{"id":376,"date":"2026-06-05T19:13:50","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T19:13:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=376"},"modified":"2026-06-05T19:13:50","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T19:13:50","slug":"the-supreme-court-has-invented-a-right-to-discriminate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=376","title":{"rendered":"The Supreme Court Has Invented a Right to Discriminate"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

This week, <\/span>the Roberts Court made clear that when it comes to drawing congressional districts, Black voters have no rights that anyone is bound to respect.<\/p>\n

Read more The Old Campaign Playbook Is Dead<\/a><\/p>\n

For years, Alabama, where a quarter of the population is Black, had defied federal court orders, including one reaffirmed by the Supreme Court itself in 2023, to create a second majority- or plurality-Black congressional district. Alabama\u2019s reasoning for not doing so was simple: Its Republican legislators didn\u2019t want to, and they didn\u2019t believe the Roberts Court would make them. \u201cThe Supreme Court ruling was 5\u20134,\u201d the state House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter said about the 2023 decision. \u201cSo there\u2019s just one judge that needed to see something different.\u201d<\/p>\n

The state was making a gamble that the Roberts Court was more partisan than sincere. And it paid off: On Tuesday, the Court allowed Alabama to proceed with a map that diminishes Black voting power to the advantage of Republicans. For all the Court\u2019s pretenses\u2014all its insistence on the rule of law, precedent, and good faith\u2014many critics and supporters of the Roberts Court see the institution as an appendage of the Republican Party. The only thing that distinguishes the critics from the supporters is whether they think that is a good thing.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlabama willfully drew a map that flouted the District Court\u2019s preliminary injunction and hoped that this Court would eventually see things its way,\u201d Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. \u201cAfter today, it is hard to call Alabama\u2019s cynical gambit anything other than a success, and the Court\u2019s rewarding of Alabama\u2019s behavior anything other than a blow to the rule of law.\u201d<\/p>\n

The majority opinion was unsigned. In it, the judges argued that the lower court \u201cfailed to follow our instruction\u201d in ordering the creation of the new district. This was a reference to the April decision in Louisiana v Callais<\/em>, in which Justice Samuel Alito announced that \u201crace and politics are so intertwined\u201d that there are almost no circumstances under which the Fifteenth Amendment\u2019s prohibition on racial discrimination in voting actually applies.<\/p>\n

Now here was an example of exactly what Alito was talking about. \u201cStates are free to decide for themselves whether last-minute changes to an election are in their best interests,\u201d the justices wrote this week. If a Republican legislature decides that a redistricting plan to suppress the power of Black voters is \u201cin their best interests,\u201d they may proceed.<\/p>\n

The implications of this case go far beyond one congressional district in one state. In Callais<\/em>, Alito issued a classic Alito disclaimer: insisting he was not doing the thing he was about to do. The Court, he wrote, was not effectively nullifying Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act when it determined that Louisiana drawing a second black-majority district (out of six total, in a state that is a third Black) was an \u201cunconstitutional racial gerrymander.\u201d This week\u2019s ruling on Alabama makes explicit what was merely implied in Callais<\/em>. The Court\u2019s logic may apply only to districting for now\u2014but there is no obvious reason to limit its application to that. The Roberts Court has replaced the Fifteenth Amendment\u2019s ban on racial discrimination in voting with a right to engage in racial discrimination in voting.<\/p>\n

Theoretically, <\/span>Callais<\/em> was a statutory case about the Voting Rights Act\u2019s ban on voting provisions that have the purpose or effect of discriminating against Black voters. That test, adopted by Congress in the 1980s (and opposed by Chief Justice John Roberts when he was an attorney for the Reagan Justice Department), was meant to prevent discrimination by actors careful enough to hide their intent. In Callais<\/em>, the Court ruled that discrimination was fine because Louisiana argued that its purpose was partisan and not racist.<\/p>\n

But in the Alabama case, the federal-district-court panel, which included two Trump appointees, had already determined that lawmakers had intentionally<\/em> discriminated against Black voters. The district court \u201cbent over backwards, taking every possible explanation for why the state did what they did,\u201d Kareem Crayton, a voting-rights expert with the left-leaning Brennan Center told me. \u201cAnd they still concluded, Oh no, there\u2019s no other way to understand this except for a racial intent<\/em>.\u201d Alabama\u2019s plan was \u201ctainted by intentional race-based discrimination,\u201d the district ccourt found, and the legislature was attempting to \u201crob Black Alabamians of an equal opportunity under the law to elect candidates of their choice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more What Dogs See That We Can\u2019t<\/a><\/p>\n

Fortunately for those legislators, the justices were waiting to drive the getaway car. Crayton said that the decision to allow Alabama to ignore the lower court\u2019s ruling was shocking. \u201cOut of all the cases you can talk about during the civil-rights movement, where the state of Alabama, state of Texas, all these states were committed to Jim Crow, none of them that I know of had been at the Supreme Court where the Supreme Court says, It’s okay if you just choose to defy a federal order.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

This week\u2019s decision is important because intentional discrimination is not just banned by the Voting Rights Act, but by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. When the Roberts Court says that the lower court\u2019s ruling \u201cfailed to follow our instruction,\u201d it is referencing Alito\u2019s argument that partisanship cannot be separated from race. Even if a court finds evidence of intentional discrimination, therefore, the Supreme Court may simply ignore it on the grounds that the discrimination in question is merely partisan and therefore acceptable. This turns Callais<\/em> into something much broader than it purported to be: a finding that the Constitution permits not only unintentional racial discrimination, but intentional racial discrimination, as long as there is also a partisan pretext for engaging in that discrimination.<\/p>\n

The Court\u2019s ruling amounts to a total inversion of the Civil War amendments, which make no such exceptions for racial discrimination in the name of partisanship. Indeed, as I have written before, that would have made absolutely no sense at the time the amendments were adopted, when white-supremacist Democrats were disenfranchising Black Republicans. Race and partisanship were even more intertwined then than they are today, given that the Democrats were then the party of the defeated Confederates.\u00a0 If the Fifteenth Amendment did not bar partisan-motivated disenfranchisement, the amendment would not have changed anything at all. . Indeed, the entire purpose of the amendments was to ensure that Black people could use the ballot as a means of self-defense against politicians who would deny them their basic, fundamental constitutional rights if they did not have to answer to them as a political constituency. The Roberts Court has thus rewritten the Civil War amendments to include a constitutional right to discriminate against Black people.<\/p>\n

This is a racist absurdity in addition to being an impossible read of the Constitution, which is perhaps why the Roberts Court has buried it under so many layers of obfuscation. The Court has invented a right to discriminate\u2014as long as you provide a political pretext\u2014that not only does not exist in the Constitution, but is explicitly prohibited by the Constitution.<\/p>\n

The absurdities continue. According to the majority, anyoneanyone alleging that a map is discriminatory must provide an alternative map that provides the same outcome: The plaintiff\u2019s map \u201cmust meet all the State\u2019s legitimate districting objectives\u2019 \u2018just as well\u2019 as the State\u2019s own map,\u201d the opinion reads. In this case, that \u201clegitimate\u201d objective is the creation of safe Republican districts. So the burden is on the victims of intentional discrimination to make sure that the people discriminating against them get what they want anyway.<\/p>\n

This logic would not have barred any of the Jim Crow voting devices that the Roberts Court frequently congratulates itself and the nation for overcoming. In the aftermath of Reconstruction, white-supremacist Democrats imposed superficially race-neutral requirements such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses. The approach taken by Alito and the Roberts Court would have found all of these measures constitutional.<\/p>\n

Frederick Douglass wrote that \u201cthe elective franchise\u201d was \u201cthe one great power by which all civil rights are obtained, enjoyed, and maintained under our form of government, and the one without which freedom to any class is delusive if not impossible.\u201d The purpose of the Fifteenth Amendment was to ensure that Black voters could not again be denied their freedoms so that politicians did not have to heed their objections, to provide what Douglass called a \u201cwall of fire for his protection.\u201d But the Constitution has few defensesagainst a majority of justices willing to ignore it or twist it to its exact opposite purpose.<\/p>\n

Read more You Might Soon Own a Piece of SpaceX<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alabama gambled on the Court\u2019s partisanship, and won.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":375,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ideas"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Supreme Court Has Invented a Right to Discriminate - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=376\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Supreme Court Has Invented a Right to Discriminate - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Alabama gambled on the Court\u2019s partisanship, and won.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=376\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-06-05T19:13:50+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=376#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=376\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"The Supreme Court Has Invented a Right to Discriminate\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-06-05T19:13:50+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=376\"},\"wordCount\":1475,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=376#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/06\\\/a5f50dbdfc05c160e47f3c9aa9179119.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Ideas\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=376#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=376\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=376\",\"name\":\"The Supreme Court Has Invented a Right to Discriminate - 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