Jamelle Bouie is one of the most incisive and profound commentators on the sociopolitics of America, bringing historical understanding, philosophical perspicacity, and clear vision to bear on any number of topics. His newsletter from a couple of days ago on the Supreme Court’s egregious and mendacious gutting of the Voting Rights Act is a case in point: it is concise and powerful, and he packs a lot of information and ideas into a mere 900 words. It is a must-read.

Against the idea implicit (and sometimes explicit) in the Court majority’s opinion that the VRA was somehow a “martial settlement imposed on the states of the former Confederacy,” he says:

It was, instead, an achievement of the most effective social movement of the postwar United States. The Voting Rights Act revitalized American democracy and stands as one of its great achievements.

The VRA was the product of and sustained by what Bouie calls “democratic energy” — I love that term and hope to continue to use it! It was generated out of the massive Civil Rights Movement, “signed into law by a president who had won election in one of the largest landslides in American history. It was subsequently reauthorized by Congress, after Congress, after Congress, after Congress.”

He goes on:

The Voting Rights Act was an attempt by the people of the United States, affirmed across two generations of voters and lawmakers, to make good the 15th Amendment to the Constitution — itself the hard fought product of war and reconstruction.

Against this we now have “an arrogant and reactionary juristocracy” that is “wielding a cramped and parochial vision of the Constitution against American democracy, rather than treating the Constitution as a tool for realizing our democratic aspirations.”

And of course, the juristocracy is not alone. The Trump Regime (Trumpsreich?) is hell bent on the same ends.

We fought a civil war to correct one of the fatal antidemocratic flaws in the Constitution. We the people must now fight to make sure that the Constitution is indeed ours. Democratic energy must be our energy.