Roberts' Rules

And the attack on voting

I am beyond fury at the betrayal of basic human rights and racial justice in Louisiana v. Callais, in which the Scurrilous SCOTUS Six have essentially ripped up what little remained of the Voting Rights Act with the effect, the desired effect, that voting rights for racial and ethic minorities, their hopes, their dreams, of actual representation, have been set back to where they were in 1964 when bigoted white-supremacist gerrymandering was everyday practice at least across broad swaths of the country if not everywhere.

Furious, but not surprised. No, not surprised.

We’ve been watching this coming step by step for years as the increasingly-reactionary SCOTUS has chipped and sliced away at targets including affirmative action as well as voting, at what were for a time standard basic protections for equal justice for racial and ethnic minorities.

I saw the predetermined conclusion 19 years ago, back in 2007, in the case Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (also known as the PICS case), which was about using race as a factor in assigning students to schools. In his ruling opinion, John Roberts wrote that “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

As I said at the time, that farcical libel on logic amounted to the Supreme Court declaring as a basis for future judgment that the way to end racism is to pretend it doesn’t exist. (Or, as I’ve also expressed it, saying the best way to drive from DC to NYC is to park at some random spot on I-95 and declare it to be Times Square while pointing at a couple of trees and insisting they are the Twin Towers.)

To the degree that John Roberts and the faction of the Court for which he spoke and speaks believes that is a standard connected to the real world, they are not only racist but also delusional. And embracing that delusion, demanding that we act as if it was true, is exactly what the Roberts Court has been about all along, a project which the Whitest House of The Orange Overlord has enthusiastically endorsed and now celebrates.

And now we are being forced to live in that delusion.

I know, I know, I KNOW that at some point, at some point, this will turn around, at some point we as a people will realize what we have done and have become and we will if I can use what is thought of as a religious term repent and recover our sense of justice as an unrealized goal worth striving for in more than slogans and greeting card sentiments.

Please know that by that I do not in any underestimate or fail to recognize the years-long, on-going, and continuing struggles of the people and organizations in the fight for racial and ethnic justice - especially all those people who are for the most part the grunts in the trenches, whose names we will never hear, but without whose work and resilience there would be no progress at all.

What I envision, rather, is a time when we as a nation, as a society, as a whole, will find the notion of people like John Roberts and the rest of the Scurrilous Six being in the positions of power which they now occupy utterly intolerable.

I am naive enough still to believe in the line about the moral arc of the universe. But I confess that right now I feel that old nagging fear that these aging bones will not live to see anything like that day.