Eric Holder on SCOTUS decision that could reduce Black congressional representation

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Louisiana is just one front in a national fight over voting maps. The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, or NDRC, leads the Democratic Party’s strategy. Former Attorney General Eric Holder has been the group’s chairman since it was launched soon after the 2016 election of Donald Trump, and he’s on the line with us now. Good morning.

ERIC HOLDER: Good morning.

MARTIN: So as we just heard, lawmakers in Louisiana are redrawing lines for primary elections that are already underway. Do we know how this will affect how voters’ ballots are counted? I mean, as Aubri just told us, that absentee ballots have already been sent out, and so presumably people have already sent them back.

HOLDER: Yeah. I mean, they’re in the process of trying to change the electoral system while voters are in the process of voting. The House – they’re trying to stop the votes for people who were running for the House, while at the same time, there’s a Senate race. There are other races for which their votes will still count. So it’s confusion, and it’s one of the reasons why we filed suit to say that you can’t do that, which the governor is trying to do by declaring a so-called emergency. That’s inconsistent with what the Supreme Court does under a thing called the Purcell doctrine, where you have a change in the electoral methods of doing things. And you – if it’s too close to an election, you don’t put it into effect until after the election has occurred. That’s what should happen here.

MARTIN: I was going to ask, what remedy are you seeking in this lawsuit?

HOLDER: Well, to simply, you know, put off that – the changes that I suspect were going to have to be made until after this election, put them into effect with regard to the House for the 2028 election, which is consistent, again, with what the Supreme Court has done in many other states.

MARTIN: Are you surprised that the court – the same court – I’m just talking about Alabama for a minute – the same court that ordered them to draw a new district in 2023 is now saying that – well, at least in Louisiana case – that these maps are no longer viable or that these maps are unconstitutional. I mean, does that surprise you? It’s the same court.

HOLDER: Yeah. Well, you know, it’s interesting. I mean, I expected the result that we got in the Cali case, the Louisiana case, but it is inconsistent with what this very same court did three years ago when it looked at maps in Alabama. I mean, again, same court, same issue, same justices. And they said at that point that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was still viable, still strong. And on that basis, ordered Alabama to redraw its district. And it was the Alabama case that led to the redrawing of the lines in Louisiana. So what the court is doing three years later, same issue is inconsistent. So how they got to this inconsistent result is a little baffling.

MARTIN: So, I mean, I think that the – I think most people would agree that this decision is expected to lead even to more gerrymandering. Your organization says that Democratic-led states need to keep up with Republican-led efforts, which is what we’ve seen happen in Virginia and California. Where do you see this going? Is there any way that this cycle ends?

HOLDER: Well, this is a race to the bottom, and it’s something that is inconsistent with what we’ve been trying to do with the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, but once Donald Trump told the Republicans in Texas to give him five additional House seats because he said as he said, he was entitled to them, we had to make a decision. Are we simply going to do nothing, or are we going to respond to that which they’ve done? And so we have had to do what we did in California and in Virginia, but we’ve done it very differently in the sense that we have put it before the people of those states to allow them to decide whether or not they wanted to do this mid-cycle redistricting, and they voted yes in California, voted yes in Virginia, as opposed to what happened in Texas, and other places where Republicans have done it, it was simply imposed upon the voter by Republican legislatures.

MARTIN: So what happens now, though? Are there other states or places where you can implement this strategy? I mean, it’s getting late.

HOLDER: I mean, there are other states that we can look at. We know that the Republicans are certainly looking at other states. They want to do the same thing in Florida that they’ve done in Texas and that they’ve done in North Carolina and that they’ve done in Missouri. And so, you know, we’ll look to other states to see if it’s possible to respond. We simply want to have a system where the voters are choosing their elected officials, as opposed to politicians choosing who their voters are. And that’s what the Republicans are trying to do. They have made a determination to try to entrench minority rule by both restricting the vote, by drawing unfair maps and then removing legal pathways to fight back.

MARTIN: So, you know, we’ve been crunching numbers over the weekend, as you might imagine, and an NPR analysis found that some 15 Black represented congressional districts may be eliminated after the Supreme Court ruling. What’s the plan there?

HOLDER: Well, as our numbers show, anywhere from 12 to 19 seats in the South, majority-minority opportunity zones are at risk. And so we will try to use all the mechanisms that we can, turning out the vote. You know, the 14th Amendment still bans racial discrimination in voting. We’ll look to state courts. We have filed a lawsuit already against what Louisiana is trying to do in the Louisiana state courts. We’ll do whatever it is that we possibly can. But one of the things that I think we really have to focus on is galvanizing people to understand that power still resides in the people of this country and that if there is a movement against that which the Supreme Court is apparently sanctioning, we can still, I think, come out ahead. It’s going to be a rough few years, but I’m actually confident that a galvanized American people – a focused American people – can right the system. And then ultimately, it’s going to be Congress that’s going to have to pass laws to ban partisan and racial gerrymandering. And that ultimately is the solution.

MARTIN: But, you know, more than 60 House seats by our count are represented by Black members. But by our count, only – I mean, a minority of them are actually majority-Black districts, only seven. And 18 have districts where a plurality of residents are Black. Half of those are in the South. I mean, haven’t Black candidates shown that they can be competitive in districts that aren’t majority-minority? So if that – if that’s the case, then why do you and other analysts consider this such an emergency when it comes to Black representation?

HOLDER: Yeah. We have certainly seen African American candidates be successful in districts who are not majority African American voters. But the reality – all the numbers that have been crunched by both sides show that anywhere, as I said, from 12 to 20 seats, and those are seats in the South, could be changed by this Supreme Court decision, and then by the actions of state officials like Governor Landry in Louisiana. I saw a post by President Trump where he said that we have to go ahead – he says we have to go ahead with what we’re doing because 20 seats are at risk. And so, yeah, you can crunch the numbers, but at the end of the day, you put at risk, as a result of this Supreme Court decision, a really substantial number of seats now held by African Americans, and you deny to African Americans in those states the ability for them to express themselves politically.

MARTIN: What about state legislatures? Are state legislative districts also what you’re concerned about?

HOLDER: Excellent question because this is not simply something that has an impact on the House of Representatives. It also affects state legislatures. It also affects city councils, county officials. Every level of voting is impacted by this decision by the Supreme Court. So it’s not only the United States House of Representatives. It will have impacts in state elections as well.

MARTIN: That is the former Attorney General Eric Holder. He’s now chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. Mr. Holder, thanks so much for joining us once again.

HOLDER: Thanks for having me.

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