Tag Archives: civil rights

R.I.P. V.R.A.

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John Roberts, Chief Justice of the United States, has achieved his life goal. With the Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, he has killed the Voting Rights Act. Roberts made the destruction of the VRA of 1965 his lifelong crusade. His opposition to the Act dates back to his days as a law clerk for then Associate Justice William Rehnquist. Rehnquist notoriously wrote a memo in 1952 stating, “I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be re-affirmed.” Plessy was the infamous “separate but equal” case institutionalizing racism in public schools. It was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

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The Supremes: LGBTQ

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Supreme Court Building, exterior

Following its tradition of recent years, the Supreme Court of the United States spent the last few weeks of June releasing its most controversial decisions of the term. It then adjourned for its usual three-month vacation. This is part of a series of posts analyzing those decisions.

The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority did not end its assault on precedent with its new rules on abortion last term and affirmative action in the term just ended. In the eight years since the court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that the right to marry is a fundamental right guaranteed to same-sex couples by both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment the surviving dissenters in that case, Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Chief Justice John Roberts have been plotting revenge. Thomas, in his concurrence to last year’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health opinion stripping American women of their reproductive rights explicitly invited a fresh challenge to Obergefell.

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The Supremes: Affirmative Action

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Supreme Court Building, exterior

Following its tradition of recent years, the Supreme Court of the United States spent the last few weeks of June releasing its most controversial decisions of the term. It then adjourned for its usual three-month vacation. This is the first of a series of posts analyzing those decisions.

Continuing its steady march back to the 19th Century, the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court has effectively ended affirmative action on the basis of race in college admissions, a policy used for more than 40 years to make campuses more diverse. The two schools at the center of this decision, Harvard, America’s oldest private university, and the University of North Carolina, the oldest public one, had programs considered the gold standard in affirmative action plans.

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