John Roberts is slowly dismantling America

The chief justice arrived from central casting in the guise of the midwestern dad next door remembering the Indiana farmland of his boyhood and promising that he viewed the job through the eyes of another American civic religion Baseball John Roberts would just be the umpire calling balls and strikes with no rooting interest save the integrity of the Supreme Court This mythic nonsense has somehow persevered for more than two decades During that time Roberts has established himself as something more than just the chief justice He is the the bulk effective and fruitful Republican political operative of his generation It s not only that the Roberts Court has enabled President Donald Trump s muscular extra-constitutional use of executive power while also awarding him an entirely fictitious notion of presidential immunity that shields Trump from nearly all accountability Roberts has also pushed the Constitution to the right and handed conservatives wins on abortion guns the context voting rights and the regulatory state that scarcely could have been imagined years ago How has he gotten away with this while maintaining his reputation as a genial institutionalist The media and the legal public deserves a few blame By disguising hardball politics as constitutional theory Roberts capitalized on longstanding deferential traditions and incentives within media court-watchers and academics The residents less easily impressed has seen through this The Court s approval ratings have sunk to its lowest levels ever during Roberts s tenure Bulk importantly Roberts is an extraordinarily case bulldozer He plays space-age chess with precision he moves slowly steadily technically Even when he rewrites precedent and invents his own doctrines his moves have been plotted years in advance Preponderance importantly Roberts is an extraordinarily individual bulldozer He plays space-age chess with precision he moves slowly steadily technically Even when he rewrites precedent and invents his own doctrines his policies have been plotted years in advance Various colleagues may wish to go faster Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito would toss the lobster into boiling water oblivious to screams Roberts turns up the heat so slowly it never notices it s in a buttered roll The chief justice has a pattern Whenever Roberts makes a dramatic move in a event involving high stakes for democracy such as in Citizens United and Shelby County he favors a baby step first Call it the John Roberts two-step He is such a master that this sometimes earns him praise as a consensus builder even when the ultimate product is quite radical It s why an upcoming circumstance should have everyone who cares about fair representation deeply concerned The Roberts Court has already taken step one On the Roberts timetable On Wednesday the Roberts Court will hear Callais v Louisiana a occurrence involving Section Two of the Voting Rights Act that is as complicated as it is consequential The central question is whether it is constitutional to take race into account when it comes to redistricting The Voting Rights Act the the greater part achieving civil rights measure in the nation s history requires majority-minority seats to be drawn when a minority group is large enough geographically concentrated and faces racial vote dilution This protects minority communities from being cracked and scattered across multiple districts that all elect a white representative Section is what prevents lawmakers in a Southern state for example from splintering Black cities or communities into multiple pieces and drawing a racial gerrymander that produces an all-white map Without this protection it s entirely doable that minority representation would vanish across the South since those districts tend to be represented by Black Democrats this carries partisan implications as well The occurrence arrives amidst unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering nationwide and pressure from the White House ahead of the midterms to maximize GOP seats in every state under Republican trifecta control It s easy to imagine states beyond Louisiana including Alabama Mississippi Texas Georgia North Carolina and Tennessee taking a fresh look at their maps if the Court finds the majority-minority seats unconstitutional Callais closely follows a similar situation from Alabama Allen v Milligan from In that episode Roberts joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh surprised numerous by authoring a - decision that required Alabama to draw a second majority-minority congressional district Alabama over-reached in this affair assuming that the conservative supermajority might be ready to act on race neutrality Roberts sought this done on his timetable not Alabama s Related How SCOTUS erased the abuse of LGBTQ kids Here Kavanaugh provided the decisive vote and set up the next challenge in Callais In his brief concurrence he suggested that had Alabama made a different argument it might have won him over Then he helpfully explained what it would be for future litigants Perhaps Kavanaugh suggested Section Two s redistricting provisions might have an expiration date His concurrence carried an eerie whiff of Shelby County They echoed Roberts argument that things have changed in the South and the age-old refrain of Supreme Court racial recidivists Surely these special protections must stop sometime E ven if Congress in could constitutionally authorize race-based redistricting under Section for specific period of time the authority to continue race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future Kavanaugh wrote A bipartisan Congress did extend the Voting Rights Act nearly unanimously in But Alabama did not raise that temporal argument in this Court and I therefore would not consider it at this time At this time A more easily devoured trail hasn t been laid out since Hansel scattered breadcrumbs in the forest It was a curious argument A concurrence finding that Alabama legislators had passed an unconstitutional racially discriminatory map seems like an odd place to suggest that maybe the time had come to declare protections against official discrimination unnecessary But then again even in Shelby County Roberts used a situation that began when a small Alabama city redistricted a Black councilor out of office on maps that had not been precleared with the cabinet as his wagon to end preclearance and pronounce a new day of sunny racial harmony Louisiana recognized the invitation and hastily RSVP d Days after the court s holding Louisiana lawmakers showing themselves slightly more strategic minded than their Alabama counterparts cited the Kavanaugh concurrence as they fought against a new map at the Fifth Circuit Meanwhile as the court signaled how future protections might end Roberts was feted by the New York Times as a savior of the Voting Rights Act and voting rights That s not calling balls and strikes It s delivering a World Series to a gambling cartel while a retinue of sports reporters cover a totally different and wholly imaginary ballgame False modesty and Citizens United Roberts and Kavanaugh called the tune and knew the dance attempts well Roberts had perfected them in Citizens United and Shelby County Citizens United required a halfway step as well Two years before Roberts and Alito joined the court in late and early respectively a - decision in McConnell v Federal Polling Commission upheld nearly the entirety of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reforms as constitutional The conservative legal movement quietly laid the groundwork for a different decision with a different majority on the court Want more sharp takes on politics Sign up for our free newsletter Standing Room Only written by Amanda Marcotte now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts That opportunity arrived in Wisconsin Right To Life a narrower matter that argued the blackout on outside political ads days prior to an electoral process violated the First Amendment rights of an anti-abortion group that required to air issue ads in a senate race The law hadn t changed But the court had The conservative legal movement that funded the scenario and created the intellectual framework for them had also helped place the judges who would decide them on the bench Roberts two years after settling into the chief s chair and after emphasizing his respect for precedent before the Senate would then eviscerate a four-year old precedent on a campaign finance question Congress had deemed central to American democracy Roberts cast himself as a cautious moderate even as he rewrote the rulebook The First Amendment requires us to err on the side of protecting political speech rather than suppressing it he wrote He insisted the Court was not overturning McConnell We have no occasion to revisit that determination at present His modesty was false This was the first bite of the apple The key word Nowadays The decision sent the clear signal that five justices stood ready to take on the larger constitutional issues surrounding campaign finance It didn t require a mind reader to decode the chief s message Conservatives got busy preparing the development that would become Citizens United A fine first chop of the log Roberts would call a similar tune when the court slowly put an end to preclearance the greater part fundamental enforcement mechanism within the Voting Rights Act On April the th day of Barack Obama s presidency the court heard a episode that hardly appeared momentous A tiny neighborhood water district in the northwest corner of Austin Texas with an elected board sought to challenge preclearance which required an extra set of eyes on any changes to voting laws or poll procedures in the states with the bulk lengthy track records of bad behavior Two lower courts had disemboweled the district s request to escape preclearance and affirmed the larger question of its constitutionality citing a careful assessment of a -page congressional record built during the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act and Supreme Court precedent Yet during oral arguments the court s GOP appointees looked ready to scuttle the nation s the bulk effective civil rights litigation The chief justice in no rush negotiated a deal with the liberals instead Preclearance could continue for now but the water district could escape But the price the chief justice extracted proved steep The liberals needed to sign onto a Roberts-penned decision that faulted the preclearance formula for being old and outdated And it included dicta a nonbinding observation that can be cited as a persuasive authority in future litigation that planted the seeds for preclearance s demise The liberal justices concluded they had won the day They celebrated an imaginary supremacy But Roberts had dug a trench and set a trap He had suckered them into signing onto a much broader indictment aimed at the future viability of the Voting Rights Act Not in this circumstance but the next one The liberal justices considered they had won the day They celebrated an imaginary domination But Roberts had dug a trench and set a trap He had suckered them into signing onto a much broader indictment aimed at the future viability of the Voting Rights Act Not in this circumstance but the next one This is where Roberts gave birth to a fundamental principle of equal sovereignty among states The trouble with this principle is that it doesn t exist The cases he cited in fact concern a very different principle equal footing which secured equality among newly admitted states It has nothing to do with voting rights or any other rights Roberts created it with an ellipsis that edited out the actual law and created what can only be seen as a deliberate misapplication of precedent The Voting Rights Act Roberts wrote differentiates between the States despite our historic tradition that all the States enjoy equal sovereignty And here he cited the very first challenge to the law from South Carolina v Katzenbach when the court upheld its constitutionality The doctrine of the equality of States does not bar remedies for local evils which have subsequently appeared Except the actual occurrence upheld the Voting Rights Act in the very sentence Roberts used to claim the opposite How does he get away with turning up into down He cut the clauses he didn t like and called it law Here s the actual decision The doctrine of the equality of States invoked by South Carolina does not bar this approach for that doctrine applies only to the terms upon which states are admitted to the Union and not to the remedies for local evils which have subsequently appeared Four years later in Shelby County v Holder when Roberts and the court eviscerated preclearance in a -to- party line decision he would cite his own made up dicta as law As we made clear in Northwest Austin the fundamental principle of equal sovereignty remains highly pertinent in assessing subsequent disparate medication of States Liberals either didn t notice or underestimated his chutzpah and hubris If they lacked the foresight to understand Roberts s person long tournament or missed his invitation for another locality to challenge preclearance this time one that the court could not totally bail out one person the greater part certainly did Edward Blum the master matchmaker who determined the Texas litigants and would soon bring Shelby County to the court s attention That s a fine first chop of the log Blum explained reporters as he left the court that morning Hollowing out the Voting Rights Act The Roberts Court has been built with a majority of justices appointed by presidents who have lost the popular vote affirmed by a Senate itself built on minority rule and with two members Kavanaugh and Justice Amy Coney Barrett validated under dubious circumstances And whether gutting the Voting Rights Act enshrining gerrymanders or allowing a tsunami of corporate money to drown our elections the court s project has been the determined dismantling of democracy and the birth of a nation where your rights voice and access to the ballot box depend on where you live and once again the color of your skin Our greater part antidemocratic institution seems determined on creating and enforcing antidemocratic results while denying that it is an activist political institution Now in Callais with part one of the two-step complete Roberts could deliver something he has worked for his entire career Hollowing out the Voting Rights Act so that it still exists but cannot act We need your help to stay independent Subscribe this day to endorsement Salon s progressive journalism The big constitutional questions over Section date back even earlier than Roberts s days on the court They go all the way back to his first job in Washington as an aide in the Reagan Justice Department Soon after being hired Roberts a twentysomething Indiana boy who grew up in a small town built for whites only that resisted integration and advertised itself as a highly restricted home area was handed the voting rights portfolio The nation owed them gratitude Roberts just sought to declare the journey over Job one A battle over the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act A battle raged within the Reagan administration Moderates in the White House demanded to avoid a fight over the law and embrace a congressional compromise Roberts and hardliners at Justice yearned to draw a line between laws that had racial intent still bad or just racial effects pretty much OK Voting that was John s fight says Michael Carvin the veteran conservative litigator and longtime Roberts friend who came to Washington around the same time as the future chief Consistently John s fight He lost that one Sen Robert Dole R-Kan crafted a compromise Even a staunch segregationist like GOP South Carolina Sen Strom Thurmond read the room and went along And the DOJ warriors like Roberts and others including a young Alito learned a valuable lesson in patience When they arrived at the Supreme Court in the arguments they advanced in the s would carry the day not because things had changed in the South but because the arena and the players shifted from Congress and the White House into the courts That lesson If you want to change the law change the judges In the courts you didn t need senators to break a filibuster representatives or even the White House In the Supreme Court five like-minded conservatives would be more than enough Now that they have six plus the Congress and the White House John Roberts has all he necessities He has slowly and patiently two-stepped his way to everything he ever required As for the rest of us John Roberts delivered that message on C-SPAN in not long before Citizens United The largest part essential thing for the residents to understand is that we are not a political branch of ruling body he stated They don t elect us If they don t like what we are doing it s more or less just too bad Read more about this topic Thanks to Trump and the Supreme Court we re facing a legal emergency Donald Trump s new American Midnight is upon us Pam Bondi is Trump s mean girl The post John Roberts is slowly dismantling America appeared first on Salon com