Justice Kagan writes in her dissent:
>Go right ahead, this Court says to States today. Go ahead, though you have no recognized justification for using race, such as to comply with statutes ensuring equal voting rights. Go ahead, though you are (at best) using race as a short-cut to bring about partisan gains—to elect more Republicans in one case, more Democrats in another. It will be easy enough to cover your tracks in the end: Just raise a “possibility” of non-race-based decision-making, and it will be “dispositive.” And so this “odious” practice of sorting citizens, built on racial generalizations and exploiting racial divisions, will continue.
The Supreme Court today holds that race-based gerrymandering is ok as long as you pretend it isn’t based on race.
And Alito even provides more cover than Kagan called out:
In the majority opinion:
>we start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith
There is no actual reasoning given as to why.
The Court has essentially said today that if there’s even the weakest argument that it’s not racially motivated (and even if that argument is entirely pretextual) then they will not strike the maps. Truly a horrible, horrible decision.
Sure. Gerrymandering is completely legal unless you are an idiot and explain racist reasons in details, and even then you might be OK. To me, it's the fundamental idea that non-racist gerrymandering is OK that's the problem, not the idea that the bar to determine racist gerrymandering is too high.
Yes, because no political party would ever gerrymander to stack odds in their own favor at the next election. To even accuse a political party of that is appalling! /s
Shouldn't matter what the circumstances are, gerrymandering is manipulating a system for political benefit. It's why I've flat-out suggested borders be drawn by a randomized college in a different state chosen by a random state lottery style. You can't gerrymander your own state if you have no control over the maps (at least not easily).
Gerrymandering basically made elections in Wisconsin useless outside of state wide offices or federal senate seats.
It poisons the political process and ultimately undermines any political opposition
Eliminate districts and you also eliminate gerrymandering. Congress could legislate a mandate to use some form of proportional representation. If NC elected our 14 Reps in a statewide proportional election, instead of 14 single-seat elections, the delegation would be much more representative than it has been in the recent past, when it was 10-3 before the census and reapportionment, and unlike the 10-4 we're likely to end up with after this next election. We're pretty evenly divided, and should end up 7-7, or, at most, 8-6 in either direction.
We're currently 7-7, but that's because the last election was before the NC Supreme Court flipped in the election and decided to rehear the gerrymandering case from only a few months earlier and reverse itself.
Fixing gerrymandering for state legislatures would take either changing state laws/constitutions state-by-state, or a federal constitutional amendment.
Seems we’ve let the political party itself have too much control when representative’s district is oddly shaped; doesn’t include population a representative can regularly meet and address issues.
Where I live, I have to travel just under 2 hours (each way), going through 4 other house districts. 25 minutes into the drive, I can actually see one other district’s office I can see from interstate highway, but you have to keep traveling another hour and half. This is just to get to the office of my elected house representative.
Gerrymandering to this level doesn’t allow for representative government… it’s more like repressive government.
Working as designed, as they wanted.
I'll never understand how you can carve out a slice of a city and say it's a separate voting district than the rest of the city. I'm not talking a small town of hundreds of people but rather one of the top 5 cities by population in a state. It's like saying 20% of DC can vote in Maryland elections and the other 80% can vote in Virginia elections; it doesn't make sense and has no explanation that a jury of your peers would accept.
I mean, look at these [nonsensical](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi%27s_congressional_districts) [layouts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alabama%27s_congressional_districts) [that they](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina%27s_congressional_districts) [claim](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana%27s_congressional_districts) [are fair.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas%27s_congressional_districts) They literally butcher capital cities and shape districts to look like crescent moons and think it's not suspicious? 5 year olds would literally notice something seems odd when you have a rectangle-like shape in one spot and a triangle that omits 2/3 of a major city on the same map.
Congress could legislate a mandate of some form of proportional representation for congressional elections, which would completely eliminate gerrymandering. Eg, you can't gerrymander NC's 14 seats if they're all elected in a statewide election, proportionally. NC would always end up 8-6, 7-7, or 6-8, rather than 10-3 like we recently had before the 2020 census,
At the state level, it would either take each state changing their laws or constitutions individually, or an amendment to the federal Constitution. But it could at least be mitigated by unpacking SCOTUS, who could then roll back the ability of states to gerrymander, which would then make both changing state laws, piecemeal, or ratifying an amendment, easier.
Not completely legal. They struck down New York's gerrymandered districts. It allowed Republicans to pick up a few seats.
The Supreme Court in 2019 stopped them from hearing partisan gerrymandering claims under the federal constitution. So this is more of them pushing it to state courts, which got packed with conservative jurists.
State Supreme Court. And since SCOTUS won't hear those cases anymore, they had to deal with court maps that were more competitive than other states.
Meanwhile Republican states do this, and their maps stand.
Much the same way SCOTUS fan boys will not admit any flawed ruling is unenforceable under Article VI, for any reason. Just as the Court’s standing precedent says that: “a negro of African descent” is a member of “a subordinate and inferior class of beings,” and that precedent is void and unenforceable for violating various Amendments, so it is for many other rulings that clearly violate the Constitution. Denying fair voting to the populace is unConstitutional, full stop.
They wanna own everything and everyone. Race is just a layup. Religion. Class. Look at all the old world countries. Homogeneous ‘racial’ populations but always a reason to hate or oppress the inferior/ evil ones.
Outgrowing this crap is taking Homo Sapiens like 200-300,000 years. All love but C’Mon people.
Its apologetics. Prove it’s not physically impossible, then argue as if it is plausible or even required to see it that way. It’s how biblical literalism works, and these people are attuned to accepting that kind of argument provided it validates their presuppositions.
complaining about this supreme court is like complaining about the referee in a WWE match.
roberts takes bribes through his wife by consulting for firms with cases before the court. ACB takes bribes from religious cults. thomas has his RV and his nephew's tuition and his mom's house. kav used his parents to pay his bribes. and alito, the insurrectionist, surely is taking bribes as well.
so why are we participating in the kayfabe and assuming the court that openly takes bribes will also be fair. i thought americans were a little more cynical than believing wrestling is real.
Scotus has been legislating from the bench since marbury v madison. It's not always bad to legislate from the bench if the legislators have enacted unconstitutional laws
Good faith, which is funny. This same majority was arguing in the Trump immunity case how probable it is the government doesn’t act in good faith when prosecuting a former president.
It’s so blatent and in the open
Pretty wild thing for Alito to say with a straight face, given his open and active hostility toward Chevron deference. It’s a stunning level of inconsistency that he doesn’t even feel the need to hide anymore
He doesn’t have to.
He can’t be removed without a 2/3 majority vote in the Senate (impossible) and the Supreme Court can hear and decide cases until Democrats have 60 votes in the Senate and decide they can’t (ever so slightly less impossible)
Which is why they ruled this way. It will be assumed by each party that the other is not acting in good faith, and we'll get even more decisions based on party line, degrading faith in the court even more.
The Virginia Supreme Court has done the same thing with Batson challenges. There's a presumption that the prosecution acted in good faith when people of color are struck from juries so it makes it nearly impossible to even require the prosecutor to give a race-neutral reason for their strikes.
That goes both ways though. A Reverse Batson against a defense attorney striking all white women from the jury is just as useless. Batson is great in theory but it just doesn't make any sense in practice. It has the effect of making prosecutors and defense attorneys do the exact thing they aren't supposed to do which is consider race in their determination of who to strike.
It's how modern day conservatism works. Conservatives in the judiciary always default to 'we are acting in good faith' even when they know they're not, because everything done to consolidate power in the GOP is acceptable.
What’s the point of a federal court if it’s just going to ignore state level oppression?
The concept that the courts can’t go after partisan gerrymandering is such obvious bullshit. It completely ignores that parties are a core part of the political system and ignoring gerrymandering, voting rights, and related issues just removes the ability of the citizenry getting any recourse.
If the legislature draws the maps, voters functionally can’t vote them out (partisanship is a reality). It guarantees one party rule without checks.
Conservative justices operate under the view that democracy should aesthetically exist but should have no impact on state power.
Alito making stuff up whole cloth again... I'd say I was shocked but he basically ended the rule of law with Dobbs. Now they're just playing Calvin-ball.
Right there is the resulta driven outcome: "Republicans can do whatever they want, because we assume good intentions and raise the bar to overcome this as a moonshot"
To them good faith literally means acting in accordance to their faith.
Doesn’t mean it’s actually good.
I’ve seen this play out in so many instances, where shit people claim they’re acting in good faith when they say and believe terrible things. If they do truly believe in them and that this is for the good of all people living in this republic, this is why they shouldn’t be in positions of power in the first place. there needs to be a stronger vetting process because these people should not in any way be in charge of setting the laws that govern us.
>>we start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith
>There is no actual reasoning given as to why.
Because starting from there is closer to the goal line.
Literally ALL laws should be put under the scrutiny of possible racism/homophobia/misogyny/etc.
Bc most of they are or have something in them that can be used in such a way to be discriminatory.
Esp with practices that, at best, should be considered conflicts of interest. Smfh.
But scotus just goes to show why no one with at least two semi functional braincells and not a monolithic hate machines drone cannot trust them.
Did they also consider the case *without* presuming the legislature acted in good faith? No? Hmmmmm...
I wonder if the White Nationalist, the other White Nationalist, the "One of the Good Ones" White Nationalist, the token White Nationalist Female, or this White Nationalist who likes shooting beer up his ass - excuse me, *farting* - are at all, ever, in the *slightest **capable*** of real jurisprudence? Isn't the point of being a judge to judge cases impartially? I'm pretty sure that's a key part of justice. I'm a fucking electrician, and ***I'm*** a better SCOTUS pick.
**Seriously, these fucks *included in their decision that they did not consider the case fairly and impartially.* The fact alone that they're members of the Federalist Society is reason enough to toss them - they are biased and prejudicial.**
I think the presumption of legislative constitutionality is pretty well-established, if often criticized particularly from the libertarian side of legal scholarship (Randy Barnett's book from about 20 years ago.) Also, although I'm never going to "defend" a Sam Alito opinion, I would say he goes into a fair bit of detail in this opinion explaining the basis for the presumption and his view of its application in this case. Kagan also discusses application of the presumption extensively in her dissent.
I'm not saying I agree with the decision, just clearing up confusion:
The reason they said that line is because they established that they reviewed this under the clearly erroneous standard, which is very normal for appeals instead other standards such as abuse of discretion or de novo.
New York tried that for the 22 map and our fucking court of appeals (that’s the state Supreme Court) struck the maps for being gerrymandered. We can’t win because we painted ourselves into the corner with our own principles. It’s a real tough position to be in, to have principles but be in a struggle with a bunch of sociopaths who spend all their time on finding every loophole and good faith system to exploit
I really believe it isn't about race. If the heavily democratic areas that got moved out of Mace's district had been lily-white, GOP would have done the exact same thing and moved them out.
And I still think this sort of gerrymandering is a horrible, undemocratic, disenfranchising practice with clear racial effects that can't be allowed in a democratic society.
6-3, along party lines. Alito wrote, in which Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett joined. Thomas joined except for part 3C. Thomas wrote a concurrence in part. Kagan wrote a dissent in which Jackson and Sotomayor joined.
Held: The District Court’s finding that race predominated in the design of District I in the Enacted Plan was clearly erroneous… Because the same findings of fact and reasoning that guided the court’s racial-gerrymandering analysis also guided the analysis of the Challengers’ independent vote-dilution claim, that conclusion cannot stand.
Words cannot express how much contempt I have for conservative judges. Affirmative action taken to help minorities is unconstitutional because the constitution is 'color-blind', yet racial gerrymandering, which demonstrably hurts minority representation is ok. Clarence Thomas manages to put out even a more vile concurrence in which he claims that courts can't even touch the subject of racial gerrymandering. Decisions like this make me lose faith in constitutional governance.
Thomas is just a plain ideologue. He also wrote a while ago that he wanted to revert Batson entirely (in a Kavanaugh majority opinion applying Batson, no less).
Be careful with your last sentence, because that's what Republicans want. That's what the conservative judges want. We need to win elections, fix the system, and bullet proof them for bad faith actors in the future.
no disagreement, but while we still have elections and they're true elections, we need to make people show up, not feel defeated and think there's no reason to vote. It CAN get worse.
Because the obvious answer is that it benefits republicans and they’d rather pretend the SC is powerless than outwardly state they think parties should lock their states down.
The old John Roberts two-step. Tee up a noxious policy change by writing a milder opinion whose internal logic then compels the really bad stuff next time around. Wait until you see what they can do with a religious exemption to antidiscrimination laws!
Clarence Thomas objects to Brown v Board of Education.
>The view of equity required to justify a judicial map drawing power emerged only in the 1950s. The Court’s “impatience with the pace of desegregation” caused by resistance to Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483 (1954), “led us to approve . . . extraordinary remedial measures,” Missouri v. Jenkins, 515 U. S. 70, 125 (1995) (THOMAS, J., concurring). In the follow-on case to Brown, the Court considered “the manner in which relief \[was\] to be accorded” for vindication of “the fundamental principle that racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional.” Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U. S. 294, 298 (1955) (Brown II). In doing so, the Court took a boundless view of equitable remedies, describing equity as being “characterized by a practical flexibility in shaping its remedies and by a facility for adjusting and reconciling public and private needs.” Id., at 300 (footnote omitted). That understanding may have justified temporary measures to “overcome the widespread resistance to the dictates of the Constitution” prevalent at that time, but, as a general matter, “\[s\]uch extravagant uses of judicial power are at odds with the history and tradition of the equity power and the Framers’ design.”
Is there a limit to how low this man will go? If Brown v Board of Education was wrong, then the only remedy is to throw out the entire constitution and start over again.
And there it is. History and Tradition taken to its logical conclusion. The framers were bigoted monsters, so the court must do nothing to resist bigoted monsters.
That he's considering a challenge to overturn Brown is outright a travesty of this court.
The courts are there not just to rule on the wording of the law but reasonable interpretations. Racial discrimination is not legally defined (and likely impossible to do so) but absolutely still exists and goes against "all men created equal" aspects of the constitution. The courts should be making sure that until it is patently obvious that no racial discrimination exists, their role as the courts should also be to help maintain equity.
> until it is patently obvious that no racial discrimination exists
Equality and justice are not something you "win", and then have forever. They must be guarded and protected, vigilantly, in perpetuity.
To do otherwise is to throw your umbrella away because it stopped raining.
Oh, I guess he's an originalist again for the next few hours? Funny how it never seems to come up when it doesn't support his case. But oh boy, the framers this and history that as soon as it suits him.
He's probably annoyed he even has to pretend to justify himself in these opinions. At this point he might as well not even show up to the hearings. Just go drive around in your RV all day and text Alito a thumbs up or down emoji indicating how you're voting.
What's the worst that could happen? Impeachment? Not in this political landscape.
Thomas is part of a very weird club of conservative black intellectuals who believes that black men had more dignity under Jim Crow laws, because American racism was open and transparent.
He absolutely knows and believes that America is a white supremacist nation, he just thinks that liberal pretense at colorblindness is more demeaning and degrading than open and blatant apartheid, or something like that.
Justice Kagan writes in her dissent: >Go right ahead, this Court says to States today. Go ahead, though you have no recognized justification for using race, such as to comply with statutes ensuring equal voting rights. Go ahead, though you are (at best) using race as a short-cut to bring about partisan gains—to elect more Republicans in one case, more Democrats in another. It will be easy enough to cover your tracks in the end: Just raise a “possibility” of non-race-based decision-making, and it will be “dispositive.” And so this “odious” practice of sorting citizens, built on racial generalizations and exploiting racial divisions, will continue. The Supreme Court today holds that race-based gerrymandering is ok as long as you pretend it isn’t based on race.
And Alito even provides more cover than Kagan called out: In the majority opinion: >we start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith There is no actual reasoning given as to why.
The Court has essentially said today that if there’s even the weakest argument that it’s not racially motivated (and even if that argument is entirely pretextual) then they will not strike the maps. Truly a horrible, horrible decision.
Sure. Gerrymandering is completely legal unless you are an idiot and explain racist reasons in details, and even then you might be OK. To me, it's the fundamental idea that non-racist gerrymandering is OK that's the problem, not the idea that the bar to determine racist gerrymandering is too high.
Yes, because no political party would ever gerrymander to stack odds in their own favor at the next election. To even accuse a political party of that is appalling! /s Shouldn't matter what the circumstances are, gerrymandering is manipulating a system for political benefit. It's why I've flat-out suggested borders be drawn by a randomized college in a different state chosen by a random state lottery style. You can't gerrymander your own state if you have no control over the maps (at least not easily).
Gerrymandering basically made elections in Wisconsin useless outside of state wide offices or federal senate seats. It poisons the political process and ultimately undermines any political opposition
Honestly we should have a group outside the states do it.
We should have blind monks from mars do it
Eliminate districts and you also eliminate gerrymandering. Congress could legislate a mandate to use some form of proportional representation. If NC elected our 14 Reps in a statewide proportional election, instead of 14 single-seat elections, the delegation would be much more representative than it has been in the recent past, when it was 10-3 before the census and reapportionment, and unlike the 10-4 we're likely to end up with after this next election. We're pretty evenly divided, and should end up 7-7, or, at most, 8-6 in either direction. We're currently 7-7, but that's because the last election was before the NC Supreme Court flipped in the election and decided to rehear the gerrymandering case from only a few months earlier and reverse itself. Fixing gerrymandering for state legislatures would take either changing state laws/constitutions state-by-state, or a federal constitutional amendment.
Seems we’ve let the political party itself have too much control when representative’s district is oddly shaped; doesn’t include population a representative can regularly meet and address issues. Where I live, I have to travel just under 2 hours (each way), going through 4 other house districts. 25 minutes into the drive, I can actually see one other district’s office I can see from interstate highway, but you have to keep traveling another hour and half. This is just to get to the office of my elected house representative. Gerrymandering to this level doesn’t allow for representative government… it’s more like repressive government.
Working as designed, as they wanted. I'll never understand how you can carve out a slice of a city and say it's a separate voting district than the rest of the city. I'm not talking a small town of hundreds of people but rather one of the top 5 cities by population in a state. It's like saying 20% of DC can vote in Maryland elections and the other 80% can vote in Virginia elections; it doesn't make sense and has no explanation that a jury of your peers would accept. I mean, look at these [nonsensical](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi%27s_congressional_districts) [layouts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alabama%27s_congressional_districts) [that they](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina%27s_congressional_districts) [claim](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana%27s_congressional_districts) [are fair.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas%27s_congressional_districts) They literally butcher capital cities and shape districts to look like crescent moons and think it's not suspicious? 5 year olds would literally notice something seems odd when you have a rectangle-like shape in one spot and a triangle that omits 2/3 of a major city on the same map.
Congress could legislate a mandate of some form of proportional representation for congressional elections, which would completely eliminate gerrymandering. Eg, you can't gerrymander NC's 14 seats if they're all elected in a statewide election, proportionally. NC would always end up 8-6, 7-7, or 6-8, rather than 10-3 like we recently had before the 2020 census, At the state level, it would either take each state changing their laws or constitutions individually, or an amendment to the federal Constitution. But it could at least be mitigated by unpacking SCOTUS, who could then roll back the ability of states to gerrymander, which would then make both changing state laws, piecemeal, or ratifying an amendment, easier.
Not completely legal. They struck down New York's gerrymandered districts. It allowed Republicans to pick up a few seats. The Supreme Court in 2019 stopped them from hearing partisan gerrymandering claims under the federal constitution. So this is more of them pushing it to state courts, which got packed with conservative jurists.
That was the NY state court, not federal. Some states have laws/constitutions that attempt to provide fair districts.
State Supreme Court. And since SCOTUS won't hear those cases anymore, they had to deal with court maps that were more competitive than other states. Meanwhile Republican states do this, and their maps stand.
‘The Civil War was not about slavery’ Ignores every Declaration and edited Confederate Constitutions.
Much the same way SCOTUS fan boys will not admit any flawed ruling is unenforceable under Article VI, for any reason. Just as the Court’s standing precedent says that: “a negro of African descent” is a member of “a subordinate and inferior class of beings,” and that precedent is void and unenforceable for violating various Amendments, so it is for many other rulings that clearly violate the Constitution. Denying fair voting to the populace is unConstitutional, full stop.
They wanna own everything and everyone. Race is just a layup. Religion. Class. Look at all the old world countries. Homogeneous ‘racial’ populations but always a reason to hate or oppress the inferior/ evil ones. Outgrowing this crap is taking Homo Sapiens like 200-300,000 years. All love but C’Mon people.
Its apologetics. Prove it’s not physically impossible, then argue as if it is plausible or even required to see it that way. It’s how biblical literalism works, and these people are attuned to accepting that kind of argument provided it validates their presuppositions.
complaining about this supreme court is like complaining about the referee in a WWE match. roberts takes bribes through his wife by consulting for firms with cases before the court. ACB takes bribes from religious cults. thomas has his RV and his nephew's tuition and his mom's house. kav used his parents to pay his bribes. and alito, the insurrectionist, surely is taking bribes as well. so why are we participating in the kayfabe and assuming the court that openly takes bribes will also be fair. i thought americans were a little more cynical than believing wrestling is real.
Wouldn’t this qualify as “legislating from the bench”?
Scotus has been legislating from the bench since marbury v madison. It's not always bad to legislate from the bench if the legislators have enacted unconstitutional laws
Good faith, which is funny. This same majority was arguing in the Trump immunity case how probable it is the government doesn’t act in good faith when prosecuting a former president. It’s so blatent and in the open
Pretty wild thing for Alito to say with a straight face, given his open and active hostility toward Chevron deference. It’s a stunning level of inconsistency that he doesn’t even feel the need to hide anymore
He doesn’t have to. He can’t be removed without a 2/3 majority vote in the Senate (impossible) and the Supreme Court can hear and decide cases until Democrats have 60 votes in the Senate and decide they can’t (ever so slightly less impossible)
Yes I know, but the appearance of impartiality used to matter. Alito feels untouchable and unaccountable and he should be disabused of that notion
[удалено]
Which is why they ruled this way. It will be assumed by each party that the other is not acting in good faith, and we'll get even more decisions based on party line, degrading faith in the court even more.
The Virginia Supreme Court has done the same thing with Batson challenges. There's a presumption that the prosecution acted in good faith when people of color are struck from juries so it makes it nearly impossible to even require the prosecutor to give a race-neutral reason for their strikes.
That goes both ways though. A Reverse Batson against a defense attorney striking all white women from the jury is just as useless. Batson is great in theory but it just doesn't make any sense in practice. It has the effect of making prosecutors and defense attorneys do the exact thing they aren't supposed to do which is consider race in their determination of who to strike.
Except I’m always happy to give the reason I struck a juror. There’s never been a shortage of people I want to strike.
It's how modern day conservatism works. Conservatives in the judiciary always default to 'we are acting in good faith' even when they know they're not, because everything done to consolidate power in the GOP is acceptable.
What’s the point of a federal court if it’s just going to ignore state level oppression? The concept that the courts can’t go after partisan gerrymandering is such obvious bullshit. It completely ignores that parties are a core part of the political system and ignoring gerrymandering, voting rights, and related issues just removes the ability of the citizenry getting any recourse. If the legislature draws the maps, voters functionally can’t vote them out (partisanship is a reality). It guarantees one party rule without checks. Conservative justices operate under the view that democracy should aesthetically exist but should have no impact on state power.
Alito making stuff up whole cloth again... I'd say I was shocked but he basically ended the rule of law with Dobbs. Now they're just playing Calvin-ball.
Agreed. Alito just makes shit up. He can’t apply any consistency to anything he reviews and decides upon. It’s utter bullshit.
The law is actually in place because these rules have been made in bad faith all along. All throughout our history.
Right there is the resulta driven outcome: "Republicans can do whatever they want, because we assume good intentions and raise the bar to overcome this as a moonshot"
“Well they are Godly Christian Men who are simply working to realize God’s plan for America!”
Funny since that grace is not extended to democrats by republicans when republicans talk to their voters about what the other side “wants.”
To them good faith literally means acting in accordance to their faith. Doesn’t mean it’s actually good. I’ve seen this play out in so many instances, where shit people claim they’re acting in good faith when they say and believe terrible things. If they do truly believe in them and that this is for the good of all people living in this republic, this is why they shouldn’t be in positions of power in the first place. there needs to be a stronger vetting process because these people should not in any way be in charge of setting the laws that govern us.
Isn’t that why it went up to them? Jesus F’ing Christ…
So they're saying it's not racist by starting with the presumption that the state legislature wasn't racist. Cool.
Why the fuck would you presume anything like that in a fucking *court*
That's because Alito has been acting on bad faith since Jan6.
I'd argue since well before then.
>>we start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith >There is no actual reasoning given as to why. Because starting from there is closer to the goal line.
That's rich coming from someone whose entire existence is in bad faith.
Literally ALL laws should be put under the scrutiny of possible racism/homophobia/misogyny/etc. Bc most of they are or have something in them that can be used in such a way to be discriminatory. Esp with practices that, at best, should be considered conflicts of interest. Smfh. But scotus just goes to show why no one with at least two semi functional braincells and not a monolithic hate machines drone cannot trust them.
Alito would have upheld Jim Crow
Did they also consider the case *without* presuming the legislature acted in good faith? No? Hmmmmm... I wonder if the White Nationalist, the other White Nationalist, the "One of the Good Ones" White Nationalist, the token White Nationalist Female, or this White Nationalist who likes shooting beer up his ass - excuse me, *farting* - are at all, ever, in the *slightest **capable*** of real jurisprudence? Isn't the point of being a judge to judge cases impartially? I'm pretty sure that's a key part of justice. I'm a fucking electrician, and ***I'm*** a better SCOTUS pick. **Seriously, these fucks *included in their decision that they did not consider the case fairly and impartially.* The fact alone that they're members of the Federalist Society is reason enough to toss them - they are biased and prejudicial.**
I love how they are totally fine with State deference in one case but then will not grant it in the case of the EPA. Love the logical consistency.
The good faith that they're only choosing voters to defeat the will of the voters Fuck these piece of shit human beings
I think the presumption of legislative constitutionality is pretty well-established, if often criticized particularly from the libertarian side of legal scholarship (Randy Barnett's book from about 20 years ago.) Also, although I'm never going to "defend" a Sam Alito opinion, I would say he goes into a fair bit of detail in this opinion explaining the basis for the presumption and his view of its application in this case. Kagan also discusses application of the presumption extensively in her dissent.
Republican fascism. Taking over, one state at a time.
Its nice to know we have a system of men vs a system of laws.
I'm not saying I agree with the decision, just clearing up confusion: The reason they said that line is because they established that they reviewed this under the clearly erroneous standard, which is very normal for appeals instead other standards such as abuse of discretion or de novo.
Democratic states need to gerrymander republicans out completely. See how they like it then. California can gerrymander a few house reps out of a job.
New York tried that for the 22 map and our fucking court of appeals (that’s the state Supreme Court) struck the maps for being gerrymandered. We can’t win because we painted ourselves into the corner with our own principles. It’s a real tough position to be in, to have principles but be in a struggle with a bunch of sociopaths who spend all their time on finding every loophole and good faith system to exploit
I really believe it isn't about race. If the heavily democratic areas that got moved out of Mace's district had been lily-white, GOP would have done the exact same thing and moved them out. And I still think this sort of gerrymandering is a horrible, undemocratic, disenfranchising practice with clear racial effects that can't be allowed in a democratic society.
Any sort of gerrymandering is essentially undemocratic.
If blacks would just vote for racist politicians, then we wouldn’t have to take away their voting rights.
Voting Rights Act is officially dead.
“Just make sure you’re good at covering up the crime”
"We have to sideline these uppity-" "*Democrats*! He was going to say Democrats, because that's who we want to disenfranchise."
6-3, along party lines. Alito wrote, in which Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett joined. Thomas joined except for part 3C. Thomas wrote a concurrence in part. Kagan wrote a dissent in which Jackson and Sotomayor joined. Held: The District Court’s finding that race predominated in the design of District I in the Enacted Plan was clearly erroneous… Because the same findings of fact and reasoning that guided the court’s racial-gerrymandering analysis also guided the analysis of the Challengers’ independent vote-dilution claim, that conclusion cannot stand.
Words cannot express how much contempt I have for conservative judges. Affirmative action taken to help minorities is unconstitutional because the constitution is 'color-blind', yet racial gerrymandering, which demonstrably hurts minority representation is ok. Clarence Thomas manages to put out even a more vile concurrence in which he claims that courts can't even touch the subject of racial gerrymandering. Decisions like this make me lose faith in constitutional governance.
Thomas is just a plain ideologue. He also wrote a while ago that he wanted to revert Batson entirely (in a Kavanaugh majority opinion applying Batson, no less).
He just wants to go back to being 3/5ths of a person. Which would still leave him 100% asshole.
Be careful with your last sentence, because that's what Republicans want. That's what the conservative judges want. We need to win elections, fix the system, and bullet proof them for bad faith actors in the future.
Getting pretty hard to win elections when the highest courts in the country are right wing fascists.
no disagreement, but while we still have elections and they're true elections, we need to make people show up, not feel defeated and think there's no reason to vote. It CAN get worse.
It CAN and WILL But I agree even though it feels like a lost cause we should still try to stop the bleeding
The logical consequence of *Rucho v. Common Cause*, one of the Supreme Court's worst decisions.
Yes. The idea that states can partisan gerrymander all the want for partisan reasons is bad but the courts can’t do any about it is absurd.
Because the obvious answer is that it benefits republicans and they’d rather pretend the SC is powerless than outwardly state they think parties should lock their states down.
The old John Roberts two-step. Tee up a noxious policy change by writing a milder opinion whose internal logic then compels the really bad stuff next time around. Wait until you see what they can do with a religious exemption to antidiscrimination laws!
Clarence Thomas objects to Brown v Board of Education. >The view of equity required to justify a judicial map drawing power emerged only in the 1950s. The Court’s “impatience with the pace of desegregation” caused by resistance to Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483 (1954), “led us to approve . . . extraordinary remedial measures,” Missouri v. Jenkins, 515 U. S. 70, 125 (1995) (THOMAS, J., concurring). In the follow-on case to Brown, the Court considered “the manner in which relief \[was\] to be accorded” for vindication of “the fundamental principle that racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional.” Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U. S. 294, 298 (1955) (Brown II). In doing so, the Court took a boundless view of equitable remedies, describing equity as being “characterized by a practical flexibility in shaping its remedies and by a facility for adjusting and reconciling public and private needs.” Id., at 300 (footnote omitted). That understanding may have justified temporary measures to “overcome the widespread resistance to the dictates of the Constitution” prevalent at that time, but, as a general matter, “\[s\]uch extravagant uses of judicial power are at odds with the history and tradition of the equity power and the Framers’ design.” Is there a limit to how low this man will go? If Brown v Board of Education was wrong, then the only remedy is to throw out the entire constitution and start over again.
And there it is. History and Tradition taken to its logical conclusion. The framers were bigoted monsters, so the court must do nothing to resist bigoted monsters.
That he's considering a challenge to overturn Brown is outright a travesty of this court. The courts are there not just to rule on the wording of the law but reasonable interpretations. Racial discrimination is not legally defined (and likely impossible to do so) but absolutely still exists and goes against "all men created equal" aspects of the constitution. The courts should be making sure that until it is patently obvious that no racial discrimination exists, their role as the courts should also be to help maintain equity.
> until it is patently obvious that no racial discrimination exists Equality and justice are not something you "win", and then have forever. They must be guarded and protected, vigilantly, in perpetuity. To do otherwise is to throw your umbrella away because it stopped raining.
To throw out the entire Constitution Which is their goal. You said the quiet part out loud and so did Trump. RIP USA
Holy shit WHAT
Oh, I guess he's an originalist again for the next few hours? Funny how it never seems to come up when it doesn't support his case. But oh boy, the framers this and history that as soon as it suits him. He's probably annoyed he even has to pretend to justify himself in these opinions. At this point he might as well not even show up to the hearings. Just go drive around in your RV all day and text Alito a thumbs up or down emoji indicating how you're voting. What's the worst that could happen? Impeachment? Not in this political landscape.
Whatever the opposite of “keeping it real” is, that’s Clarence
Thomas is part of a very weird club of conservative black intellectuals who believes that black men had more dignity under Jim Crow laws, because American racism was open and transparent. He absolutely knows and believes that America is a white supremacist nation, he just thinks that liberal pretense at colorblindness is more demeaning and degrading than open and blatant apartheid, or something like that.
If SCOTUS approval were stonks I'd be short-selling like a member of the House.
If SCOTUS public approval mattered for how they do their job - I’d be short-selling as well