‘It’s Really a Full-On Attack on the Voting Rights Act’: CounterSpin interview with Ari Berman on voting rights erasure

 

Janine Jackson interviewed Mother Jones‘ Ari Berman about the erasure of the Voting Rights Act for the August 15, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

 

Janine Jackson: Goings on in Texas, where Republicans are pushing to redraw congressional districts so as to give their party five new House seats, and Democrats have left the state to deny them the quorum to do it, have a lot of us looking for our eighth-grade civics books. How is this legal, and if it is, how does it comport with what we’ve been told is democracy, the reason we had to stand up and put our hands on our hearts and recite a pledge—the medicine, we’re told, the US should invade other countries to force them to take? The defining element of that story is voting: Everyone gets a voice. That’s what makes us different, special and better. Is that ideal being subverted, or have we misunderstood it all along?

Ari Berman is national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, and author of a number of books, including Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America and, most recently, Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It, out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He joins us now by phone; welcome back to CounterSpin, Ari Berman.

Ari Berman: Hey Janine, thanks for having me back.

JJ: We’re on the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, often understood as a, or the, keystone civil rights law. We’ve seen the chipping away, the undermining, but this is my big question: How did we get here, such that in August 2025, we are in fear of losing it altogether?

AB: Yeah, well, it was a pretty somber 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, and there’s real questions about whether we’re going to be celebrating a 61st anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, let alone anniversaries after that, because the law has been repeatedly gutted by the Supreme Court through a series of decisions.

They have ruled that states that have a long history of discrimination, like Texas, no longer have to approve their voting changes with the federal government. That really opened up a floodgate to new voter suppression, new gerrymandering.

Then they’ve chipped away at the law in other respects. For example, they’ve made it much harder to strike down discriminatory voting laws. They’ve made it so that you can’t challenge partisan gerrymandering, no matter how blatant it is.

And now they are preparing to possibly strike down the ability to counteract racial gerrymandering as well, and that has given a green light to states like Texas to engage in voter suppression, to engage in new kinds of gerrymandering, and to not really feel like there’s going to be accountability from the courts or from the federal government, like there has in the past.

JJ: I would like to anchor us in the fact that the voting rights fight is not some sort of general, ephemeral thing: “Voting is good.” It’s really about Black people, and white supremacists’ unending attempts to keep Black people from being treated as people, including in our right to a political voice, right? That’s at the core of it.

AB: I mean, that’s certainly what it was about at the beginning. It was about the effort to end Jim Crow in the segregated South. It was about the effort to restore voting rights to people that have been disenfranchised for so many years. And in the decades since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, it’s enfranchised millions of people—not just Black Americans, but other minority groups, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans.

They’ve all been protected, and the voting rights of millions of people have been expanded because of the Voting Rights Act. And that’s really what’s under threat now, is that states feel free to do the kind of discriminatory actions that they might have not have gotten away with in the past.

For example, Texas has violated the Voting Rights Act in every single redistricting cycle. Its current redistricting maps, the ones that predated Donald Trump’s push for five seats, those are already being challenged as discriminatory under the Voting Rights Act by Black and Hispanic plaintiffs.

And now they’re trying to pick up five more seats, largely by going after districts represented by Black or Latino Democrats, or places where Black and Latino voters have influence. And so it’s really a full-on attack on the Voting Rights Act. And they’re betting, and perhaps not incorrectly, that a very extreme Supreme Court is going to let them get away with it if they succeed.

JJ: Just to lay it out briefly, what we’re talking about, and I think folks may think they know it, but maybe they don’t. It’s often presented as “voters are supposed to elect officials, and this is officials trying to choose their voters.” When we talk about redistricting, how do you explain that to someone who maybe doesn’t understand it?

AB: Yeah, the idea is that voters elect representatives to represent them, but the way that redistricting works, often, when redistricting becomes gerrymandering, what’s happened is districts are represented to boost one party or one interest at the expense of another, and elections are pretty much predetermined.

And I think what’s happening in Texas is even worse, because, even if there is gerrymandering, it usually happens once a decade, after the census comes out. Now they’re trying to re-gerrymander the state, because Texas is already gerrymandered.

And they’re not just doing it to prevent Texans from holding their representatives accountable. They’re trying to do it to prevent voters from holding Donald Trump accountable, which is the whole reason he’s pushing for this redistricting.

He doesn’t care about taking up five new Republican seats in Texas. The only reason why he wants to pick up five Republican seats is so that Democrats don’t take back the House and hold his administration accountable.

So this is why it has national significance, because what’s happening in Texas is going to affect the entire US House race, and that is something where every state’s redistricting process has an impact. But this kind of gerrymandering mid-decade is extremely unusual, and it’s even more unusual for the White House to be the one that’s precipitating it.

JJ: So to put it boldly, I mean, you’ve indicated it, but what happens? What can we imagine happening if the Voting Rights Act is essentially eviscerated? What will it change? How will things be different?

AB: I think it’s going to be a lot easier for states to discriminate against voters of color, to pass voting laws and redistricting maps that roll back protections for all voters. And so you’re going to see states enact new restrictions on voting. You’re going to see them enact more egregious gerrymanders.

They could very well roll back districts that are represented by Blacks or Latinos, that have been protected for 50 or 60 years. And it’s going to be reminiscent of things that were done in the pre–Voting Rights Act era, when you had widespread disenfranchisement in the Jim Crow South. I don’t think we’re going to go back to those days, but we’re going to go back to days when the federal courts, the federal government, they really didn’t have any checks on what states could or couldn’t do. And that’s why you had poll taxes and literacy tests and grandfather clauses and all-white primaries and all of those things.

And I think it’s been the mission of the conservative justices on the Supreme Court to roll back things like the Voting Rights Act for 30 or 40 years. John Roberts, for example, the chief justice, has been trying to weaken the Voting Rights Act since he was a young lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department.

So this is not a new fight for them, and they’ve been aggressive in doing this, in a series of phases. Every time they strike down one part of the Voting Rights Act, they say, “Oh, well, this other part’s left,” and then they go after that part. “Well, this part’s left,” and now it’s becoming a situation where there’s almost nothing left, and the almost nothing is on the verge of becoming nothing. And I think it’s going to be a very sad day for American democracy, if and when that happens.

JJ: Well, yeah, because as you point out, it’s been John Roberts’ mission over years. And it’s always been, and this is part of a bigger picture of the public opinion argument, it’s always been, “Well, we have bans on racial discrimination. We have laws against that. We’re not touching them. We’re just greenlighting the discrimination that happens every day in every way by saying any measure you might introduce to fight that is prohibited.” And it’s part of this unspoken, or sometimes spoken, notion that fighting racism against people of color is somehow anti-white; it’s somehow discriminatory against white people to have equity.

AB: Exactly, and that’s what happened in the Louisiana redistricting case, which is the one where they could further gut the Voting Rights Act, and perhaps kill it once and for all, where they were going to decide this question of whether Louisiana should have drawn a second majority Black district. That seemed relatively uncontroversial, because the Supreme Court said Alabama should do that. So then Louisiana followed, and then a group of “non-African-American plaintiffs” challenged the map, and basically said it was discriminatory against white people, even though white people controlled every single district in Louisiana except for one.

And really what it is, it’s an effort to redefine the entire battle after the Civil War, and the entire battle of Reconstruction, which was meant to give rights to formerly enslaved people that had been denied for so many years. And now they’re arguing that violates the 14th and 15th amendments, that drawing districts that allow formerly enslaved people to elect the candidates of their choice violates the 14th and 50th amendments. It’s a totally ahistorical argument, but they have done this in a lot of different areas. Now they’re doing the Voting Rights Act.

And so it’s really an attempt, not just to take us back to the pre-Voting Rights era, but in many ways, it’s an attempt to rewrite Reconstruction, to take us back to the pre-Reconstruction era itself.

This is part of a larger project here, that has gone on in a lot of different ways, but the Voting Rights Act has remained a consistent target, because the Voting Rights Act has prevented states that want to discriminate, like Texas, that have tried to discriminate over a 60-year period. It has been very effective until recently at preventing them from doing so.

JJ: I wish folks would see it or understand it as part of that larger picture. If you’re used to superiority, then equity is a downgrade, right? And that’s a larger conversation that we have to have societally.

But on voting rights, I feel like everyone, including media, but everyone should understand that this is tied to every issue you care about. If you don’t want the US to fund genocide in Gaza, for example, well, you should be able to vote in politicians that reflect that view, particularly when it is a widely shared view. I do understand the exhaustion with electoral politics, but I think that’s because it doesn’t deliver, and I worry that some folks have abandoned the field.

AB: For sure, and I think this kind of thing, politicians predetermining election outcomes, is the very kind of thing that breeds more distrust in the political process, and distrust in institutions, and then they disconnect from the political process of institutions altogether.

I would totally understand why people say, “Hey, why should we vote if elections are predetermined. What’s the point?” I hope that people don’t take that away, but I certainly think that may be part of why they’re doing this.

As you said, this is part of the bigger fight, but what I worry about is that the fight over redistricting in Texas is thought of as, “Oh, this is just politics,” right? And then if Democrats respond, they’ll say, “Oh, the Democrats are just doing it too. This is just a political fight between Texas and California,” without acknowledging, first off, the Republicans started this fight, and they’ve been much more aggressive about gerrymandering than the Democrats.

But even leave that aside, this is about a bigger project to repeal 60 years of the Voting Rights Act, and an even bigger project than that, to repeal, essentially, what happened during Reconstruction, and the fact that equality was written into the Constitution. This is much bigger than just a political skirmish. And so I think that it’s important to have that context, because that context is often what’s missing when this conversation happens. And to understand this is part of a larger authoritarian playbook that is being used by the president, to essentially turn representative democracy into something that only benefits him or his party, and to weaponize every aspect of the federal government, and now, by extension, every aspect of state government, to try to protect Trump, or to try to protect the interests that protect Trump.

JJ: Let’s talk about fightback. Legislatively, I see this John Lewis Voting Rights Act. What else is afoot? Because, obviously, this is not going unnoticed, but the question is, what tools do we have in hand? So what do you see, first of all maybe at the legislative level, but what do you see in terms of resistance?

AB: The thing that worries me is that the resistance is basically Democrats saying, “Well, we’re going to gerrymander too.” And I totally understand why they’re doing it, because it’s unfair for one party to play by one set of rules and the other party to play by a different set of rules. But ultimately, a race to the bottom for gerrymandering, the people that are going to suffer are the voters themselves.

And so I think what has to happen is what happened previously, which is Democrats tried to pass federal legislation that would ban this kind of partisan gerrymandering. They almost succeeded in doing so in 2021, 2022, with the Freedom to Vote Act. Everyone but three Democrats supported it, every Republican opposed it.

And this is a case in point of why we need federal legislation, because right now, if one state does something, other states tend to follow along. You also have Florida and Ohio and Missouri and Indiana saying they might do this kind of gerrymandering, along with Texas, and you have other states, like California and New York and Illinois, saying, “Well, we’re going to fight back. We’re going to do our own kind of gerrymandering.” And that’s the exact situation that Democrats wanted to prevent from happening.

So I think we definitely need new federal legislation, but this is not going to be a short-term fix. I mean, no legislation is going to be passed as long as Trump is president. You’re going to have a conservative Supreme Court that will weigh in on the legality of whatever Congress does. So we need a broader, longer-term strategy here for how to pass legislation, how to change the course, and how to get public consciousness to rise on this issue.

I think one of the things that’s been good about Texas is it’s attracting a lot of attention from people who are angry about gerrymandering and saying, “What can we do about the problem?” But the solution can’t just be more gerrymandering to counteract gerrymandering. That is, ultimately, not going to be a long-term solution that is good for Democrats or good for democracy.

JJ: Big picture, I also worry that what people think we need to “get back to,” as though there were some halcyon days of democracy, is a fuzzy and flawed image. And then we really need the energy that it takes to think about what we can move forward to, what we can create, the idea that’s so liberating and inspiring to many of us, and then more of us who don’t have a choice, the present is just untenable.

But I worry that there’s a huge admixture of people who think, “Ugh, meetings? Can’t I just push a button and fix it?” But there’s no GoFundMe for democratic aspirations. We have to do more.

AB: For sure. Some of these things, there’s a short-term and a long-term component. And the short-term component is obviously organizing resistance elections. And the longer-term component is changing some of these institutional structures, whether it’s laws that are passed by Congress or the composition of the courts or things like that. And that’s a longer-term fight.

And I think sometimes it’s so easy to get caught up in resisting whatever Trump does in a given day, which just can be so overwhelming, it’s easy to lose track of that longer-term picture. Which gets back to this original conversation of, how do we end up like this in the first place?

JJ: Right. Well, here’s my final, last question. What would you like to see news media do more of, or do less of, in their coverage of this set of issues?

AB: I think covering the larger context is really important. This fight over gerrymandering did not begin this summer; there’s much deeper roots to it. And then again, just not both-sidesing the issue, not making false equivalence that, “OK, well, Texas is doing it and now California is doing it. So this is just how politics works.”

And this is a deeply abnormal fight. It’s deeply abnormal to have mid-decade gerrymandering. It’s deeply abnormal to have the president push for that kind of gerrymandering. It’s deeply abnormal that the Supreme Court is on the verge of gutting the crowning achievement of the Voting Rights Act.

None of this is normal, and Democrats have been put in an unenviable position, which Trump often does to people, of having to play in the gutter. But, ultimately, this is part of the broader Republican authoritarian takeover. And I would like to see that larger, that bigger picture, present in more of the stories about this.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with reporter and author Ari Berman. You can find his work at MotherJones.com. The latest book is Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It. It’s out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Ari Berman, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AB: Thanks so much, Janine.

 

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.