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Ron Brownstein

Brownstein's main concentration is on how Abbott and other southern governors have been usurping the federal government's powers in the area of immigration, based, as usual with such conservative projects, on theories based on the Constitution's saying what it doesn't say. But this kind of thing isn't limited to one issue or one state. Take what's going on in Alabama. Back in June, in a surprise ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that Alabama's new voting maps violated what's left of the Voting Rights Act. In its majority opinion, the Court strongly advised that the legislature draw up a new map with two majority-black congressional districts. The legislature went back, pondered the question, and promptly blew off the Supreme Court entirely, voting through a new map with one majority-black congressional district. From the Washington Post:

What the new map does is drain some black voters out of the pre-existing majority-black district into another pre-existing district that will now be 40 percent black, which is not a majority, even by Alabama math. But the Republicans are hanging their defiance on the fact that the Supreme Court had mandated a second majority-black district "or something quite close to it." (You have to love how the carefully manufactured conservative majority equivocates just enough to let the vote-suppressors get tricky.) The Democrats, of course, are planning another lawsuit.

Sooner or later, this Democratic administration is going to face a situation like the one Eisenhower had in Little Rock in 1957 and like the one Kennedy faced in Mississippi in 1962. The national government cannot stand idly by while a bunch of tinhorns take us all back to the Articles of Confederation, if not to the Confederate States of America. There will be hell to pay, but the price will be worth it.

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.

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Greg Abbott and Republican Governors Are Reigniting the ... - Esquire