The John Crow Roberts Court majority is colluding with Republicans to steal the midterms ... and they're not even hiding hiding it

They've told you who they are. Believe them.

This is exactly the ending I expected.

In an unsigned order, the John Crow Roberts court has effectively decreed that only Republicans can gerrymander their states to lock in partisan political control of federal and state elected offices. Louisiana can do it, literally while people are voting. Alabama can do it, despite this same court having ruled just a couple of years ago that their maps were unlawful racial gerrymanders. (Apparently, they’ve since read the polls about Republican prospects in November and changed their minds.) Tennessee can do it while literally locking Black elected officials out of the chamber while they vote to strip away Black political access. Texas can do it, too, and did so despite it not being a census year — setting the precedent the other states have followed. You know who can’t do it? Virginia. Despite 3 million residents of the state telling them to.

Virginia Democrats went to the John Crow court somehow expecting relief, or at least consistency with the Roberts principal that racial gerrymandering is bad but political gerrymandering is good (when it helps Republicans.) Apparently, if it stands to help Democrats, political gerrymandering — which the Virginia effort explicitly was — is not happening. Not on John Crow’s watch.

The ruling was short and dispassionate. There were no high minded and flowery attempts to cloak the hypocrisy in constitutional mumbo jumbo. Basically, the Roberts court said to Virginia: come back when you have a map that helps our friends.

The message is loud and clear: to hell with Democratic voters. Even 3 million of them can’t make this court treat every American equally. Because this imminently corrupt court must have Republican rule in order for the financial windfalls of its most unethical members to survive intact. If true oversight ever came to Washington, some of these justices might have to answer for the ways in which they and their families have enriched themselves at the expense of the American people, American democracy, and the Constitution they’ve brutally beaten to a pulp.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. John Glover Roberts is presiding over the most nakedly corrupt Supreme Court majority in the institution’s history. The brilliance and temperance of the three women justices in the minority only shames him more.

The villainous chief justices: Roger Taney (left) and John Glover Roberts (right)

When history looks back, if history still exists and hasn’t been swallowed by apartheid tech AI, John Glover Roberts and Roger Taney will stand together in infamy. No courts have presided over the loss of more rights and freedoms than those administered by these two historical villains. Chief Justice Taney established the notion that African Americans — enslaved and free alike — could not be citizens, and therefore no rights that white men need respect; and that slavery could not be prohibited in America. Chief Justice Roberts has presided over the principle that Black Americans, despite being citizens, need have no political representation of their own choosing, and no political power to defend themselves against racist policies, because to John Glover Roberts, racism stopped existing sometime before the Voting Rights Act was passed (if it ever existed at all) making the VRA an unnecessary piece of legislation that needlessly shames the formerly Confederate South.

Roberts has spent a lifetime trying to kill the voter access law he hates, and apparently, the Reconstruction Amendments that caused its necessity in the first place. Roberts has attacked each of them in turn: aiming at the 14th Amendment on behalf of his preferred presidential candidate in 2024 by essentially erasing Section 3 of the 14th Amendment which bars insurrectionists from running for or serving in federal office without a congressional waiver.

Next up on the hit list was the 15th Amendment’s demand that access to the ballot not be abridged on the count of race. To kill that one, John Crow handed Sam Alito the knife with which to cut out the remaining innards of the Voting Rights Act that were left after his own Shelby vs. Holder mauling in 2013, to punish the country for electing Barack Obama as president.

The fact that the Callais case was brought to the court by a 2020 election denier whose goals on January 6, 2021 when he himself was at the Capitol participating in the “protest” were belatedly achieved by the Roberts court in the Trump v. U.S. case should not be lost on anyone.

Possibly soon, Roberts will also sink the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, too — having allowed Alito to weaken the privacy provisions by wiping Roe v. Wade off the books in 2022. His only apparent concern when it comes to equal justice under law as proscribed in what’s left of the 14th is that big corporations, whom he and his fellow Republicans deem to be “people” and the super wealthy are granted a kind of super-citizenship, such that their rights and power matter more than that of any American, though much, more than the people who look like, and vote like, Barack Obama.

God help us if and when John Crow gets on to dismantling Amendment 13. My guess is, he’ll make that the rare decision authored by Uncle Clarence, who will without a shred of irony, write himself back into plantation slavery in the hopes that he’ll get to serve in the house where the sweets are.

Still from the film Django Unchained. Included for no reason at all.

Collusion

If a Jan 6 insurrectionist from Louisiana brings a case to the court where the chief justice who deleted Article 3 of the 14th Amendment from the Constitution so that an insurrectionist from the justice’s preferred party could run for president despite attempting a coup, assigns the ruling to a justice who flies the flags of insurrectionists on his household lawn; and the concurrence is written by a justice whose wife was literally one of the coup plotters, wouldn’t that be considered collusion? And if these justices appear to be colluding with the plaintiffs in the cases they accept, and with the people financing the ongoing coup against our democracy to try to install a technocratic fascist dictatorship dependent on continued Republican control — which clearly is the sole focus and goal of the chief justice … how is any of that legal? And why should the State of Virginia feel obligated to pay it the least bit of attention or deference?

If Virginia was wise, they would proceed with the maps of their choosing, precisely the way Alabama did, and keep it pushing, knowing they would actually be following the will of 3 million Virginians. And should Democrats take back control of the House and Senate, impeaching John Roberts, Sam the Scam Alito, Clarence Thomas and the rest of this 6-person court mafia should be job one — even before impeaching Trump again (and Hegseth and RFK Jr.)

Any Democrat taking this rotten court seriously at this point is too foolish and weak to be of any use to us. Like Harriet Tubman, some of these weaklings need to be left behind while we’re rushing to freedom.

An F-You from beyond the grave

Medgar Evers, the American hero who the racist regime’s in-house war criminal Pete Hegseth is trying to strip from a battleship, received a posthumous law degree (his dream) from a Mississippi college. It was NOT Ole Miss. But the conferral was a fitting middle finger for the man who gave his life at 37 years of age trying to win basic dignity and freedom for Black people in Mississippi. Yet in the state where he fought and died for the franchise, the governor and state legislature are threatening to strip the lone seat held by a Black Mississippian from congress. This would mean that a state that is one-third Black would have ZERO Black representation in Congress. This while Pete Hegseth — the most unqualified secretary of defense in U.S. history, continues to threaten to strip Medgar Evers’ name off of a battleship named in his honor.

The USNS Medgar Evers

If only Hegseth would spend more time figuring out how to keep our battle ships out of the Straight of Hormuz and less time on abject racism and confederate worship we’d be better off as a country, despite having a president who openly states that he doesn’t spend one second thinking about the financial situation of ordinary Americans.

An F-You from the witness seat

While Trump gives the middle finger to ordinary Americans, watch New Orleanian Marshan Camese dismantle the Republican politicians who are eliminating Black Democratic representation in Louisiana.

And here is Mr. Camese explaining why he said what he said, and the smoke he also has for Democrats in this moment.

Amen, Mr. Camese. Amen.

We addressed this issue on The Joy Reid Show this week. If you missed it, take a look and listen: