The Roberts Court Is Letting the (Former) Confederate States Hang a “Whites Only” Sign on the Legislative Door: Part 1
John Roberts Lost Ronald Reagan’s Battle to Erase Black Representation But Used the Supreme Court to Give Trump Whites-Only Maps–Will He Lose the War?
For the past three weeks, I have been having nightmares about the ghouls of the racist confederacy within our nation that Chief Justice John Roberts has effectively resummoned in Louisiana v. Callais. In the same span, I have fielded near-daily calls about the waking nightmare the Roberts Court has unleashed by using that case to decimate the Voting Rights Act–the most important civil rights statute ever passed.
I confess I have found it difficult to write about the obvious evil consequences of that illegitimate ruling: enabling white-dominated legislatures in the South to bleach out Black representation under the pretext of “partisanship.”
Because it’s not okay. It’s deeply, terribly, and destructively immoral.
It is also a glaring sign of just how out of control and unjudicial the Roberts Court has become, openly usurping powers the Constitution explicitly grants to Congress to protect voting rights. The arrogance of John Roberts’ anti-voting-rights agenda is staggering, though it has likely not even reached its peak.
In the weeks since Callais, this faction of partisan political operatives on the nation’s highest court has repeatedly put its thumb on the scales of justice–over and over and over again–to benefit the Republican Party in this pivotal midterm election year. The Roberts Court issued this ruling knowing exactly how eagerly Southern legislatures would take up its obscene invitation to redraw their maps to suppress Black representation.
John Roberts may as well have ordered “Whites Only” signs to be printed and hung up on the doors of state legislatures in the South, just like the drinking fountains of yore. As my friend, the brilliant Mike Podhorzer, has dubbed it, this is a “neo-Confederate Court.”
Just look at how eagerly the Roberts Court has aided the party–and the super rich, regressive billionaires–that appointed it, to the disadvantage of Black Americans and our representative democracy. In February 2022, when Joe Biden was president, the Roberts Court blocked a lower court order requiring Alabama to redraw its congressional map, which had packed Black voters into a single district while creating six white-majority districts, despite the white population falling to 62%. The Roberts Court disingenuously claimed that the lower court’s January ruling came too close to the election to allow the maps to be changed, invoking what is known as the Purcell doctrine.
By allowing the 2022 midterms to proceed with maps in violation of the VRA, the Roberts Court limited Black representation, helped Republicans take control of Congress, and thwarted Biden’s legislative agenda. Then, in 2023, the Court ruled that Alabama did, in fact, have to create a second Black-majority district. But by then, the damage was done–and the Court quickly pivoted to impugn Biden’s standing in other ways, deploying its freshly invented “major questions doctrine,” to block his modest student debt forgiveness. It’s a fictional legal standard we mysteriously almost never hear mentioned when it comes to Trump’s radical dictates over the past 16 months.
Now, in 2026, with Trump openly demanding that congressional maps be redrawn to shield him from the threat of a Democratic-led House, and thereby accountability for his actions, the Roberts Court has flipped its own script. It has decreed that Alabama doesn’t have to have that new Black-majority district and neither do Louisiana or Tennessee, even though we are months closer to the primary and general elections than back in 2022.
Not only that, the Roberts Court didn’t even mention Purcell, even though citizens in Louisiana, for example, were already actively voting in an election. Meanwhile, when Democrats in Virginia attempted to counter these machinations by Trump and his minions, the Roberts Court allowed more than three million votes to be canceled out by another Republican-dominated court in Virginia.
There can be no doubt anymore that John Roberts is not a fair umpire. He is bent by his bias, his profound hostility toward the Voting Rights Act as he revealed in the Shelby case in 2013.
With Callais, Roberts is shamelessly giving himself a win in a battle that he knows, with every muscle in his body, he lost as a special lawyer during the Reagan administration.
My friend Podhorzer asked me if I was going to write about the parallels between this scenario and Moby Dick. In Herman Melville’s great American novel, Captain Ahab is consumed by rage after the huge whale, Moby Dick, tears away one of his legs. Ahab’s obsessive pursuit of the whale that had once bested him ultimately succeeds, in a sense, though the end result is catastrophic loss. He harpoons Moby Dick, only to be dragged to his death by the rope, after which the whale smashes his ship, drowning the entire crew except for a lone survivor.
Roberts appears similarly unable to accept that he once lost his fight over Section 2 of the VRA and became obsessed with winning at any cost–even if the cost was losing the country itself. Catching the whale and crushing the voting rights of Black Americans may feel like a victory to Roberts today, but buried within this retrograde victory of faux color-blindness are the exact ingredients for an enormous loss for Roberts.
Americans across the South and beyond are furious. Voters see the debasement of our nation under an utterly corrupt and incompetent president–and a complicit Roberts Court–and they are rising up. People are clamoring for real change, demanding that our voices be heard.
The court of public opinion is already delivering its verdict. John Roberts, who infamously said that if the public doesn’t like a ruling, “it’s just too bad,” is about to find out what can happen when you finally catch the whale. More and more people have no confidence in the fairness of the Roberts Court, which is acting as though it stands above the law itself–dictating changes to our rights in defiance of the popular will and dismantling protections that thousands of our representatives voted for and millions of Americans struggled for decades to secure.
Despite Roberts’ gaslighting that the court is not partisan, more and more of the public see these rulings for exactly what they are: hyperpartisan, imperious, illegitimate, and deeply racist. Together, we are going to rebuke and disempower operatives in judicial robes who dare to act as unaccountable kings, including “John Crow” Roberts himself.
What I’m Reading:
Reviews of “Supremacy: How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People,” the forthcoming book by Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan
Article III of the Constitution which gives the Supreme Court jurisdiction over a few narrow areas, like disputes between states, but gives Congress the ultimate power to determine exceptions to that rule: “In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”
Great work MS Graves. I appreciate your insights and clarity.
Powerful analogy, Lisa, of Moby Dick.
Great writing and substantial insight.