This Is Not Partisan Polarization

I'm a Supreme Court watcher, but not professionally, and there's a lot going on these days. So I wasn't very aware of the major voting rights case, Louisiana v. Callais, argued six months ago, that was announced today.

Attorney Imani Gandy @angryblacklady.blacksky.app described it this way half a year ago:

Just so everyone is clear, the main issue in the Supreme Court voting rights case tomorrow is whether it's racist against white people to enforce the Voting Rights Act. I'm dead serious. We live in incredibly stupid times.

As anyone knows who has followed voting rights, John Roberts has had it in for the VRA his entire career. (See Ari Berman's book Give Us the Ballot, for instance.) When the Supreme Court killed pre-clearance back in 2013, the writing was on the wall, but they danced around the issue, pretending they wouldn't go the rest of the way, biding their time, waiting for the majority they needed.

Now is the time.

Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed BlueSky acccount.

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SCOTUS rules that intentional discrimination required to find race discrimination under VRA, which is nearly impossible to prove. This will weaken VRA to point of irrelevance. Though Alito wrote majority opinion John Roberts has been trying to gut VRA for 40+ years since he worked in Reagan DOJ
Ari Berman

It's so disheartening watching this court carry out the explicit project of white supremacy so blatantly while gaslighting the public to say it's trying to stop discrimination. They're dismantling every major legacy of the civil rights movement. We need to reform this court.
Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net

John Roberts has been trying to kill Voting Rights Act since he was young lawyer in Reagan DOJ in early 1980s. That's most important context for today's Callais decision. Roberts Court has now issued 3 major decisions gutting VRA, turning law into dead letter:


Ari Berman

Supreme Court rules Black voters had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.
Victor Ray

The Voting Rights Act is essentially dead and it’s quite possible that we will, like when a similar SCOTUS gutted civil rights at the fall of Reconstruction, see a disappearance of much of the Black congressional representation, especially in the most heavily Black states, which are in the South.
Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones.bsky.social

If you want a picture of the Republican future, imagine a bench full of white men— and men who wish they were white — declaring in law that only They know what the Real racism is, and it's when they, personally, have to acknowledge any systemic inequalities which have disproportionately benefited them.
Dr. Damien P. Williams @wolvendamien.bsky.social

I say it again and again: Because we don’t learn the real history of this country, we do not understand what this country is capable of. After 1870, 22 Black men served in Congress. By 1901, because of racist SCOTUS rulings, electoral coups and election cheating and violence, there were none.
Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones.bsky.social

Supreme Court Overturns ‘Right v. Wrong’


The Onion

Headlines saying this Supreme Court decision "curtails the use of race" in voting are going to make me have a stroke. It empowers white supremacy. It does not curtail the use of race.
Victor Ray

Given the argument that ended the VRA, I think it’s time liberals did some self reflection about the now decades long obsession with partisan polarization as the problem, as opposed to authoritarianism, extremism, oligarchy, and racism.
Jake Grumbach

technically, the Supreme Court decision legally blesses the use of race as a reasonable proxy for political leanings. it absolutely does not curtail the use of race – it permits it
Ann M. Lipton

Small point but today illustrates pretty clearly why they were so obsessed with banning critical race theory. Derrick Bell’s work predicts this type of regression on rights.
Victor Ray

I’m seeing people struggle to understand today’s SCOTUS ruling. That’s because the conservative justices took a law explicitly created for equity and said, “What if we just claimed it meant the opposite thing?” This is the judiciary’s playbook for dismantling every law from the civil rights era. Every decision like this is genuinely mind boggling if you attempt to understand it from a place of good faith. Because these are extremely bad faith interpretations.
Nicole Bedera

One of the most clarifying passages I've ever read on what "polarization" actually means in the U.S.":


Neil Lewis, Jr.

The pro-Confederate movement has been operating in plain sight because we’ve misunderstood America to be a democracy fending off attempts at fascism, instead of what it is and always has been — a fascist state fending off attempts at democracy.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social