The Civil Rights Inversion: Where Up is Down and Down is Up

That is the Republican mantra now.

Ever since the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, Republicans have been chipping away at them through court cases like Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Brnovich v. DNC (2021), and Wal-Mart v. Dukes (2011), which limited class-action lawsuits. They’ve found a champion in Trump.

61 Years After Bloody Sunday, We Are Entering a New Era of Voter Suppression

Two efforts underway threaten to erode the promise secured by the foot soldiers of Selma in 1965.

The Nation

Janai Nelson

March 9, 2026

As the writer Zora Neale Hurston eloquently observed, “There are years that ask questions, and there are years that answer.”

Nineteen sixty-five was one of those years that answered. And 2026 is shaping up to be its heir.

In 1965, a group of ordinary citizens stood on the doorstep of history. On one side, the brutal reality they had lived since the final days of Reconstruction, one of white hoods and open caskets, strange fruit and sundown towns. On the other was the promise of true equality, which had eluded them for so long.

[...]

Two consequential voting rights developments greet us this year: a seemingly innocuous change to Postal Service procedure that actually has massive ramifications for mail-in voting, and an imminent congressional vote on the so-called “SAVE America Act,” which passed the House last month and now heads to the Senate. Together, they threaten to erode the promise secured by the foot soldiers of Selma.

Despite its misleading name, the SAVE America Act is not about saving our elections. It’s about sabotaging them. The measure would require American citizens to show documents like a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. The problem: Nearly half of Americans don’t have a passport, and 69 million women could not use their birth certificate to prove their citizenship status because it doesn’t match their current legal name.

One of the things the SAVE Act does is require mail-in ballots to be delivered by Election Day; no ballots received after that date will be accepted... period. This becomes dangerous when paired with the recent USPS announcement stating they can't guarantee when or where mail will be postmarked. If ballots are misplaced behind a machine and not found until the next day, the attitude is simply: "Oh well!"

Now, Trump & Company have stood the entirety of civil rights legislation on its head. They are claiming that even court-ordered affirmative action is itself a form of discrimination. What we are seeing is a "complete inversion" of civil rights law. Up is down and down is up, like something out of the dystopian novel 1984.

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights writes,

January 20, 2025: President Trump issued an executive order that defines ‘sex’ in unscientific narrow binary terms, mandates that federal policies and documents align with this definition, and prohibits funding or promotion of so-called “gender ideology.” It also directs agencies to remove references to nonbinary people and prohibit recognition of gender identity differently from sex assigned at birth in a blatant attack on trans people. Many of the actions listed in this order would be in direct conflict with much of the Supreme Court’s opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County, binding precedent interpreting Title VII’s prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sex in the workplace. The order also calls on the Bureau of Prisons and the Department of Homeland Security to ignore the guidelines of the Prison Rape Elimination Act and enforce a blanket policy forcing transgender women into men’s prisons and detention centers against their will.

Plus, Trump and Company tore up a legal agreement on the protection of transgender students! PBS News reported,

The Education Department said Monday it has terminated agreements that previous administrations reached with five school districts and a college aimed at upholding rights and protections for transgender students.

The decision means the department will no longer play a role in enforcing those agreements, which called for schools to take steps to comply with federal civil rights law. The districts affected are Cape Henlopen School District in Delaware, Fife School District in Washington, Delaware Valley School District in Pennsylvania, and La Mesa-Spring Valley School District, Sacramento City Unified and Taft College in California.

In other words: "I'll see you in court!"

Ultimately, all the work that both parties in Congress and the presidency achieved decades ago is being torn asunder.