Alito: There's No Way To Know If The President Is Racist

Willful ignorance is a key – maybe the key – to bad-faith jurisprudence. If you can pretend you don't experience reality the same way others do, you can rule any way you want.

No one knows this quite like Samuel Alito knows this.

The guy who a couple months back helped to green-light Texas Republicans' white supremacist electoral map by granting the presumption of good faith to those lawmakers also thinks there's no possible way to prove the president of the United States – who ran on an explicitly blood-and-soil white power agenda – holds racist views.

The Supreme Court's anti-constitutionalist majority on Thursday ruled in favor of the Trump regime's request to strip Haitians and Syrians of Temporary Protective Status, a big legal win for a regime that has done everything in its power to make the US whiter over these past two years. Alito and the Roberts Court's right wingers got around the thorny question of intent – why Haitians? – by doing what they always do: Weaponizing bad-faith legalism.

The Roberts Court Is Trying to Stop the Political Pendulum

The Republican Party is getting nervous about the midterms. The Republican justices on the Supreme Court are doing what they can to help.

Balls and StrikesBalls & Strikes

Alito wrote in Thursday's Court opinion that, well actually, there are many reasons a president and his administration would want to strip protective status from migrants escaping famine and violence in their home countries. Maybe, Alito said, a president would have economic reasons to use his personal paramilitary to storm into those migrants' communities, hunt them, arrest them, chain them, and throw them on a plane that will bring these families back to the places where they will face great peril even death.

Maybe that president cares so much about the American economy that he has no choice but to deport the most desperate migrant families. He surely takes no pleasure in doing so.

Ten years into the Trump era, Alito has the gall to tell the American public and his fellow SCOTUS justices that there are all manner of "race neutral justifications" for taking away protective status from the same Black migrants who have been disparaged by the president and his allies for years and years. That these imaginary "race neutral justifications" die on the legal vine if you paid even passing attention to the vice president's trafficking in white supremacist lies about Haitian migrants does not bother Alito one bit.

The Belligerent, Bad-Faith Bullshit of SCOTUS’s Major Questions Doctrine

Creating an impenetrable force field through which no progressive public policy could pass was always going to be a two-step process for the American right. And the second step is more infuriating – and for the left, more vexing – than the first. The first step in creating a right-wing

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

Alito takes his bad faith legalism a step further in this particularly odious opinion and excuses the president's inveighing against Haiti as a "shithole country" by saying yeah, it is a shithole country. Why else would Haitians flee to the US? Calling Haiti a shithole country is not racist, Alito suggests. It's only fact. The president is only stating facts, he says, presumably with the smirk of someone who knows exactly what he's doing.

This is the same Supreme Court justice who just a couple years ago told a documentarian that his legal philosophy boiled down to this: “One side or the other is going to win."

Elena Kagan pushed back on Alito's bad-faith bullshit with a veritable bullet point list of the ways in which the president has demonstrated his racist hatred against migrants, especially migrants with Black skin.

Kagan does little more than point out that this particular president is famous for going on TV every day and demanding an end to Black and brown immigration into the United States while begging European nations with majority-white populations to send their people to our shores. She does nothing but quote the president who has said immigrants poison the blood of the American people – a throwback white supremacist trope that went over the heads of Americans who are clueless about the history of blood-and-soil politics, the fuel with which this regime runs.

We’re Going To Need So Much Judicial Review

The stain of the Roberts Court must be scrubbed out of the national fabric. There’s really only one way to do that.

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

Kagan does not outline some complex legal argument that might be inscrutable for someone who lacks a law degree. She doesn't cite obscure SCOTUS precedent from a hundred years ago. She says, simply, here's how we know the president is a racist, and that his policies are driven by his lifelong racial animus. It's nothing if not straightforward.

Sometimes the Roberts Court's bad faith is slick, underhanded, even invisible. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's clumsy and laughable. That's what we got in Thursday's ruling against Haitian and Syrian migrants in the United States. My ten-year old daughter knows the president has publicly and gleefully promoted the end of nonwhite immigration, and Samuel Alito does not. I'm supposed to believe this. You are too.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.