SUPREME COURT SINKS THE CONSTITUTION
Durt Fibo
May 23, 2024
The U.S. Supreme Court blew yet another hole in the Constitution today. In a 6-3 decision, the justices returned the case of Alexander v South Carolina Conference of the NAACP to the federal district court, asserting that it had not properly evaluated the evidence when it ruled that the state’s lawmakers had discriminated against Black voters. That case was decided by the United States District Court for the District of South Carolina in 2023 and can be found here https://vhdshf2oms2wcnsvk7sdv3so.blob.core.windows.net/thearp-media/documents/Findings_of_Fact_and_Conclusions_of_Law_1.6.23.pdf
The previous court ruling had found that “Under the state’s 2022 plan, Congressional District No. 1 is a racial gerrymander in violation of Plaintiffs’ rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” The plaintiffs were “The South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, and Taiwan Scott, on behalf of himself and all other similarly situated persons.” The defendants were a cesspool of the state’s Republican officials, including the President of the State Senate.
Writing the majority opinion was that dyspeptic adolescent Samuel Alito, who with his trademark teenage bile snarled: “The three-judge district court paid only lip service to these propositions. That misguided approach infected the district court’s findings of fact, which were clearly erroneous under the appropriate legal standard.” Yet the case up before him had already been decided in favor of those challenging the racially gerrymandered Republican scheme after overwhelming evidence; they had introduced 652 exhibits and testimony from 42 witnesses. One of the most convincing witnesses, with the most overwhelming evidence was Dr. Kosuke Imai, of Harvard University, who had produced some TWENTY THOUSAND maps created with an algorithm which did NOT include race as a factor but complied with normal, legal redistricting criteria only to show that it couldn’t be done while achieving the result the Republicans had mapped out. Nor was the South Carolina case a simple paid ‘expert’ hack job or a peripheral hobby for Dr. Imai, as can be seen by his scientific investigations into redistricting (https://polisci.wustl.edu/events/kosuke-imai-harvard-university).
Joined by Roberts, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Island Barrett, Alito however either eschewed all existing evidence (not for the first time), or inverted its meaning. For, included in his opinion was the oblivious: ““Without an alternative map, it is difficult for plaintiffs to defeat our starting presumption that the legislature acted in good faith.” As a final cannonball through the Constitution’s hull, Alito wrote that “A party challenging a map’s constitutionality must disentangle race and politics if it wishes to prove that the legislature was motivated by race as opposed to partisanship.”
Yet the Republican Party’s aims and tactics are verifiably racially organized. The political has become racial, and the party cannot be separated from the racial policies it chose for itself. The Fourteenth Amendment is fully part of the U.S. Constitution, adopted under President Ulysses S. Grant to rectify the insanity which led to the Civil War. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is federal law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. But the perennially pubescent Supreme Court rightists will not stop attacking the Constitution and laws they collect money to uphold. Now, like much of the American justice system, the Supreme Court is raving in the kind of self-serving coprolalia once perfected by Roland Freisler, Vasili Ulrikh and the venomous Andrei Vyshinsky –the top jurists of Hitler and Stalin.