocal opponent of redistricting, concerned it could actually cost the GOP seats in the House since he has a brain - read the Tuesday tea leaves in Indiana and let the vote proceed.

In Mississippi Get Yourself Another Country To Be Part Of - where the primary votes for Congressional seats have already been held - Governor Tate Reeves is “open” to expanding the coming special session of the state legislature to include a redistricting to eliminate the state’s sole Black-held Congressional seat, which is represented by Bennie Thompson. The question is how to completely fuck the rules and do it to take effect this year, or keep a figleaf of “democracy” and do it for 2028. Never fear, Mississippi has long history in how to turn reality upside-down and call it truth. The white Mississippians I met in the Navy 64 years ago were the dumbest, most evil people I ever met, and nothing has changed there.

In Alabama, home of the stupidest white people on the planet, Joyce Vance reports that despite Governor Kay Ivey saying earlier this week that she didn’t foresee redistricting this year, the state is appealing to the Roberts K-K-Kourt to allow them to use the racially-based gerrymandered redistricting map that was thrown out by the Roberts Kourt two years ago, to send a nice all-white delegation of Alabama inbreds to DC this year. Looserana has already obtained the necessary dispensation from the Kourt to redistrict in the middle of a primary election to wipe out a second black-opportunity district Alito assassinated last Monday.

Duncan Hosie writes in The Atlantic about the long-term implications of what Justice Alito did last Monday: “But to view Callais as merely the final hit in the Voting Rights Act’s destruction is to miss its deeper ambition. The bigger shift is that Callais also closes off the possibility that a future Congress could respond with new legislation combating racial discrimination in the electoral system. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion, joined by the other Republican appointees, rests on an interpretation of the Fifteenth Amendment that effectively bars Congress from remedying the very inequities Callais unleashes - inequities the amendment itself was designed to eradicate and prevent.”

Thomas Zimmer wrote on Substack about where Callais stands in U.S. history: “Because Louisiana v Callais is, in many ways, the culmination of a ‘backlash’ against multiracial democracy, and because it will in turn fuel the escalating reactionary countermobilization, it signifies the end of a distinct phase in U.S. history. The Second Reconstruction is over; we are into the second ‘Redemption’ now.”

David Cole echoes Zimmer at the NYRB: “The decision in Louisiana v. Callais may be the Roberts Court’s most radical and far-reaching yet, rivaled only by the 2022 elimination of the right to abortion. It will almost certainly usher in a bleaching of the nation’s legislative bodies - federal, state, and local - unlike anything this country has seen since the ‘Redemption’ of 1873 - 1877 ended Reconstruction and returned white supremacists to power throughout the South.”

We should have expelled the South back in 1787, when all they had was Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, North and South Carolina and the Georgia penal colony and put a fence around that allowing no exit by the transported felonious inbred English pigfuckers who inseminated those places.

To understand how truly awful a “Solid South” has been in U.S. History, consider that it was not until the southern representatives were expelled from Congress during the Civil War that the Merrill Act - establishing public higher education - was passed. Ditto the Homestead Act which opened the West to small farmers and broke the power of the reactionary “cattle barons.” The Transcontinental Railroad was built on the path of the Oregon and California Trails in the North, rather that through Texas to southern California - all due to the lack of Southern reactionaries being able to stymie these programs as they had in the 30 years before the war. The “Solid South” between 1890-1960 prevented or delayed the passage of the Wagner Act that gave unions the right to organize, the Social Security Act that was the major step toward eventually dealing with poverty among older Americans and the New Deal reforms - all of which were initially crippled by Southern Senators and House Committee Chairmen who dominated Congress who made sure to exclude women and non-whites from the benefits of these programs. This is now the potential legislative future for any environmental reform, voting reform, health care reform. Every change in favor of progress in this country since its founding has been opposed by the “Solid South.” That’s the future again.

The TrumpDOJ announced a “civil rights probe” of Steve Descano, the elected Democratic state prosecutor in Fairfax County, Virginia’s largest, over conservative complaints he’s too lenient on criminal defendants who are undocumented immigrants. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon trumpeted the election-year investigation in typically MAGA terms: “This investigation will uncover whether this prosecutor is putting the community at risk in offering sweetheart deals to illegal immigrants charged with serious crimes.”

This will all outlive Donald Trump. It turns out future political struggles of the 21st Century will be spent still attempting to deal with 250 years of the slaveocracy and its white supremacist ideology. America’s “Original Sin” will continue to harm anyone trying to make America live up to its founding promises.

Trump claimed during his recent “60 Minutes” interview, based on the federal indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center on fraud and money laundering charges, that the violent 2017 Unite the Right rally was “a total fake” funded by the extremist watchdog group “to make me look bad.” The actual facts have stood in plain sight for years: A coalition of violent neo-Nazis organized online and converged in Charlottesville, Va. in August 2017, first as a torch-wielding mob that kicked and punched student counterprotesters on the campus of the University of Virginia, and then engaged in hours of street brawls the following day, culminating in a car-ramming attack that killed Heather Heyer and injured 30 other peaceful protesters.

Remember, you are not the crazy ones, and we were made for these times.

“Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government, nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty, as we understand it.” - Abraham Lincoln

The current media scene is a stark reminder of the importance of independent journalism. No billionaires. No oligarchs. No corporate media. No dark money PACS. None of us can do it alone. You are not the crazy ones. These are truly the times that try men’s and women’s souls. This is the fight of our lifetimes, and the challenge of our generation. I realize times are getting harder, which is why some readers understandably didn’t renew their subscriptions. There are free subscribers who read TAFM daily according to the site stats. If you folks happen to be in a position to help make up the gap, please consider joining the other paid subscribers here at That’s Another Fine Mess to keep things going. Across Substack, authors like me need your help! It’s only 21 cents a day. I am deeply thankful to those who have done so. Remember, independent media brought down Viktor Orbán - we can bring down Trump, with your support. I hope you’ll join Stephen King - one of my favorite writers - in keeping TAFM operating.

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