John Roberts Has Positioned the Court to Help Republicans Rig the Midterms and Keep Trump in Control of Congress
Roberts Launched His Legal Career Targeting the Voting Rights Act
This morning, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two cases about Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – the part of that landmark legislation John Roberts spent hundreds of hours trying to limit when he launched his legal career. Few people know that because most coverage of this litigation does not mention it.
Just three years ago, Roberts signaled that the long-standing legal precedents that allowed Black Americans to challenge the dilution of their votes were in trouble. They were “controversial,” he said, but still binding law for now. In that case, the other five Republican appointees to the Court allowed maps drawn in Alabama – maps that three lower court judges found to be illegal under the Voting Rights Act – to be used in the 2022 midterm elections. They claimed it was too close to the election to redraw the maps to comply with Section 2. That decision was issued the first week of February and paved the way for similar maps drawn by Republican legislatures that diluted Black voting power to be used in Louisiana, Georgia, and Florida.
The result? Republicans took control of Congress, with four seats more than the 218 they needed. It was not the “red wave” Republicans had been hyping, and Mike Johnson would not have become Speaker of the House without the Roberts Court’s intervention. That election put an end to any further investigations into the violent insurrection Trump incited on January 6 and also allowed Republicans to block Biden’s legislative agenda.
After those midterms, Roberts took his pen to strike down considerations of race in college admissions, a ruling that foreshadows what the Court is about to do to crucial protections against white legislatures’ proclivity to minimize Black representation. In Louisiana, for example, more than one-third of the population is Black, but without the enforced protections of the Voting Rights Act, the legislature drew distorted congressional maps that mathematically and definitively create five majority-white districts and just one majority-Black district. Aside from assuring disproportionate white representation, these maps also secure Mike Johnson’s seat and leadership in the House.
And just last year, Roberts and his fellow Republicans transgressed long-standing legal precedents against racial gerrymandering by allowing South Carolina Republicans to remove more than 20,000 Black voters from their traditional voting district, in order to give Rep. Nancy Mace a safe seat in the 1st District along the Gullah Geechee shore. The Roberts Court claimed, again despite detailed findings from lower court judges, that the (Republican) legislature could create a racially disparate effect in its maps if its stated goal was to limit Democratic representation by moving Black voters’ districts.
The issue of racially disparate effects is precisely what Roberts sought relentlessly to exclude from Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act as he launched his legal and political career.
As I detail in my new book, Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights:
After choosing to be a kind of paid stagiaire to [William Rehnquist] the most regressive justice on the Supreme Court, John Roberts got the nod for a job at the very top of the Department of Justice to work as a special assistant to Attorney General of the United States William French Smith. Justice Rehnquist had called Ken Starr, Smith’s counsel, to recommend Roberts for a post in the leadership of the Justice Department. Smith and Starr hired Roberts and put him in charge of the Voting Rights Act reauthorization issues. Roberts had no actual experience working on voting rights, and his only seeming ‘qualification’ for the job was clerking for Rehnquist, who was a prominent opponent of voting rights.
From his new vantage point in the executive branch, Roberts seemed determined to do everything he could to preserve his judicial mentor’s ruling in Bolden and block Congress from amending the Voting Rights Act to nullify the judicially concocted discriminatory intent requirement that ignored disparate impacts on Black Americans. According to his close colleague Michael Carvin, Roberts was working sixty-five plus hours a week— writing arguments, developing talking points, and drafting op- eds on the Voting Rights Act. Such was his single-minded devotion to blocking Congress from restoring that law and his determination to exclude the effects on Black voters as proof of a violation.
If you think Roberts is going to do the right thing now–as Donald Trump pushes Texas and North Carolina to rig their maps to protect him from losing control of Congress–think again. That’s another reason why, in my opinion, the passage of Proposition 50 in California is so vital to help counter Republican efforts to block genuine majority rule in Congress.
And, remember, Roberts orchestrated the decisions that paved the way for Trump’s return to power with his unprecedented and counter-constitutional ruling giving Trump immunity from criminal prosecution last year. Then there’s the spate of shadow docket rulings Roberts has not dissented from, mowing down lower court orders that found Trump’s policy dictates are causing irreparable harm and are likely in violation of the Constitution or statutes or legal precedents or all three.
And let’s not forget that in 2013, Roberts struck down another key enforcement provision of the Voting Rights Act, unleashing waves of voter restrictions across the country. His dictate disregarded a mountain of congressional fact-findings on the need for preclearance to prevent precisely the democracy-destabilizing outcome he made possible through his arrogant use of the judicial office to impose his political agenda as binding law in spite of the will of our elected representatives.
John Roberts is not a fair umpire. He has become what I am calling a “Trumpire,” rewriting the law in ways that aid Trump and restrict our rights in alignment with the right-wing political agenda he whole-heartedly embraced as a pre-MAGA Reagan revolutionary. It’s a MAGA Court now and he is at the helm, acting in some ways more powerfully than a king, as the king-maker.
We are going to need new language to address what is about to become of the “rule of law” as it diverges dramatically from the rule of justice in voting rights and much, much more. And we are going to need to organize, like the No Kings march times ten!
What I’m Reading:
My book – this week marks my book tour, starting in Oakland and hopefully coming to a city near you soon!
How to plug into No Kings Day marches for our freedoms!
And, the Constitution.
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It makes me wonder how much Roberts got paid by Billionaire Trump and his Billionaire friends and associates.
Thank you, Lisa. I have had to confront the virulent white supremacy that was taught to me. It's still rife in way too many places.
I'm not giving up the conversations and efforts to bring light into this cruelty and darkness. I appreciate all you're doing. I've learned a lot