The Supreme Court Has Invented a Right to Discriminate

The overarching agenda of Project 2025, the Felon's regime, and the extremist majority on the United States Supreme Court ("SCOTUS") is to restore white supremacy and the primacy of right wing Christianity.  This past week's ruling by SCOTUS in favor of Alabama's redrawn congressional voting districts that erased a majority black district (in a state where 26% of the population is black) has in effect created a right to racial discrimination as longs a fig leaf of partisan purpose can be fabricated.  Meanwhile, the "Department of War" announced the reduction in the number of religious affiliation categories for service members from over 200 down to 31. While the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a/k/a Mormon church, is included as a religious category on the updated list, it is not included in the list of faiths labeled “Christian.” The take away is that the goal of evangelical "Christians", many of whom are blatantly racist, to have the right to discriminate against anyone they choose, be they black, gay, non-Christians, and even women is well on the way to fruition.  The situation ought to terrify thinking Americans because once the rights of others can be erased or marginalized, the rights of many are put at risk. One need to look at Nazi Germany to see how this can progress. A piece in The Atlantic looks at SCOTUS's frightening ruling. Here are excerpts:

This week, the Roberts Court made clear that when it comes to drawing congressional districts, Black voters have no rights that anyone is bound to respect.

For years, Alabama, where a quarter of the population is Black, had defied federal court orders, including one reaffirmed by the Supreme Court itself in 2023, to create a second majority- or plurality-Black congressional district. Alabama’s reasoning for not doing so was simple: Its Republican legislators didn’t want to, and they didn’t believe that the Roberts Court would make them. “The Supreme Court ruling was 5–4,” State House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter said about the 2023 decision. “So there’s just one judge that needed to see something different.”

The state was making a gamble that the Roberts Court was more partisan than sincere. And it paid off: On Tuesday, the Court allowed Alabama to proceed with a map that diminishes Black voting power to the advantage of Republicans. For all the Court’s pretenses—all of its insistence on the rule of law, precedent, and good faith—many critics and supporters of the Roberts Court see the institution as an appendage of the Republican Party.

“Alabama willfully drew a map that flouted the District Court’s preliminary injunction and hoped that this Court would eventually see things its way,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “After today, it is hard to call Alabama’s cynical gambit anything other than a success, and the Court’s rewarding of Alabama’s behavior anything other than a blow to the rule of law.”

The majority opinion was unsigned. In it, the judges argued that the lower court had “failed to follow our instruction” in ordering the creation of the new district. This was a reference to the April decision in Louisiana v. Callais, in which Justice Samuel Alito announced that “race and politics are so intertwined” that there are almost no circumstances under which the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition on racial discrimination in voting actually applies.

Now here was an example of exactly what Alito was talking about. “States are free to decide for themselves whether last-minute changes to an election are in their best interests,” the justices wrote this week. If a Republican legislature decides that a redistricting plan to suppress the power of Black voters is “in their best interests,” they may proceed.

The implications of this case go far beyond one congressional district in one state. In Callais, Alito issued a classic Alito disclaimer: insisting he was not doing the thing he was about to do. The Court, he wrote, was not effectively nullifying Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act when it determined that Louisiana drawing a second majority-Black district (out of six total, in a state that is one-third Black) was an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” This week’s ruling on Alabama makes explicit what was merely implied in Callais. The Court’s logic may apply only to districting for now—but there is no obvious reason to limit its application to that. The Roberts Court has replaced the Fifteenth Amendment’s ban on racial discrimination in voting with a right to engage in racial discrimination in voting.

Theoretically, Callais was a statutory case about the Voting Rights Act’s ban on voting provisions that have the purpose or effect of discriminating against Black voters. That test, adopted by Congress in the 1980s (and opposed by Chief Justice John Roberts when he was an attorney for the Reagan Justice Department), was meant to prevent discrimination by actors careful enough to hide their intent. In Callais, the Court ruled that discrimination was fine because Louisiana argued that its purpose was partisan and not racist.

But in the Alabama case, the federal-district-court panel, which included two Trump appointees, had already determined that lawmakers had intentionally discriminated against Black voters. . . . Alabama’s plan was “tainted by intentional race-based discrimination,” the district court found, and the legislature was attempting to “rob Black Alabamians of an equal opportunity under the law to elect candidates of their choice.”

Fortunately for those legislators, the justices were waiting to drive the getaway car. . . . This week’s decision is important because intentional discrimination is banned, not just by the Voting Rights Act, but by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. When the Roberts Court says that the lower court’s ruling “failed to follow our instruction,” it is referencing Alito’s argument that partisanship cannot be separated from race. Even if a court finds evidence of intentional discrimination, therefore, the Supreme Court may simply ignore it on the grounds that the discrimination in question is merely partisan and therefore acceptable. This turns Callais into something much broader than it purported to be: a finding that the Constitution permits not only unintentional racial discrimination but intentional racial discrimination, as long as there is also a partisan pretext for engaging in that discrimination.

The Court’s ruling amounts to a total inversion of the Civil War amendments, which make no such exceptions for racial discrimination in the name of partisanship. . . . . Race and partisanship were even more intertwined then than they are today, given that the Democrats were then the party of the defeated Confederates. If the Fifteenth Amendment did not bar partisan-motivated disenfranchisement, the amendment would not have changed anything at all. Indeed, the entire purpose of the amendments was to ensure that Black people could use the ballot as a means of self-defense against politicians who would deny them their basic, fundamental constitutional rights if they did not have to answer to them as a political constituency. The Roberts Court has thus rewritten the Civil War amendments to include a constitutional right to discriminate against Black people.

The Court has invented a right to discriminate—as long as you provide a political pretext—that not only does not exist in the Constitution, but is explicitly prohibited by the Constitution. . . . This logic would not have barred any of the Jim Crow voting devices that the Roberts Court frequently congratulates itself and the nation for overcoming. In the aftermath of Reconstruction, white-supremacist Democrats imposed superficially race-neutral requirements such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses. The approach taken by Alito and the Roberts Court would have found all of these measures constitutional.

[T]he Constitution has few defenses against a majority of justices willing to ignore it or twist it to its exact opposite purpose.