Do watch this bit from Alex Wagner’s show on MSNBC last night:
Here’s more from Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern at Slate:
Alito says, in short, that courts should pretty much never find that state legislatures acted with racist intent, because they are owed this presumption of good faith that cuts in their favor. And he just makes up the reasons why—he’s just pulling it out of his pocket. Alito says: First, state legislators are bound by an oath to the Constitution, and we should assume they’re following that oath. Second, when we accuse state legislators of doing race-based redistricting, we’re accusing them of “offensive and demeaning conduct” that bears a “resemblance to political apartheid,” and “we should not be quick to hurl such accusations at the political branches.” Finally, he says, we should be wary of voting rights plaintiffs “who seek to transform federal courts into weapons of political warfare” through racial gerrymandering claims.
Whoever could imagine the state legislature of South Carolina enacting anything racist, right? Or, in other words, Sam Alito must be living on another planet, because he doesn’t seem to get this one.
This case should have been really easy because the Supreme Court decided a similar one in 2017: Cooper v. Harris, which involved a North Carolina congressional district. The court, which looked very different in 2017, struck down the district. And in her majority opinion, Justice Elena Kagan rejected all the garbage that Alito shoveled into the law on Thursday. She wrote that plaintiffs don’t have to present a specific kind of evidence and appeals courts should defer to district courts’ findings, not go over them with a super-skeptical eye.
Here, rather than acknowledging that he’s overturning Cooper v. Harris, Alito accuses Kagan of misreading her own opinion from just seven years ago. He says she was talking about “an imaginary version” of Cooper v. Harris—which, I cannot stress enough, is a decision that she herself wrote. It is a noxious mix of mansplaining and gaslighting for Alito to overrule this precedent without admitting it, then tell the author of the precedent that she misunderstood the meaning of the opinion that she wrote.
As much as I’d love to smack Alito around with a blunt object, I do not advocate doing such things. Violence is wrong. I just want Alito removed from the court and banished from politice society. Maybe even deported. He should just go away.
Sometimes when you’re in dissent, you try to make the best of the majority opinion: You can suggest that there are still ways around the new blockade, other approaches or theories or methods that might get around the majority’s roadblock. But here, Kagan gives it to us straight. As she puts it, the majority tells states to “go right ahead” and draw racial gerrymanders because “it will be easy enough to cover your tracks in the end.” If this is now the law, there is really no law against racial gerrymandering. The equal protection clause has been gutted. The post–Civil War amendments no longer have any meaningful application to racial gerrymandering.
It’s been 154 or so years since the 15th Amendment gave Black men the right to vote, and White racists are still pushing back any way they can think of. The only thing that’s changed is that the White racists have to frame their arguments as not being racist.
And then there’s Clarence Thomas … This is Mark Josephe Stern:
And yet, as bad as Alito’s opinion was, it didn’t go far enough for Justice Clarence Thomas, who penned a solo concurrence demanding a radical move: The Supreme Court, he argued, should overrule every precedent that limits gerrymandering—including the landmark cases establishing “one person, one vote”—because it has no constitutional power to redraw maps in the first place. And he places much of the blame for the court’s allegedly illegitimate intrusion into redistricting on a surprising culprit: Brown v. Board of Education.
Brown was, of course, the 1954 decision holding that racial segregation in public education violates the equal protection clause. Many of us celebrated its 70th anniversary just last week. But Brown has always had its detractors, and Thomas has long been one of them. He has written that the decision rested on a “great flaw” by focusing on the stigma that Jim Crow inflicted on schoolchildren. He rejectedBrown’s assertion that Black children suffered constitutional harm when denied access to integrated education. And he condemned the court’s ongoing efforts to remedy decades of segregation by integrating public school systems by judicial decree, decrying these integration efforts as “predicated on black inferiority.”
Again, what planet does this man live on? It can’t be this one.
In other news: “The International Court of Justice on Friday ordered Israel to immediately halt its military assault on Rafah, the city in southern Gaza where more than 1 million people had sought refuge in dire conditions.” This is the UN’s highest court. Good luck with that.
Bibi better hurry up and get to the US before he has an international warrant out for his arrest. The US is not an enforcing member of the World Court but he might have an emergency landing at one that is. It is good to see the United Nations is not in conflict with the World Court. Bibi is trying to come to help Trump beat Biden you know, as those International Right/Reich leaders do stick together. Did not western civilization try for a Holy Roman Empire that ended up being none of the above at one time. How many times does a Theocracy have to fail before people quit on that idea. Even Iran, with all that oil money, is having a hard time with its version.
"Bibi is trying to come to help Trump beat Biden you know"
Your right and that damn fool Chuck Schumer is part of the delegation inviting him.
"Schumer has said he’ll join the invitation because the U.S.-Israel relationship “transcends” any one leader"
Thomas and Alito are horrid but they need the agreement of three other justices to pervert the Constitution. The actual threat is that they will be replaced by younger and even more obscene versions of the American fascist right if Trump wins.
I remember this was my main argument in 2016 in the Clinton v Trump argument, Yes HRC is/was corrupt (and barely legal) but there was a vacancy that on the USSC that either Clinton or Trump would make. It turned into THREE appointments. IMO, progressives who could not stand the stench of HRC created the court we have.
The "good" news about their demonstrated aversion to post-depression 20th Century democracy is that it might motivate Democrats to pack the court as soon as we have the majorities in the House and Senate to pass a law to add two Justices to the bench or four. My gut tells me this will be 2026. If we do bump up the size of the court, Democrats need to hold either the WH or the House or the Senate for a long time or the GOP will roar back with the same stunt.
But if Trump is defeated, the GOP is going to form a circular firing squad. Perhaps more accurately, they will participate in the largest cage match to the death of all time. The GOP as it exists has no interest in democracy, if you define democracy as rule by the will of the majority. Right now, they want to take power. Push them into a minority status for a few election cycles and they will want to share power (and hopefully agree to play nice.)
Today, quite independently of each other, my daughter and my wife broached the subject of working (my daughter) outside of the US and moving out of the US (my wife.) Kathy has one more year of college and who knows where there may be an opportunity. I'm too old to pick up and start over in a new country. I may die in one of the gulags that gulag anticipated might crop up.
Democracy can work – we have to exclude people from leadership positions in our Democracy if they are antagonists of Democracy. After the Civil War, we excluded Cobfederate leaders from positions of power. After WWII, Germany was restored to self rule that excluded Nazis. This is not a new concept. Anti-democratic forces have brought the US to her knees. I have not considered the details of what I'm proposing but we've waited too long to mete out penalties for supporting insurrection.
Please elaborate on the "HRC stench"
A fair question. Rather than bore anyone with my poorly worded opinions, I will point you to an article everyone here should read. It's possibly the best primer on political corruption in a short read that you will find. The author is a scholar, a lawyer, an activist who shows up and marches, and an expert on ethics. He teaches ethics to professors at Harvard in other disciplines. The flip side of ethics is corruption.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/05/could-hillary-clinton-be-the-champion-campaign-finance-reform-needs/394238/
I've had Crunchwraps more supreme than this court.
A stack of corrupt traitor hacks shoving their whims into law.
If you think the SCOTUS is bad now, think what it would be like after a Trump re-election. Catastrophic might be too weak of a word.
It's easy to understand Sammy di Puzzi Alito and GinniClarence Thomas evil when you understand they see themselves as Arch-Bishops of America and are above petty partisan politics. They are the truth and the way and none can come to the Constitution yet through them.
Therefore, they <I>prima facia</I> can not be corrupt or unethical and because their position in the Government are eternal instead of at the whim of the maddening crowds and fickle electorate they are the above all.
So, like a totally perverted form of elitism? The supremacy of the most corrupt with a pathological god complex? That could be beyond reactionary. We may need a new category.
They are the truth and the way and none can come to the Constitution yet through them.
Amen brother, speak it out!