Alito: There's No Way To Prove These Jim Crow Electoral Maps Are Racist

The anti-constitutionalist jurists comprising a majority of the land’s highest court, working directly for corrupt billionaire benefactors and using bad-faith legal arguments to unwind the human rights gains of the 20th Century, are now telling fellow jurists to ignore all evidence of bad-faith political maneuvering and assume the nation’s radicalized, anti-democracy political party is operating in impeccably good faith. 

It’s a lot to take in, I know, but it’s exactly what happened on Thursday when John Roberts and the captured institution we call the United States Supreme Court once again saved the Republican Party by green lighting the most virulently racist electoral maps ever conceived. Texas Republicans’ Jim Crow-style gerrymander of their already-gerrymandered state – which came at the request of their increasingly sleepy and senile god-king – dilutes the electoral power of brown and black populations in ways that shocked even the Trump-appointed district judge who struck down the maps as beyond the constitutional pale. 

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The fascist bat signal lit up the night sky and the Roberts Court came to the rescue, with Samuel Alito – an insurrectionist sympathizer and very clearly an enemy of the United States – swooping in to chastise the district courts and ruling that the Texas GOP could move forward with the maps designed to add upwards of six Republican House seats in 2026 (I maintain Republicans have no chance of retaining a majority, though they could reduce a massive Democratic House majority to something smaller and less likely to hold in 2028 and 2030). 

Samuel Alito’s Bad Faith Has Been Laid Bare

Alito was recently caught being honest about his radical judicial philosophy. That’s good.

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

Alito in his opinion – dripping with disdain both for constitutional rule and the judicial branch itself – said the district court judge who ruled against the Jim Crow maps designed by Texas Republicans “failed to honor the presumption of legislative good faith by construing ambiguous direct and circumstantial evidence against the legislature.” 

Alito continued: 

Because of the correlation between race and partisan preference, litigants can easily use claims of racial gerrymandering for partisan ends. To prevent this, our precedents place the burden on the challengers ‘to disentangle race and politics’ when the asserted reason for a map is political, it is critical for challengers to produce an alternative map that serves the State’s allegedly partisan aim just as well as the map the State adopted. Although respondents’ experts could have easily produced such a map if that were possible, they did not, giving rise to a strong inference that the State’s map was indeed based on partisanship, not race. Neither the duration of the District Court’s hearing nor the length of its majority opinion provides an excuse for failing to apply the correct legal standards as set out clearly in our case law.

In other words, according to Alito’s twisted legal logic, no one can argue against a gerrymander unless one is able to prove without a doubt that the redistricting is being done with clear racial animus, with the unambiguously-stated goal of making black and brown people’s votes count less, or not at all.

It’s similar bad-faith reasoning that saves police from being thrown in jail for gunning down people of color on camera. If you can’t prove racist intent, you have nothing. Racist intent, conveniently for Alito and the Court’s far-right majority, is impossible to prove save for a text thread in which a Texas lawmaker explicitly says, "Hey guys, let's dilute the vote of people of color in our state via gerrymander. We can talk about our very racist scheme after lunch today."

It’s a fun little trick Alito and Clarence Thomas and Roberts have used that gels nicely with the SCOTUS majority’s political preferences. 

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 backstop against

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

The good-faith interpretation of the Texas gerrymanders – or any Republican gerrymander, for that matter – is that it’s being done for partisan advantage. This, according to the SCOTUS majority, is a perfectly valid reason to create new House districts. It’s why they’ll let California's gerrymander stand (the difference being California's gerrymander does not discriminate on the basis of race and was approved by voters). That those red state districts are drawn in absurd shapes to carefully carve out population centers with a high concentration of people of color is never factored into Alito’s analysis because that would undermine the whole exercise. Acknowledging that cities and counties with heavy black and brown populations that vote overwhelmingly Democrat would give away the game and make the right’s pro-gerrymandering arguments invalid, even laughable. They are laughable, of course, but that doesn’t matter as long as the bad guys have a supermajority on the only judicial body that matters. 

Though it may shock the conscience to read a SCOTUS majority opinion replete with such intellectual dishonesty, it shouldn't come as a surprise coming from a body that has for years said racism in the United States is dead. Roberts and his majority have slowly drowned the Voting Rights Act under the guise that racism has been solved in America. We had a black president, after all. If anything, right-wing SCOTUS justice have said, white people in the US might be a beleaguered minority suffering the indignities of systemic discrimination as spelled out in DEI policies.

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan wrote the dissent to Alito's wildly unconstitutional green lighting of Texas' Jim Crow electoral maps, pointing out in respectful (too respectful) terms that everything Alito wrote about the majority's decision was bullshit and they know it.

Over the course of three months, a three-judge District Court in Texas undertook to resolve the factual dispute at issue in this application: In enacting an electoral map slanted toward Republicans, did Texas predominantly use race to draw its new district lines? Or said otherwise, did Texas accomplish its partisan objectives by means of a racial gerrymander? The District Court conducted a nine-day hearing, involving the testimony of nearly two dozen wit- nesses and the introduction of thousands of exhibits. It sifted through the resulting factual record, spanning some 3,000 pages. It assessed the credibility of each of the wit- nesses it had seen and heard in the courtroom. And after considering all the evidence, it held that the answer was clear. Texas largely divided its citizens along racial lines to create its new pro-Republican House map, in violation of the Constitution’s Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The court issued a 160-page opinion recounting in detail its factual findings.

Kagan goes on to tell Alito and the Court's anti-democracy majority to have some goddamn respect for the American judiciary and its judges and professionals doing their best to uphold the law during a lawless era. "We are a higher court than the District Court," Kagan write, "we are not a better one when it comes to making such a fact-based decision. ... Today’s order disrespects the work of a District Court that did everything one could ask to carry out its charge—that put aside every consideration except getting the issue before it right. And today’s order disserves the millions of Texans whom the District Court found were assigned to their new districts based on their race."

Kagan, like her fellow SCOTUS liberals, all but begs the Court's anti-democracy majority to stop going to war with the U.S. judiciary, which has fared quite well against the authoritarian onslaught we've faced since January. The whole idea of separation of powers, of governmental branches jealously guarding their power, their sway, falls apart when a nation is cursed with a high court that gleefully signs off on every tyrannical policy that comes from the god-king they created. With a functional Supreme Court upholding basic constitutional principles, Trump and his lackeys would be hamstrung. He would have been a lame duck the second he was elected. There would be a clear path forward.

Thurgood Marshall Saw This Shit Coming

By 1991, nearly a quarter century after he became the first Black Supreme Court justice, the venerable Thurgood Marshall saw the coming right-wing takeover of the courts for what it was: A legal coup powered by an entirely bad-faith interpretation of the U.S. Constitution that would – one day – allow

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

After reading through Alito's bad-faith reasoning in favor of the Texas gerrymander, I thought back to the days after Trump had been defeated in 2020. It felt as if a despot had been deposed, that we were free, but in the back of our minds we knew this was a temporary reprieve unless opposition forces – elected Democrats – did the right thing and reformed and expanded the Supreme Court. Not until that body it controlled by pro-America, pro-democracy, pro-constitutional jurists will we be able to dig out of the fascist trench in which we live today.

I wrote about it during the Biden presidency and I'll write about it during whatever remains of the Trump years: Breaking the Supreme Court's anti-democracy majority is the only path to recovery, to a future in which we are not at the whims of bad-faith operators using their godforsaken shadow docket to shape national policy and beat back those of us who support democratic self rule. Without SCOTUS reform, there is no future.

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