The supreme court decision that effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act (VRA) “was red meat to the Republican legislators of the south” the US House representative Bennie Thompson said. Conservative lawmakers in Mississippi , where Thompson is both the state’s lone Black and only Democratic congressional representative, have used the opportunity to explicitly target him, threatening to redraw the second congressional district, that he represents. Federal protections, those initially stipulated by the VRA, prevented states from “bad behavior”, or methods that they previously used to suppress voters – such as, Thompson noted, instances in which Black voters were asked how many bubbles were in a bar of soap. With the supreme court’s new interpretation of section 2 in Louisiana v Callais, Thompson said that lawmakers could “create an opportunity for people to not be represented or vote for the candidate of their choice”.…