Jim Crow's Six-Decade Dream Comes True at The Supreme Court. Now What? (4/30/26)
Some early steps in the long fight ahead. Plus we have a nominee in Maine, May Day for those who can join and those who can't, Dems enable Republican ugliness and more
💬☎️ Text to help Mop Up Michigan take on corporate money in politics this November tonight at 5:30 PM ET or make calls to help flip seats on the Georgia Supreme Court at 6:30 PM ET 💬☎️
TOO LONG, DIDN’T READ
So much to do in the wake of Louisiana v. Callais, starting with supporting groups mobilizing people of color, winning legislative seats and pressuring Congress – plus a rapid response call at 8PM ET
We shut it down and hit the streets for May Day Strong tomorrow – help get folks activated, how to help if we can’t strike, and some flyers to hand out
Warrantless wiretapping hot potato thrown back to the Senate, Farm Bill moves forward with no restoration of SNAP… with the help of Democratic votes
Learn how to use the Right Question Institute’s Why Vote tool on May 5 or May 19
If you have questions, comments, and especially submissions for actions, please email us at roganslisttips@gmail.com!
A GOOD DAY FOR JIM CROW, A BAD DAY FOR MULTI-RACIAL DEMOCRACY
The white supremacist forces in America never accepted the victories of the civil rights movement as final. For six decades, they have been chipping away at the progress we made towards a true multi-racial democracy, with notable success at the Supreme Court under supposed institutionalist moderate John Roberts, and yesterday they made one of their longest-standing dreams real. A Samuel Alito-led 6-3 majority in Louisiana v. Callais effectively gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the central safeguard against racially discriminatory redistricting.
The right-wing plans to take advantage of this ruling and silence the voices of people of color in our government to the maximum extent possible are already in motion. Since we’re relatively deep into the primary season, most of the damage won’t take hold until 2028. But in Louisiana, Governor Jeff Landry is planning on attempting to delay the May 16th primaries to ensure the maps are redrawn by November.
The impact could be devastating. A Black Voters Matter-Fair Fight Action analysis found that up to 30% of the Congressional Black Caucus and 11% of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus might lose their seats with Section 2 eviscerated. At the state level, we could see as many as 140 Black or Hispanic-majority legislative districts disappear.
There is no easy path forward here, and rebuilding is going to be a struggle. The very tools we use to secure change are being taken away. As the NAACP Redistricting Project manager Stuart Naifeh said yesterday, this was a multi-generational fight for them, and it’s going to be a multi-generational fight for us too. We are going to need deep structural change for this hijacked Supreme Court and to our battered democracy, including adding justices and a national ban on racial and partisan gerrymandering. We’ll be talking more about how in the coming days and weeks, but the asks will be high commitment.
For today, here are some places we can start.
The entire purpose of this project is to ensure the votes of people of color can be suppressed or devalued. It would be a terrible mistake to concede that they’ve won and we can’t do anything about it. We need to redouble our support for the folks looking to get these communities out to the polls. 🙋🏾♀️ Let’s consider donating to and volunteering with organizations like Black Voters Matter, Fair Fight Action, the Texas Organizing Project and Voto Latino. 🙋🏻
As we’ve been painfully reminded over the last year, much of the fight over redrawing maps will play out at the state level, often in the legislature. One of the strongest weapons we still have available is passing state-level voting rights acts, which also requires us to pick up seats downballot. Winning these races has never been a high enough priority. That has to change. 🗳️ Let’s use tools like FlipSeats.org (via Jordan Zakarin) to help identify where we should focus, consider a donation to Every State Blue’s First in Line program (via Michele Hornish) to redirect funds to under-resourced races, and sign up to volunteer with States Win to make sure we’re doing the work to get out the vote in legislative elections. 🗳️
Ultimately, we are going to need to pass a new voting rights act, and it would be useful to make sure our members of Congress know that’s our minimal expectation. 🗣️ Let’s reach out to them today – we can find language and an email tool via Resistbot here, or text SIGN PLHKCU to 50409. 🗣️
🫱🏾🫲🏼 Finally, we can join Indivisible for a rapid response call tonight at 8PM ET, featuring experts from the NAACP and the ACLU, to talk about the work ahead. We can sign up here. 🫱🏻🫲🏿
And if we’ve got questions we want answered, we can direct them to the experts at Bolts Magazine here.
SOME LAST-CHANCE MAY DAY ACTIONS
At least 100,000 students are walking out with the Sunrise Movement. Teacher call outs are shutting down 21 school districts in North Carolina alone. We are reclaiming the disruptive, radical roots of May Day tomorrow – and reminding the authoritarians and the oligarchs that we have the power to not comply.
We’re less than 24 hours away from May Day Strong. Let’s make sure we’re getting everyone activated we can for this event. 📢 Rogan’s List has pulled together a full list of social media graphics, gifs and art to post, along with printable flyers to share and guidance for having one-on-one conversations with people in our lives about tomorrow’s shutdown and protests, here. Let’s put them to work! And we can find events near us to let folks know about on May Day’s site and on Mobilize. 📢
We know this is a step up in the level of engagement from previous mass protests, and not everyone is in a position to make the full no work, no school, no commerce commitment. If we’re not able to fully shut it down tomorrow, organizers are just asking that we do what we can, including helping spread the word online and in our networks, calling local media to push them to cover the protests and above all at least join us in not shopping and make sure we’re telling people about it by taking the pledge and sharing this image.
Lastly and least importantly: we can help bring more people onto the Rogan’s List team tomorrow! Find mini and full-pager flyers we can print and hand out here and here.
See everyone in the streets – and as always, send protest photos and sign pictures to roganslisttips@gmail.com!
SUSAN COLLINS CONCERN LEVEL: PROFOUND
Democrats have the political headwind behind them in these midterms, but they’re faced with a tough map to regain Senate control. If we are going to take the upper chamber, it is almost certainly going to require finally defeating Susan Collins in Maine. Our path to do so became clearer this morning, as Governor Janet Mills acknowledged her poor polling position and dropped out of the Democratic primary, securing the nomination for insurgent progressive candidate, veteran and oyster farmer Graham Platner. While Platner has been dogged by deeply troubling statements and actions in his past, his fresh, clear and uncompromising vision has clearly struck a chord with Mainers, and recent polls give him six- and nine-point leads over Collins. ☎️️ If we’ve had enough of Susan Collins furrowing her brow at Trump and then voting to enable him anyways, let’s get in the fight for Graham Platner. We can take phonebank shifts for him Tuesday and Friday evenings and Sunday afternoons here. ☎️
❎ We can also find more ways to help win these midterms in our regularly updated action page here. ❎
SO WHAT’S HAPPENING ON CAPITOL HILL?
The uncomplicated part: in a remarkable show of naivety, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) bought into the White House’s attempts to conciliate him by dropping the probe into Fed Chair Jerome Powell and voted to advance his replacement, allowing Kevin Warsh to get through the Senate Banking Committee. He will get a confirmation vote by the full Senate in early May.
Far twistier were things in the House, but the headline is that Speaker Mike Johnson managed to clear some of the logjam of his packed agenda, with entirely too much compliance from the other side of the aisle:
The House passed the budget resolution to allow them to move forward with a reconciliation bill funding ICE and CBP without restraints. The vote was 215-211, completely on party lines, with totally-not-a-Republican-now-honest Kevin Kiley (I-CA) voting present. BUT: Republicans now need to nail down exactly what’s going to do in that reconciliation bill, and whether they will include priorities beyond giving more money to Trump’s thugs, such as paying for Trump’s war on Iran.
They also may or may not vote on a bipartisan bill to fund the rest of the Department of Homeland Security today – they’re under pressure to do so with emergency funding to pay salaries running out, but many House Republicans remain unhappy with separating out ICE and CBP funding and don’t trust there will be enough votes to pass reconciliation.
The House passed a three-year extension of warrantless wiretapping authority under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, without adding warrant requirements or closing the data center loophole. The vote was 235-191, with 22 Republicans voting no while 42 Democrats led by ranking member on House Intelligence Jim Himes (D-CT) saved the surveillance state by voting yes. BUT: the only reason they were able to get enough GOP votes to move forward procedurally on backdoor searches was by agreeing to add a permanent ban on the Federal Reserve issuing a digital currency, a random right-wing obsession that Senate Republicans say will kill the bill in their chamber. The plan as of now is for the Senate to ram through a 45-day extension to buy them more time, but that would require unanimous buy-in from senators, and privacy advocate Ron Wyden is going to object.
The Farm Bill passed out of the House this morning. In a big victory for corporate accountability, they first voted to strip the Cancer Gag from it 280-142 but paired with some agreements on ethanol sales they managed to garner enough support to push it through. The final vote was 224-200, with three Republican nos and 14 Democrats voting yes, tacitly accepting devastating cuts to food assistance. (The bill has a few steps left, and changes are expected in the Senate, but righting this fundamental wrong is not on John Thune’s agenda.)
Their cuts to SNAP from the MAGA murder budget were the largest in its history - $186 billion. It’s one of the cruelest policy tradeoffs in recent memory: cutting food from the plates of children and families to pad the bank accounts of millionaires. 2.5 million people have already lost support while grocery prices rise and the economy tanks. We’re anticipating more than four million people, including more than one million, will ultimately take a hit. children SNAP is typically funded through the Farm Bill, giving them a second chance to reverse the damage… which the Republicans, of course, have not taken.
It’s a lot, and it’s incredibly frustrating to see so much damage enabled by a few dozen Democrats.
In short, our actions today:
🗣 Call our senators and tell them in no uncertain terms: we want an end to warrantless wiretapping and other attacks on our privacy enabled by Section 702, and they must vote no on the Farm Bill unless SNAP is restored. 🗣
️🗣️ Call our reps, especially if they’re among the Democrats who helped push through backdoor searches and surrendered on food assistance cuts, and let them know how we feel about their votes. We can find language from Jess Craven here and from the Food Research & Action Center here. ️ ️🗣️
LEARN A NEW WAY TO INCREASE VOTER ENGAGEMENT
The Right Question Institute has a “Why Vote?” tool to encourage low-income adults to go to the polls and vote for their interests. In May, RQI is hosting one-hour webinars to teach us how to use the tool to encourage voter engagement. Frontline workers at direct services organizations and agencies, instructors who work in adult and workforce education programs, educators who work with parents in lower-income communities, voter-engagement advocates, community leaders, and anyone interested in taking action to strengthen democracy are all invited to attend. 🎓 There will be two separate sessions—one on May 5 at 8PM ET, the other May 19 at 1PM ET. Let’s register for the one that best suits our schedule—and let’s spread the word. May 5; May 19. 🎓
👀 KEEPING AN EYE ON… 👀
NEWS: Florida legislature passes new congressional map, aiming to pick up four seats
Looking for ways to get engaged in the midterms? Here’s a full list! And here’s some ways to help flip two supreme court seats in Georgia!
We can’t let anyone forget the kids in Dilley - join the #ReadThemHome campaign and organize a stuffed animal drop-off May 20th
Call on the DNC to release the full results of their 2024 election autopsy
Public Citizen identifies 446 hospitals at risk thanks to the MAGA murder budget, let’s make sure folks in our community know we’re in danger and who’s to blame
Solidarity with striking workers in Independence as they enter Week 4 on the picket line
Impeach the supreme court….they are not upholding the constitution…they are stooges for djt-who is demented…..
Crazy calculation for FISA: protect national security interests or give the government more ways to trample on civil liberties. I’m not sure which is worse