Furious NY Times writer lashes out as he sees US plummet to 'apartheid'

The U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing majority unraveled more than a half-century of corrective action and cleared the way for a return to American apartheid, according to a New York Times columnist.

The court's conservatives – three of whom were appointed by President Donald Trump – have chiseled away at the landmark Voting Rights Act, which was explicitly intended to correct historical discrimination against Black Americans and other minority groups, and Times columnist Jamelle Bouie argued they have ignored the original intent of the Constitution.

"The Voting Rights Act put the final nail in the coffin of American apartheid and opened the door to something that looked worthy of the name democracy," he wrote.

But he went on, "With its decision in Louisiana v. Callais last week, the Republican-appointed supermajority on the Supreme Court has delivered the latest in a string of decisions — stretching back to Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 — that have weakened the Voting Rights Act’s ability to stop racial discrimination in voting and to secure fair representation in both Congress and state legislatures."

"Led by Chief Justice John Roberts, the conservative justices have sidelined lawmakers, invented doctrines and ignored their own rules and procedures in a relentless drive to trim the Voting Rights Act beyond all recognition," he added.

The court gave GOP-led states in the former Confederacy the tools to destroy majority-minority legislative districts under the cover of partisan gerrymandering, which Justice Samuel Alito made clear in his majority opinion was a legitimate purpose for state legislators. Bouie noted the concurring opinions took whacks at the concept of equal protection.

"Descriptive representation, as it is known, is not perfect; race alone does not guarantee that a lawmaker will act in the interest of his or her community," Bouie wrote. "But the record suggests that in places where racial polarization is the norm, where the legacy of Jim Crow segregation shapes the political and social landscape, the opportunity provided by a majority-minority district can mean the difference between some representation and none at all."

The Roberts court considers those districts as simply "racial entitlement," and Bouie said the conservative majority placed a state's purported right to engage in racial gerrymandering above Black Americans' right to choose their own representation.

"In the name of a colorblind Constitution and the equal protection of the laws, then, the Supreme Court has given the green light to a gleeful attempt to end Black political representation at the state and federal level," he wrote. "And as long as there isn’t clear evidence of intentional discrimination — a standard that would have been difficult to prove at the height of Jim Crow, which rested on the same fiction of facial neutrality — it passes constitutional muster."

Lawmakers in Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi are already planning special legislative sessions to blot out the majority-minority districts in their states, which Bouie argued would roll back some of the rights defined in the 14th and 15th amendments.

"It is perverse that this Supreme Court has used both amendments to facilitate what might become the largest reduction in Black representation at the federal and state level since the end of Reconstruction and the 'redemption' of the South," he wrote. "Words meant to secure the political equality of all Americans are being raised as weapons to deprive them of just that."

"Here, we see the problem with conservative 'colorblindness,'" Bouie added. "A constitution that doesn’t see color — a constitution that treats all classifications as one and the same in a country defined by its sordid history of racial subordination — is a constitution that cannot see group inequality. And worse, it is a constitution that reifies this inequality through its willful blindness to the plain realities of our society. Liberty for those who profit from the cruel legacies of our past, endless struggle for those crushed under their weight."

He added, "If the Supreme Court is going to act as a partisan institution — as a super-legislature whose judgments override the decisions of voters on the thin basis of ideology — then the only path worth taking is to discipline and transform the court with all the tools Congress has at its disposal under the Constitution.

"Beyond court reform, Americans have to reacquaint themselves with constitutional thinking — with the idea that we, the people, make constitutional meaning. To the extent that the Supreme Court claims broad authority to say what our Constitution means, it is in large part because we have given this authority to them through our indifference."