Surprised it took this long

[bigtree]

...for Clarence Thomas to embrace and promote the disparaging and dismantling of the civil rights protections his predecessor in the SC seat fought so successfully for.

Thomas is angling here against a unanimous 9-0 decision. MAGA activists on the Supreme Court are only just beginning their dismantling of federal protections Americans have relied on for decades to defend and preserve basic rights.

Clarence Thomas attacks Brown v. Board ruling amid 70th anniversary

Thomas attacked the Brown decision in a concurrence opinion that allowed South Carolina to keep using a congressional map that critics say discriminated against Black voters.

The court "took a boundless view of equitable remedies" in the Brown ruling, wrote Thomas, who in 1991 replaced Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall — the first Black Supreme Court Justice and the lead lawyer in the Brown case.

Those remedies came through "extravagant uses of judicial power" to end racial segregation in the 1950s and 60s, Thomas wrote.

Federal courts have limited power to grant equitable relief, "not the flexible power to invent whatever new remedies may seem useful at the time," he said, justifying his opinion to keep a predominantly white congressional district in South Carolina.
https://www.axios.com/2024/05/23/clarence-thomas-supreme-court-racial-segregation

Clarence Thomas Makes a Full-Throated Case for Racial Gerrymandering
In a startling concurrence, the justice faulted Brown v. Board of Education for empowering the court to limit racist redistricting.

The case at hand, Alexander, involves a South Carolina congressional district that was becoming competitive for Democrats. After the 2020 census, the GOP-controlled Legislature moved thousands of Black voters out of this district, and brought thousands of white voters into it. This population-shuffling shored up the district’s Republican lean, meeting the Legislature’s goal. Voting rights advocates sued, arguing that the redistribution of residents on the basis of race violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. A federal district court agreed and found the map unconstitutional.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court reversed the lower court, insisting that the Legislature cared about partisanship (which is allowed), not race (which is, in theory, disallowed). In the process, it effectively overturned precedent prohibiting lawmakers from using race as a proxy for partisanship in redistricting. Alito’s majority opinion also turbocharged the “presumption of legislative good faith,” better described as the presumption of white racial innocence. He directed lower courts to more or less ignore “circumstantial evidence” of racist intent when assessing these gerrymanders. The result is a new, nearly insurmountable bar for victims of racial gerrymandering: It will be virtually impossible for any plaintiff to prove that lawmakers targeted them because of their race rather than their assumed political beliefs. Legislatures may now aggressively dilute the voting power of Black communities by shifting them into districts where their votes will matter least.

“Redistricting remedies rest on the same questionable understanding of equitable power,” Thomas (wrote). If Brown was the diseased root, then the famed redistricting cases of the 1960s were the poisonous tree. In these rulings, SCOTUS outlawed malapportionment, a kind of gerrymandering that creates large population disparities between districts to lock certain groups out of political power forever. For instance, in 1960, the populations of Vermont’s House districts ranged from 38 people to 33,000 people. The vote of a resident in the smallest district counted 868 times more than that of a resident of the largest district. Many legislatures used malapportionment to dilute the votes of urban residents (who were more likely to be nonwhite), giving (white) rural voters outsized sway in the state House.

The tool was also deployed as a more direct instrument of racial discrimination. Virginia’s white supremacist Legislature, for instance, packed Black voters into a small number of districts and then spread white voters around many more districts. This tactic produced its intended result: After Brown, the Virginia Legislature voted to shut down all public schools rather than integrate them. The 21 state senators who voted for the measure represented fewer Virginians than the 17 senators who opposed it. That’s the combination of malapportionment and racial gerrymandering in action.

read more: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/05/supreme-court-south-carolina-redistricting-ruling-clarence-thomas-brown-v-board.html

Eric Slack @elderslack 1h
I’m very confused. Without Brown v Bd of Ed, Justice Thomas is not on the SC, not admitted to Yale Law School, not admitted to Holy Cross undergrad and never becomes Chairman of the EEOC. As Malcom X said “Who taught you to hate yourself?”

[magicarpet]

1. These Krishtun Fascist Jurists are taking a royal dump on the bench and then rubbing our noses in it.

[Biophilic]

2. This man is so appalling.

He is certainly doing his master’s service. How awful that we have come to this: the dismantling of the civil rights era. One of the things, that as an American, I was proud of after our horrible racist history. I thought it proved that a nation, and its people, could become better.