Bolts.com makes a point I don’t think many of us have fully grasped — if the Supreme Court does what we think it will do when it finally guts the Voting Rights Act, the consequences won’t just be for the loss of Black representation in the U.S. House of Representatives. The negative consequences will be much more profound on the state and local level.

Here’s just one example:

It has been nearly two years since Fayette County officials shuttered the Bernard Community Center, in rural West Tennessee. The closure has devastated the mostly Black residents who frequented the space to host after-school tutoring sessions for students, breakfasts for senior citizens, movie nights, knitting classes, and private events like birthdays and memorial services. “​​People used it for 20 years to help each other, to help themselves, and now that is just gone. It has had an emotional toll on people,” says Christine Woods, who served on the community center’s board and fought its closure.

Since the center was shut down, Woods and other advocates have organized protests and pled at public meetings for Fayette County’s board of commissioners to reopen it. But Woods says nobody seems to be listening on the board, whose 19 members are all white despite the county’s large Black population.

“If we had different representation on the county commission board, we would have had someone to stand up and fight for us,” Woods told Bolts and MLK50. “They don’t have to be someone Black, just someone who cares about our community. Someone who can see things from our eyes and feel our pain. Someone who knows what this center means to us, who thinks we deserve to have it. Right now, I think no commissioner feels that way.”

The make-up of the Fayette County board is by design. The county in 2021 drew a map with no majority-Black district, even after the board’s own counsel advised that the plan illegally diluted the power of Black voters, who make up roughly a quarter of the population.

Black residents won a reprieve this year, after Woods and other residents joined with the local NAACP to sue Fayette County, claiming the map violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Under the threat of their lawsuit, which followed another complaint filed by the Department of Justice under President Joe Biden, county officials relented in July and adopted a revised map for the 2026 elections that includes three majority Black districts.

The new map could significantly boost Black representation in Fayette County next year, but those gains already feel fragile. The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to deliver a ruling in the coming months that could gut the VRA, threatening this county’s new districts and undermining similar challenges elsewhere.

That is, of course, the point. The Republicans (not just MAGA by any means) simply cannot live with the fact that they have to share any power with racial minorities (and Democrats more broadly).

Read the whole thing. It will break your heart. But then, what doesn’t these days?