Judge Brown's oral argument hearing

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson spoke up in one of her first oral hearings at the Supreme Court. Apparently, she is not going to be shy. On Tuesday, oral arguments were made in a dispute over whether Alabama’s racial redistricting plan is legal or not.

The case, Merrill v. Milligan, asks if Alabama has to create a second majority-Black congressional district. The state and probably the right-wing majority on the court will say no. The radical right argument is that the Voting Rights Act’s requirement to do so is unconstitutional.

A WaPo opinion piece comments:

First, some background: Republicans have been telling themselves a useful fiction, namely that racism has vanished, and any attempt to teach about the enduring effects or to remedy enduring discrimination is unfair to White people and is unconstitutional. We see the phenomenon in their contrived war against “critical race theory” in schools (even though it not taught to children).

.... The result [of the Civil Rights movement] was, among other things, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which specifically targeted measures that discriminated against Black voters in the South.

And that brings us to Jackson on Tuesday. Mark Joseph Stern writes for Slate:

In a series of extraordinary exchanges with Alabama Solicitor General Edmund LaCour, Jackson explained that the entire point of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments was to provide equal opportunity for formerly enslaved people, using color-conscious remedies whenever necessary to put them on the same plane as whites.

Jackson took her colleagues through the history of the Civil War amendments, revisions to the Voting Rights Act in 1982 and even the Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction from 1866. Jackson informed her colleagues: “The legislator who introduced [the 14th] amendment said that ‘unless the Constitution should restrain them, those states will all, I fear, keep up this discrimination and crush to death the hated Freedman.’ ” Jackson observed, “That’s not a race-neutral or race-blind idea in terms of the remedy.”

The right-wing’s fixation on a “colorblind” society serves to strip Congress of the power under the 14th Amendment to address discrimination. The right-wing justices are so determined to show the Constitution to require their “colorblind” result that they’ve ignored the history, meaning and intent of the document they claim to revere.

The court’s six-justice conservative majority has shown repeatedly that it has the votes to achieve the radical, partisan outcomes it desires, so it need not make convincing arguments — or even coherent ones (see it’s ruling overturning abortion rights). That’s what makes Jackson’s remarks so effective. Essentially, she said, “I’m making sure everyone understands what is going on here.”

Arguments like that are probably noy going to make any difference in the outcome. Alabama will be able to limit the influence of Black voters by gerrymandering. As the opinion itself points out, the six radical right Republican judges not not need to make convincing or even coherent arguments. All they need to do is vote for the radical right imperative in this case, which is taking power from voters and giving it to increasingly radicalized, anti-democratic Republican state legislatures.

Some people complain that the US has never been a democracy, citing things like the Senate and electoral college, both of which are inherently anti-democratic. Maybe so. But if they complained about insufficient democracy (voter power) before, they should expect even less going forward. Republican Party elites are taking power from citizens and giving it to themselves. This is an anti-democratic power grab, pure and simple.