justsayin59

Here's another in an occasional series of posts about corporations putting profits ahead of safety and resultant deaths. This is the story of how Union Carbide killed an estimated 700 Blacks in West Virginia in the early 1930s. Nobody was ever even charged with a crime, much less went to prison.

Natalie Hausmann at Democracy Docket:

California passed its statewide Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 2002. Not many followed suit. But over two decades later, states are revisiting the idea with urgency. A dozen states have now passed VRAs, with half enacting the legislation under the second Trump administration. And in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that gutted Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, a flurry of states are passing their own versions of the legislation. Most recently, Delaware’s General Assembly passed its state VRA to fight suppressive voting measures and reinstate previously guaranteed federal guardrails.

In Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court ruled against a court-ordered congressional map establishing two majority-Black districts because it said the state could not use race to redistrict for electoral representation.  The ultra-conservative court also now requires proof of intentional discrimination, meaning pro-voting groups must present evidence that gerrymandered maps were drawn with a racially discriminatory motive. Voting rights and legal experts have rebuked the updated standard as nearly impossible to prove. State VRAs also reject this premise. “Voter suppression claims do not require evidence of intentional discrimination,” the text of the Delaware bill reads. 

[...] While 10 states already had their own protections, New Jersey joined Delaware as one of two states to pass statewide voting rights acts following the Callais decision.

[...] While there’s been increasing progress, not all state VRAs have survived legal scrutiny. Right-wing groups have wasted no time issuing challenges. The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a conservative legal group, sued to strike down Illinois’ Voting Rights Act in May. It pulled directly from the Supreme Court’s Callais decision to justify blocking the law. Governor JB Pritzker (D) formally asked the court to dismiss the case. PILF’s attack on state VRAs is just the latest in its anti-voting work.  And even in states without VRAs, GOP leaders have seized the moment to target states seeking to protect against voter suppression. Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) was outspoken in advocating for legislators to take action against blue maps “drawn or defended under the old regime” during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in May. Schmitt also called on Trump’s Department of Justice to “end illegal racially-gerrymanded districts,” to which DOJ head Harmeet Dhillon promptly responded.