Writing in 1943, the historian Henry Steele Commager delivered both a stern history lesson and a warning about the United States supreme court. The court, he said, had never been a friend to US democracy, and it never would be. For anyone committed to the advancement of majority rule, he added, judicial review “is wrong in theory and dangerous in practice”.
The danger that Commager noted was on full display on 29 April 2026, when the supreme court eviscerated section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. As the Department of Justice explains, section 2 “prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups … or procedure that results in the denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group”.
That’s what it does say and that’s exactly what the Supreme Court has just said it says. You can’t discriminate on hte basis of race in creating electoral districts that will likelky to won by someone of one race or anotyher. That’s racial discrimination and you cannot do it. Yea, even if the like race of the winner is something good and cuddly like Black of Hispanic or something.
Yer man here in The G is claiming that the court eviscerated that clause when in fact they confirmed it.
Austin Sarat, associate dean of the faculty and William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College,
Ah, well, Amhurst and reality have not been known to be in close contact for some time now.
The US is not a democracy, it’s a republic.
Groups – eg ‘black Americans’ – have no rights under the Constitution.
Individuals – eg individual black Americans – have rights.
Leaving those points to one side, the issue here is that many people don’t understand that to discriminate can mean to act in favour or in disfavour of something and, ipso facto, that if discrimination is unconstitutional it’s unconstitutional whether it favours or disfavours your pet cause.
This is very easy to understand but these days professors are mostly fuckwits.
I understand that the original meaning of racism was whites despising blacks. Blacks despising whites was just right and proper.
Things don’t really seem to have changed too much.
The point about the Supreme Court is still valid though. Each president tries to pack the court with ideological comensurates. It can and sometimes does end up with courts making insted on interpreting laws.
Blair created the same thing with our Supreme Court, which luckily, although it did sail close to the wind as in 2019, has not yet reached the kind of party lines voting that the US version has.
On this particularly case. I just happened to have read in an article some of what Ketanji Brown said. It made no sense. It was like she was trying a completely different case to her colleagues. These guys seem to live in the same off world existence.
It isn’t the job of SCOTUS to serve democracy. It is solely to interpret the constitution and apply it to laws and lower court decisions. Much of the time that will be protecting a person or group from the tyranny of the majority. It’s a difficult job and made worse by those who want to stuff the court to get the decisions to go along with their own ideology. I don’t see how the partisan element can be removed now.
It only really happens under leftists, though, Otto, because they are on the long march and they’re true believers.
The Republican justices tend to be reasonably principled constitutionalists of one stripe or another, whereas, as you correctly point out, Ketanji is a cretin (put there to do the bidding of her masters – as was Biden). Sotomayor is a leftist hack, as was Bader Ginsburg, as are most of them.
Hence, if you read this judgment it makes perfect sense.
The Constitution says you can’t discriminate on the basis of race, and this is discrimination on the basis of race; therefore it is unconstitutional.
That the Constitution happens to coincide with what (some right wing) Republicans might want is just that – a coincidence.
Mind you, the court that they overturned – the 1986 Gingles case court – was also nominally Republican. Plenty of them drift once they get into the cocktail party circuit. Or have long marched beforehand, I guess.
The current Goodfellows podcast has just been discussing the Supreme Court and worth a listen. It turns out that justices tend to vote contra to the president that appointed them and not along party lines, otherwise Trump would get all his executive orders endorsed.
One point that is often made in recent times is that the problem isn’t SCOTUS or even POTUS, it’s Congress that has abdicated its responsibilities in favour of becoming Instagram and TikTok influencers. Most of the problems that SCOTUS deal with could be resolved by Congress passing laws.
Why don’t they just gerrymander on the basis of age? Then you could have a seat packed with gullible young sods who’d vote Democrat. Or add sex: a Reservation of ageing cat ladies, likewise liable to vote Democrat.
The gullible young sod reserves already exist: College and Uni towns…
The whole gerrymandering thing is, as an outsider, hilarious..
Both sides are doing it full force, have been since the Dawn of Time, and are ReeeeEEEee!!!-ing at each other shouting “Foul!!!” all the way.
The biggest problem for the Dems that I can see is that they already had “optimised” the hell out of their possibilities in the last 2-3 elections, and can’t do any more wiggling at the lines without things becoming Too Obvious and entering actual Voting Manipulation teritory.
Which you can point to, and is actually Verboten…
‘Tis already a Grey Area you’re treading, and that requires some ..subtlety.. And looking at some of the cases the Dems are trying this time… “Subtle” doesn’t apply…
Given that we’ve recently had a court in the UK rule that that criminal over there from Somalia who entered the UK illegally has more rights than Grist who was born here, then I’m not too well disposed to lawyers and courts at the moment. And when the Prime Minister and his Attorney General prosecute British soldiers pro bono -i.e. just for fun- for war crimes some dodgy solicitor made up I’m especially not too keen on them…
I think we’ll find that rather like “jihad”, “pro bono” has several meanings, not all of them obvious.
First thing we do: kill all the directors of the Crown Prosecution Service.
Yesterday, the advancement of majority rule was a bad thing, indeed it was tyranny. Can we have a ruling, please?
Isn’t “the constitution has never been a friend to US democracy,” rather the point of it?
It was the founders’ attempt to limit the powers of a democratically elected government. Defend minorities.
The US Supreme Court has absolutely square root of bugger all job of being “a friend to democracy” or “the advancement of majority rule”. It’s job is to protect the laws and constitution.