Republicans’ redistricting maps are motivated entirely by race – not politics

The Democratic representativeTerri Sewell of Alabama at an event to call on the US Senate to pass voting rights legislation, on Capitol Hill this month. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA

Although the phrase “All politics is local” is usually attributed to Tip O’Neill Jr, a former speaker of the US House of Representatives, the aphorism probably originated in the February 1932 Associated Press column “Politics at Random”, when the Washington bureau chief, Byron Price, wrote: “All politics is local politics.” As valid as Price’s summarization of inside-the-Beltway politics may be, there is probably a more accurate way to describe the All American sport of civic power-brokering:

All politics is racial.