Additionally, if you want to talk about voter suppression, let's talk about why the Justice Department didn't bring charges against the New Black Panthers for voter intimidation in 2008, which was a far more egregious case of racial voter intimidation than is anything the State of Texas does with redistricting.
Are you really that fucking retarded? We have a couple black guys, doing something illegal, in one place.
vs
A system of gerrymandering such that the from redistricting alone, the GOP has a supermajority sufficient to change parliamentary rules and engage in further redistricting without ever having to consult a single member of the opposition party, and auto-override the veto of any democratic governor we might ever elect in a state wide vote. And they'll do it. A system of gerrymandering such that the voters in major urban areas are, if not technically disenfranchised, have their districts demographically swamped by rural hinterland such that their votes dont actually count for anything.
And that is just for the federal congressional delegation, in one state, and it is part of a larger strategy. In Ohio, the republicans won 52% of the vote, and 80% of congressional seats, in Pennsylvania, they won 49% of the vote, ans 72% of the seats, in Michigan, the GOP won 45.6% of the vote and 64% of the seats
Black voters used to block vote Republican the same way they now block vote Democrat. The switch seems to have coincided with the rise of the welfare state and the Democratic Party as its champion.
No Moron. It coincided with a major reshuffling of the US left-right spectrum that took place during the first half of the 20th century, culminating in party realignment in the 1960s through 1980s. This process took almost a hundred years and coincides more with a North/South split in the democratic party on social issues, and a Populist/Anti-Populist split in the Republican Party. These splits together created the New Deal coalition--an alliance between Intellectuals, Ethnic Minorities, Blue Collar Workers, and Farmers on the one hand, who accepted the legacy of the new deal, and regulation of the economy that had at one point been the primary bailywick of the progressive republicans of the Teddy Roosevelt Era. On the other hand, it created the Conservative Coalition--pro-business republicans and white southerners who rejected the New Deal, and the encroachment on States Rights it, and the Civil Rights movement entailed.
These coalitions initially transcended the original political parties, and eventually lead to a change in their fundamental natures. The Republicans of today are the party of Lincoln, Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt in name only, and actually have little to do politically or philosophically with the legacy of any of those presidents.