The Latest Attack on Voting Rights

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Gullah Gullah Island Theme Song: Come and let’s play together, in the bright sunny weather. Let’s all go to Gullah Gullah Island…

Lisa Graves: If you are a kid or parent in the 1990s, You might remember this TV show, Gullah Gullah Island. Its setting was based on the east coast of South Carolina, in an area called the Gula Geechee Corridor, home to the Gula Geechee people.

Taiwan Scott: We are part of a corridor, the Gula Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, that Congress basically identified.

As a cultural significant group of people that can trace our lineage, our heritage back to West Africa.

Lisa Graves: Taiwan Scott is a real estate agent in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, home to a Guli Geechee community. Taiwan explains the corridor was established as a kind of enclave for freed slaves after the [00:01:00] Civil War.

Taiwan Scott: The Union Army was here and protected us. And then once they left, It’s almost like an experiment. Well, not almost, it was an experiment. Let’s see if these formerly enslaved folks would be able to survive and sustain from own governments to businesses and hospitals thriving, I would say, and surviving.

Lisa Graves: The Gula Gula Island kids show doesn’t really get into this history. It mostly shows easygoing Island folk hanging around and singing songs. But Taiwan, who was raised in New Jersey. says that when he would visit as a kid, life on the island was actually kind of like that.

Taiwan Scott: My grandmother and my grandfather, they used to have a, what we call a juke joint here in Hilton Head Island. It was where the blacks would go on the beach. They would do the low country bowl, the devil crabs and fried fish. And it was basically the Sunday hangout. For [00:02:00] people of color.

Lisa Graves: Taiwan was also struck by how close knit everyone was.

Sometimes a little too close knit.

Taiwan Scott: Everybody around here was family, you know? And the worst thing was, you know, my grandmother would say, everybody’s related to you, you know? So I couldn’t have a girlfriend or anything like that from Hilton Head. I mean, you have to go off the island.

Lisa Graves: Something else to know about the Gullah Geechee people.

Politically, they tend to vote Democratic. In South Carolina, a red state, Taiwan and his liberal neighbors were a serious threat to the status quo. In his electoral district, South Carolina’s first congressional district, or CD1, Gullah Geechee and other black voters helped a Democratic candidate win a congressional seat in 2018.

And they almost pulled off another Democratic victory in 2020, but the Republican candidate, Nancy Mace, won by the skin of her teeth with a scant 1. 3%. And then Republican lawmakers decided enough was enough.

In [00:03:00] 2021, Republican state lawmakers, Lawmakers redrew South Carolina’s electoral map in a way that stripped Black communities of their voting power. The new map carved a wedge straight through the Gullah Geechee Corridor, plucking around 30, 000 Black voters out of CD1 and into a neighboring district, leaving both districts with a clear Republican majority.

Taiwan Scott: And it’s not to say that they just moved everybody. It’s black people. It’s black people who have the same issues and same concerns throughout the corridor, corridor that they’re carving out.

Lisa Graves: The new map served its purpose. Nancy Mace, that Republican lawmaker who barely won in 2020, in 2022, she won again by almost 14%.

Taiwan Scott: So when you see the state coming in and carving fellow Geechee people out of our district and placing them within another district, I mean, you have to question how is that not by plan.

Lisa Graves: In [00:04:00] 2023, Taiwan, along with the NAACP and the ACL U, sued the state and federal court claiming that the electoral map was illegal racial gerrymandering.

The case was called Alexander versus South Carolina State Conference of the naacp. In the end. The court agreed that that map was discriminatory and it ordered lawmakers to draw up a new map, but then South Carolina appealed the ruling to the U. S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case. With the ruling in legal limbo, South Carolinians will probably go into the 2024 election.

Under an electoral map that has been proven in a court of law to be racist.

Taiwan Scott: It still comes down to why don’t we matter? I mean, why did the state take that position and say, okay, well, we need, we need to take this to the U. S. Supreme Court to get their opinion on this. It’s not calculated. I mean, you know, it just shows us that we don’t matter as far as [00:05:00] they’re concerned.

Lisa Graves: If the U. S. Supreme Court sides with the state and leaves the map in place, The 2024 election will be the least of our problems.

I’m Lisa Graves, and this is Grave Injustice, a podcast from Courier that explores how powerful extremist interest groups have hijacked the courts to bend the law and rewrite the rules. In this episode, we’re going to explore a decades long effort to chip away at the 14th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act, helping bad actors strip minority communities of their political power.

It could change the course of the 2024 election. It could undo decades of voting rights progress in America. And it could undermine democracy itself.

What happened in South Carolina’s first congressional district is called gerrymandering. The Constitution charges [00:06:00] state governments with dividing up their populations into voting districts. They usually redraw the map every 10 years. The voting districts are required to be roughly equal in population, but the shape of those districts is more or less up to the states.

Ari Berman: Gerrymandering is really when one political party draws a district. to their advantage and to disadvantage another party or a specific community.

Lisa Graves: This is Ari Berman, a National Voting Rights Correspondent for Mother Jones and the author of the books, Give Us the Ballot and Minority Rule.

Ari Berman: Typically, redistricting happens every decade.

And basically, gerrymandering is the weaponization of redistricting. Redistricting isn’t inherently evil, but gerrymandering is.

Lisa Graves: One gerrymandering tactic is called packing. Where voters of a certain political leaning are lumped together into the same district, effectively quarantining their votes from the rest of the states.

What happened to South Carolina’s district one is the opposite. It’s called cracking, in which a voting demographic is splintered in different districts. A [00:07:00] telltale sign of a gerrymandered district is an amorphous bug splat type shape, with seemingly random benches and corridors grabbing up specific municipalities and neighborhoods.

That kind of gerrymandering is flagrantly anti democratic, but it isn’t new. The term was coined in 1812, and the practice is as old as America itself. And it’s not just Republicans who’ve done it.

Ari Berman: It’s used by both political parties, although one could argue it’s been used more effectively by Republicans of late.

Lisa Graves: Gerrymandering has also proven to be extremely difficult to tamp down. You can argue that it violates the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection of the laws. Federal courts have gone back and forth on that and whether it’s even possible or not to prove unconstitutional gerrymandering in a federal court of law.

In a 1986 gerrymandering case, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that gerrymandering is unconstitutional and does fall within the court’s jurisdiction. But it also couldn’t agree on a standard [00:08:00] criteria for what is and what isn’t unconstitutional gerrymandering. A handful of other gerrymandering cases in the 21st century played out the same way.

The court agreed that gerrymandering was unconstitutional. But decided that each of these cases was either outside its purview, or that the gerrymandering was impossible to objectively prove. So while the courts dithered, Republican lawmakers and their right wing allies launched a full blown gerrymandering blitz.

This plan even had a name, Project RedMap.

Ari Berman: RedMap was the plan to capture state legislative seats for Republicans in the 2010 midterms and then to draw new congressional and state legislative districts as a result, using a lot of dark money.

Lisa Graves: Project RedMap really got going after the 2010 midterms.

Ari Berman: In 2010, Republicans gained an unprecedented number of state legislative seats, then they turned around in 2011 and drew all these gerrymandered districts that basically entrenched their power in all of these key swing states like Wisconsin, North [00:09:00] Carolina, Ohio, for a decade or more.

Lisa Graves: One form of gerrymandering, however, is expressly illegal, racial gerrymandering, which is drawing voting district maps on racial lines, not just partisan ones. It was outlawed in the 1965 Voting Rights Act. And it’s what happened in 2021 in South Carolina.

Ari Berman: Alexander versus NAACP is a case concerning racial gerrymandering in South Carolina’s first congressional district.

Republicans made the district a lot more Republican by essentially taking a black voters out of the district. They took 30, 000. Black voters out of Charleston County, so around Charleston, South Carolina.

Lisa Graves: Here’s Leah Aden, an NAACP lawyer and the Plaintiff’s Counsel in the South Carolina case.

Leah Aden: The first is that South Carolina excessively used race to sort voters in and out of CD1, and they had no compelling interest in sorting voters on the basis of [00:10:00] race.

Instead, we argue that they identified race, for no good reason, used race for no good reason to move voters in and out.

Lisa Graves: The plaintiffs also claim that the new congressional district map was explicitly drawn to minimize the power of black voters.

Leah Aden: And both of those principles are protected under our constitution.

Ari Berman: Basically what Republicans had done is they had accomplished this political advantage by essentially using black voters as pawns.

Lisa Graves: So what did South Carolina say in its defense? Here’s the big twist. The state didn’t deny that the map was gerrymandered. They were open about it. They quote, sought to create a stronger Republican tilt to congressional district number one, but the map wasn’t racial.

They argued.

Leah Aden: South Carolina has responded. This is all partisanship. We. Moved more than 30, 000 black voters out of Charleston out of one county because we wanted to make this a Republican [00:11:00] leaning district.

Lisa Graves: But wait, hasn’t the U. S. Supreme Court established multiple times that partisan gerrymandering is illegal in principle, even if it’s difficult to prove?

Well, by then, things had changed. A few years before South Carolina’s latest map was drawn, the right wing Supreme Court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause that questions of partisan gerrymandering were out. Out of its purview, non justiciable, to use the legal term. The

Ari Berman: Supreme Court, in another very radical decision out of North Carolina, the Rucho decision, basically said that partisan gerrymandering can’t be reviewed by the federal courts.

Lisa Graves: Don’t even come to us about gerrymandering Supreme Court said, it may be undemocratic or even unconstitutional, but you need to deal with it in the state courts. There’s nothing we can do.

Ari Berman: Now, this to me is really crazy because it doesn’t say we can’t strike down partisan gerrymandering. It says we can’t even review it.

So now basically what Republicans are doing all across the country is they’re drawing these racially gerrymandered districts and they [00:12:00] said, Oh, we just did it for partisan reasons. And the Supreme Court seemed sympathetic to that argument.

Lisa Graves: And now we get to what makes this South Carolina case so crazy.

so weird and so important. The U. S. Supreme Court isn’t deciding whether or not South Carolina’s electoral map is gerrymandered. What it’s deciding is whether the map is racially gerrymandered, which would violate the Voting Rights Act and the 14th Amendment, or whether that map is just partisan gerrymandering, which it now claims is not allowed to touch.

In court, Leah argued That once race factors in at all, any partisan motivation, stop mattering. Discrimination is discrimination is discrimination.

Leah Aden: Deny that redistricting is a partisan fight. We don’t deny that there were partisan motivations, um, in playing a part in the development of national district one, but.

The Constitution has long said that if you use [00:13:00] race and race and you harm people on the basis of race in order to achieve a partisan interest, that raises constitutional questions. South Carolina has only partisanship as an explanation for their drawing the lines, and the Constitution has not identified partisanship as a compelling interest that allows that to happen.

To run amok over black voters in the state.

Lisa Graves: In other words, the act of racial discrimination trumps any partisan motivations you may have. Your supposed intent doesn’t matter. You just can’t target a racial group when you’re drawing voting maps. That’s illegal discrimination. And in this case, the evidence was clear.

The new map shunted almost 80 percent of the vote. A black residents of Charleston County out of district one resulting in a proportion of black voters. 17 percent that had been precisely calculated to give Republicans the [00:14:00] advantage. And all three judges on the lower federal court agreed. The state of South Carolina, the legislature of South Carolina had clearly targeted black communities.

It was an open and shut case until it wasn’t.

PBS Newshour Report: The US Supreme Court today heard arguments in a key racial gerrymandering case out of South Carolina. So, we know that two lower courts agreed that there was a clear racial gerrymander in this case, but at least a handful of the conservative justices on the Supreme Court today appeared to cast doubt on that.

Lisa Graves: The U. S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments for the appeal of Alexander v. NAACP in October of 2023, and the justices seemed far more skeptical than the lower federal courts. Chief Justice John Roberts and other right wing judges in Grilled Leia about the value of circumstantial evidence and whether she could objectively prove racist intent.

John Roberts: We’ve never had a case where there’s been no direct evidence, no map. [00:15:00] No strangely configured districts. And instead it all resting on circumstantial evidence.

Ari Berman: It seemed pretty clear from oral argument that the justices wanted to reinstate the racially gerrymandered map. That they basically were buying South Carolina’s argument that this was about Political power, not race.

Neil Gorsuch: Here there’s no, no evidence that the legislature could have achieved its partisan tilt, which everyone says is permissible, in any other way.

Samuel Alito: There is no way in which a plaintiff can disentangle race and politics, except by providing an alternative map.

Lisa Graves: John Roberts and other right wing justices talked about, quote, disentangling race from politics. They seem to believe that if many of the Democrats in District 1 happen to be Black, it’s on the plaintiffs to prove that it’s not just a coincidence.

[00:16:00] If the right wing U. S. Supreme Court ends up siding with the state of South Carolina in this case, its consequences would extend far beyond Tywone Scott and his neighbors in the Gullah Geechee Corridor. It would essentially declaw a core component of the Voting Rights Act, which is its ban on racial gerrymandering, the strongest statutory legal check we have on gerrymandering of any kind.

In 2019, the U. S. Supreme Court, which included two New justices appointed by Trump and handpicked by Leonard Leo declared that federal courts could not touch partisan gerrymandering. If this Supreme Court sides with South Carolina now, it would be easy for any state to engage in racial gerrymandering.

After all, who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men. But all states will have to do is claim that their motivation is political and not racial, and it will be on the plaintiffs to prove otherwise.

Ari Berman: Basically, if [00:17:00] South Carolina succeeds, what, what every state’s going to do is they’re going to draw racial gerrymanders and just say, yeah, these are partisan gerrymanders.

And then the Supreme Court’s going to say, that’s fine. We don’t have any problem with that.

Lisa Graves: For lawmakers seeking to minimize the voices of minority voters, it would be open season. Up next, Hey,

Kyle Tharp: it’s Kyle Tharp, and I’m the author of Courier’s Newsletter For What It’s Worth. For the past five years, I’ve been tracking the online information wars and the digital trends shaping our politics, delivering data and insights to over 20, 000 readers every Friday morning. As this wild 2024 election cycle heats up, we all need to be paying attention to what’s happening online.

If you want to know more about the online forces impacting our politics, make sure you’re subscribed at FWIW. news or at the link in our show notes.[00:18:00]

Lisa Graves: Alexander versus NAACP isn’t a fluke. It’s the latest in a decades long attack on voting rights. That goes back to the civil rights movement. And before

Ari Berman: the civil rights movement was tremendously popular, tremendously powerful, and it changed America and it changed American law and things like the civil rights act and the voting rights act led to a transformation of American democracy.

Lisa Graves: In 1965, president Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the voting rights act.

Lyndon B. Johnson: This act flows from a clear and simple wrong. It’s only purpose is to right that wrong. Millions of Americans are denied the right to vote because of their color. This law will ensure them the right to vote. The

Lisa Graves: sweeping bill prevented state and local governments from imposing any voting rule that quote, results in the denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen [00:19:00] to vote.

On account of race or color, it undid many of the classic tactics states had used to keep black people from voting, such as literacy tests, poll taxes, and private property requirements more to the point. The bill also banned redistricting that dilutes minority votes,

Ari Berman: and a lot of Republicans didn’t like it because it led to a real shift in political power.

It gave formerly disenfranchised communities a say in the government for the first time. And so they tried to figure out How can we overturn this law? They couldn’t overturn it through the normal channels. So they turned to the courts.

Lisa Graves: And one of the key players in the effort to declaw the Voting Rights Act has been none other than now Chief Justice John Roberts.

Ari Berman: John Roberts was the point person for the Reagan administration when it came to weakening the Voting Rights Act. So he’s been trying to weaken the Voting Rights Act for 40 years.

Lisa Graves: In the 1980s, John Roberts helped the Reagan administration try to weaken key parts of that bill, arguing for a higher burden of proof on [00:20:00] discrimination claims.

30 years later, Roberts got another shot at the Voting Rights Act. In the 2013 case of Shelby County v. Holder, the U. S. Supreme Court Under John Roberts struck down a section of the Voting Rights Act that required states with a history of discriminatory voting laws to gain approval from the federal government before enacting certain voting policies and rules changes.

Alex Aronson: John Roberts and the, you know, Republicans 5 4 majority in that case, the bear 5 4 majority in that case did a pretty extraordinary thing. And they completely threw out the extensive and. You know, assiduously compiled findings of fact that Congress had put together that really supported the law.

Lisa Graves: Alex Aronson is the Executive Director of Court Accountability, an advocacy group that works to expose corruption and dark money in the courts.

Alex Aronson: And they said, no, Congress got these facts wrong. Racism is basically over. You know, look, things have improved and we can no longer justify these [00:21:00] extraordinary interventions by the federal government in state, you know, lawmaking around. Elections and voting

Lisa Graves: for the record. Justice Ginsburg disagreed. She wrote that, quote, throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you’re not getting wet.

But also America was getting soaked. Right wing lawmakers were more than ready to discriminate against minority communities for political gain. And the Shelby decision opened the door to a new wave of racially targeted voting policies. such as voter ID restrictions, the closure of polling places in minority districts, and restrictions on early voting.

Texas, North Carolina, Alabama, Arizona, and several other red states have taken advantage of that ruling to make it harder for minority communities to vote.

Alex Aronson: And in that arrogance, in that entitlement, in that [00:22:00] brazen act of judicial activism, you could see not only Roberts and the Republican majorities zeal for under undermining voting rights, for seizing power to set the parameters and the terms of law and policy in this country and override the will of the people as enacted through laws of Congress.

But you could see the extent to which originalism and textualism, these doctrinal philosophies, Is that we have been sold by the right-wing legal movement for decades as commitments to judicial restraint. More than anything, we could see the lie in that sales pitch. There’s nothing textualist, there’s nothing originalist about the way that out that outcome was produced.

It was a, it was a brazen act of judicial activism. Exactly the thing that Originalism Purportedly was designed to correct against. It’s exactly how Justice Ginsburg foretold, and we have seen a raft of, uh, discriminatory. [00:23:00] Racially discriminatory voter suppression laws across red states in particular fueled by dark money fueled by the very Right wing dark money forces responsible for the ill gotten composition of today’s Supreme Court People like Leonard Leo and groups like the Honest Elections Project law firms like Consovoy McCarthy Which was the firm that argued Shelby County and is now in partnership with dark money groups like the Honest Elections Project Working in states like Alabama to help red state legislators And so we saw Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society and a whole army of funders really take aim at voting rights at, at democracy issues broadly.

Lisa Graves: Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society. If you’ve been listening to this show, those are names you’ve heard before. Here’s a refresher. The Federalist Society, or FEDSOC, [00:24:00] is a powerful network of right wing lawyers. That has ties to right wing judges at every tier of the judicial system, including six Supreme Court justices.

The Federal Society, or FEDSOC, is a powerful network of right wing lawyers that has ties to right wing judges at every tier of the judicial system, including six Supreme Court justices. Leonard Leo is the FEDSOC’s board co chair. And he’s possibly the most influential man in right wing politics, with the possible exception of Donald Trump.

In fact, Leonard Leo is the man Trump called when it was time to choose people for the U. S. Supreme Court and other judgeships. Leo would supply Trump with a shortlist of names, and whoever Trump picked, it was sure to be Leo approved. For the past 20 years, federal society backed judges have been gradually dismantling the power of the Voting Rights Act and the 14th Amendment to protect the voting [00:25:00] power of black people in America.

Alex Aronson: They started investing in new ideas to dismantle these signature laws that the people had passed, the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. And they started Recruiting new leaders to weaponize the law against this progress, people like John Roberts and Sam Alito in the Reagan era, where they were trying to implement this conservative legal vision of the Constitution around the idea of originalism in the Department of Justice.

Lisa Graves: These right wing interests know that democracy is not on their side. They know that ultimately, American voters will support legislation like the Voting Rights Act and leaders who support it. Those right wing actors, the same ones who have suppressed common sense gun laws and overturned Roe v. Wade, they’re not really interested in democracy at all.

On the contrary.

Alex Aronson: The right wing legal movement has always understood that access to the franchise, that true, [00:26:00] flourishing American democracy was not going to work out well for them. And they understood that the courts were an incredibly valuable weapon to achieve that end because the courts were inherently anti democratically structured, insulated from democratic accountability and pushback, particularly the Supreme Court justices and federal judges who are insulated by life tenure.

And so what this means for us with the writing on the wall, frankly, in terms of how diminished voting rights enforcement is going to be at the federal level is a real clarion call for for democratic, uh, activism around re securing these rights through our democratic process. And so what our movement must do is, is reckon with this reality that this court is an anti democratic force that has too much power, that has more power than it was ever intended to have.

And so as we, you know, re imagine what we, what we want for this country, a true multiracial future. Flourishing American democracy where people have [00:27:00] access to the basic services and things that they need to have comfortable lives and to be happy and thrive. We need to confront this threat because a majority of this court, a super majority of this court has been put there to prevent that dream from becoming a reality.

Lisa Graves: Up next, back to South Carolina and the people affected by this latest assault. Hi,

Mark Jacob: it’s Mark Jacob. I’m a former Metro editor of the Chicago Tribune and former Sunday editor of the Chicago Sun Times. Today I’m the author of Stop the Presses, a weekly newsletter from Courier about how right wing extremism has exploited the weaknesses in American journalism, and also what journalists in you can do about it.

As a lifelong journalist, I couldn’t stay silent as bad actors in politics game the system [00:28:00] while others in my profession turn a blind eye. So every week, I’m holding the news media accountable. and encouraging us all to be more than fact checkers. We must be fact crusaders. Make sure you’re subscribed to receive my newsletter every Monday.

You can subscribe at stopthepresses. news, that’s one word, stopthepresses. news, or at the link in our show notes. Thanks a lot.

Lisa Graves: In South Carolina, Brendan Murphy has witnessed the effects of this right wing effort firsthand.

Brenda Murphy: When we look at the voting precincts and where they’re located and the availability and Some of the changes, not having the access to what was routinely the place that you were accustomed to voting, that has been somewhat problematic.

Lisa Graves: Brenda is the president of the NAACP’s South Carolina Conference. She says that Black communities have dealt with fewer polling places, And longer lines due to restrictions on polling hours and early voting. These are [00:29:00] deceptively small measures that, in the big picture, end up shaving off thousands or tens of thousands of Black votes.

Brenda Murphy: Has that impacted on us as a people, people of color? Yes, it has. Because the vote has been diluted in certain areas, in primary areas.

Lisa Graves: Brenda says she’s optimistic that, eventually, that racist electoral map will be replaced. Nevertheless, a lot of damage has already been done. The map has already influenced elections in South Carolina, and it will likely be in effect during this year’s election.

Brenda Murphy: We have to make a significant effort at re educating individuals and communities. Regarding the lines that will be effective this coming year in terms of candidates that will be running for election for our Senate and House positions here in South [00:30:00] Carolina. And, you know, some folks have filed to run and they are finding out.

That based on the lines, they don’t live in the district. So it’s creating, still creating problems.

Lisa Graves: Arguing the matter on behalf of the NAACP, Leah Aiden also feels extremely frustrated.

Leah Aden: We’re definitely disappointed when the jurisprudence says that once a map has been declared unconstitutional, it’s the rare, unusual, frankly, unfortunate circumstance where another election is allowed to happen under an unconstitutional map.

And that’s what’s happening here.

Lisa Graves: That racist electoral map will likely remain in place during the 2024 election. Which means it will be harder for people like Taiwan Scott and the Gullah Geechee community to have their problems heard or the support of leaders who care about them.

Leah Aden: While it is the case that Mr.

Scott has needs in CD1 related to being a member of the Gullah community and [00:31:00] wanting to be in a district with other Gullah community, he cannot organize with Those members of the Gullah community to advocate for greater funding around land loss prevention, coastal preservation, economic infrastructure.

When you bleach most of the Black voters from Charleston, from CD1, you are sending a message that Black voters, Who live and work in CD1 don’t have a right to representation alongside their neighbors.

Taiwan Scott: I strongly feel and believe that it all starts on the local level. I mean, we have to engage our representatives on the local level.

We have to be able to influence them to take it up the line, you know, get it, get it to the state house, you know, and get our voices heard.

Lisa Graves: For Taiwan, fair representation doesn’t just show up in voter rolls or censors. It’s not just data or statistical evidence rolled out in a [00:32:00] courtroom. It’s in his community’s roads, it’s schools, emergency services, basic stuff.

Taiwan Scott: We as natives need our infrastructure in place as well. You know, we need to be able to have what we need to sustain and survive. We need to have businesses. I mean, housing is huge, a huge issue everywhere, you know, in, in, you know, what, where, when will we have our opportunity to provide housing?

Lisa Graves: Taiwan and his neighbors are battling state highway expansions that run through the heart of traditional Gula neighborhoods and villages.

They’re fighting for adequate flood protection, protection for the coastlines in Gula regions. Taiwan asks, why do richer neighborhoods always seem to have these basic necessities on demand? While District 1’s Black communities have to fight and scrape for them.

Taiwan Scott: So it’s, it’s happening in Hilton Head.

It’s happening throughout the corridor. They don’t have to say that we’re being discriminated against. I can, I can show you, you know, I mean, it’s, it’s, [00:33:00] you can see it. And, and that’s the, that’s why we need to be able to elect a representative who can relate to these historical issues and historical concerns.

And we need that voice. You know, we need that

Lisa Graves: voice. Yeah. But now that voice is in the hands of the U. S. Supreme Court, and their decision won’t just determine the future of South Carolina’s Congressional District 1, but for minority communities throughout the country. And for democracy itself.

Next time on Grave Injustice, we’ll dive in and look at a case that on its face involves a small fishing business in New Jersey, but behind its journey to the U. S. Supreme Court is You guessed it. A right wing billionaire with an agenda.

Christopher Leonard: In terms of corporate power, I do use the analogy of, it’s the Roe v.

Wade that animates powers like Coke. It would be a huge decision, a huge win for them. 

Lisa Graves: We uncover that massive plot to handcuff the expertise of the federal government on the next episode of Grave Injustice.