A former Trump administration official downplayed a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on voting rights but met pushback from his fellow panelists on CNN.
The conservative majority essentially gutted the Voting Rights Act's requirement that congressional districts be designed to give minority voters an opportunity to elect their own representatives, and former Donald Trump aide Mike Dubke told "CNN This Morning" that he agreed with the court's ruling.
"Let's be clear about what we're talking about: This is just another form of gerrymandering," Dubke said. "I mean, we've been talking about Texas and Virginia and California and that midterm gerrymandering, the Voting Rights Act, making race a primary issue of how you draw these districts, is just another form of gerrymandering. So to Justice [John] Roberts' point, a law that was written over 60 years ago, is it still necessary? We can have that argument, we should have that argument. But we've also got a broken system in which we are trying to gerrymander ourselves into majorities in the House of Representatives. It is the fox designing the henhouse."
Host Audie Cornish pushed back.
"But one of the things that's interesting about this ruling is they specifically say partisan reasons are okay, partisan reasons to protect incumbency, to protect parties is perfectly legal and fine," Cornish said. "So in a way, it doesn't alleviate what you say. It actually elevates the partisan reasoning."
Journalist Sara Fischer agreed.
"When I look at certain laws in the way that the Supreme Court has set precedents, for example, the standard of actual malice when it comes to defamation – that's something that I cover a lot – the wording here matters so much," Fischer said. "So the thought here that you need to prove intent is so, so, so hard for anybody to legally overcome, so just want to put that out there. In terms of the political and partisan thing, I think what they're trying to get at there is that is not going to violate the way that this law is being interpreted. What will violate the way that this law is being interpreted is if you are to make these decisions that are, you know, end up being discriminatory against race, and so essentially what they're saying is we're not ruling on whether or not this is a partisan problem. We're only ruling on this narrow thing. Yeah, now that the outcome means it's more partisan, that's a debate that we all are going to have to have as a society."
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