Ari Berman

speaker

360 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 8 Jul

Ari Berman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Fresh Air · A look at new barriers at the ballot box · 8 Jul 2026 podcast

All people do not have equal rights.

We are going back to a day in which white voters have more power than black voters in the South.

And that's the very kind of situation the Voting Rights Act was meant to rectify.

Well, what the Supreme Court argued was that you had to show intentional discrimination, which is very difficult in this day and age, to be able to show that the votes of black voters, for example, had been diluted.

Now, as you mentioned, Tanya, in Alabama, in the wake of the Kalei decision,

A federal court found that Alabama Republicans had intentionally discriminated against black voters by refusing to draw a second majority black district, even when the federal courts ordered Alabama Republicans to do so.

This came back to the Supreme Court in the wake of the Clay decision.

And the Supreme Court said that's not enough.

So they already, in the weeks after the Calais decision, went beyond what they said in Calais.

And they basically said that legislatures are entitled to what they called a presumption of good faith.

And that if you can say you're doing this for partisan reasons...

That's basically a get out of jail free card.

So all Republicans in Alabama or Louisiana or Mississippi or wherever it might be have to say is, yes, we diluted black voters power.

Yes, we got rid of a majority black district, but we just did it for partisan reasons.

We believe that Alabama is better served if we have an all Republican delegation.

It just so happens that that all Republican delegation, because of how racially polarized voting is in the South, is going to be all white.

The problem with that is that's the very thing that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was meant to stop.

It didn't matter what the reason was that you tried to eliminate a black member of Congress or tried to make it impossible for black people to be elected.

If that's what was happening, that was a violation of the Voting Rights Act.

And the Roberts Court has turned the Voting Rights Act on its head, and they've really turned the 14th and 15th Amendment off.

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