from WNYC studios. I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Friday, May 24th.

Where's the line between drawing congressional district lines to help your party and drawing those lines to help your

race. The Voting Rights Act is supposed to ensure that black voters are not all, you know,

clumped together in a few congressional districts for the purpose of diluting black voting power.

But yesterday, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in a case involving South Carolina's congressional districts

that allowed the state to basically do exactly that.

The complication, if black voters overwhelmingly go for Democrats and white voters for Republicans,

as is mostly the case in South Carolina, how do you tell the difference between

racial and partisan gerrymandering? And by the way, why is partisan gerrymandering acceptable either?

So we'll talk about yesterday's ruling and take a deeper dive into drawing congressional lines

generally with the divide in the House so very narrow now within just a few

seats, redistricting could make the difference in which party wields all that majority power

next year. With us now is Ari Berman, National Voting Rights Correspondent for Mother Jones Magazine.

He's made it his life's work to study and report

on questions like these. His influential book, Give Us the Ballot, the Modern Struggle for

Voting Rights in America, is nearing 10 years in print. He also has a new book, Minority Rule,

the right-wing attack on the will of the people and the fight to resist it.

And yes, that includes the connection between the political forces that gave us January 6th

and the forces that gave us rulings like yesterday's from the Supreme Court.

Ari, nice to have you on again. Welcome back to WNYC.

Hey, Brian. Great to talk to you again. Thank you.

Let's start with a basic definition.

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