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The Roberts Court Is Letting the (Former) Confederate States Hang a "Whites Only" Sign on the Legislative Door: Part 1
John Roberts Lost Ronald Reagan’s Battle to Erase Black Representation But Used the Supreme Court to Give Trump Whites-Only Maps–Will He Lose the War?
Great piece from the Roberts OG, @thelisagraves.bsky.social . Truly, she is Roberts's anti-Boswell.
— Michael Podhorzer (@mikepod.bsky.social) 2026-05-24T21:00:13.882Z
If you haven't subscribed to her Substack, what are you waiting for?
www.graveinjustice.news/p/the-robert...
https://www.graveinjustice.news/p/the-roberts-court-is-letting-the?r=49pqr&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true
It is also a glaring sign of just how out of control and unjudicial the Roberts Court has become, openly usurping powers the Constitution explicitly grants to Congress to protect voting rights. The arrogance of John Roberts’ anti-voting-rights agenda is staggering, though it has likely not even reached its peak.
In the weeks since Callais, this faction of partisan political operatives on the nation’s highest court has repeatedly put its thumb on the scales of justice–over and over and over again–to benefit the Republican Party in this pivotal midterm election year. The Roberts Court issued this ruling knowing exactly how eagerly Southern legislatures would take up its obscene invitation to redraw their maps to suppress Black representation.
John Roberts may as well have ordered “Whites Only” signs to be printed and hung up on the doors of state legislatures in the South, just like the drinking fountains of yore. As my friend, the brilliant Mike Podhorzer, has dubbed it, this is a “neo-Confederate Court.”
Just look at how eagerly the Roberts Court has aided the party–and the super rich, regressive billionaires–that appointed it, to the disadvantage of Black Americans and our representative democracy. In February 2022, when Joe Biden was president, the Roberts Court blocked a lower court order requiring Alabama to redraw its congressional map, which had packed Black voters into a single district while creating six white-majority districts, despite the white population falling to 62%. The Roberts Court disingenuously claimed that the lower court’s January ruling came too close to the election to allow the maps to be changed, invoking what is known as the Purcell doctrine.....
Not only that, the Roberts Court didn’t even mention Purcell, even though citizens in Louisiana, for example, were already actively voting in an election. Meanwhile, when Democrats in Virginia attempted to counter these machinations by Trump and his minions, the Roberts Court allowed more than three million votes to be canceled out by another Republican-dominated court in Virginia.
There can be no doubt anymore that John Roberts is not a fair umpire. He is bent by his bias, his profound hostility toward the Voting Rights Act as he revealed in the Shelby case in 2013......
The court of public opinion is already delivering its verdict. John Roberts, who infamously said that if the public doesn’t like a ruling, “it’s just too bad,” is about to find out what can happen when you finally catch the whale. More and more people have no confidence in the fairness of the Roberts Court, which is acting as though it stands above the law itself–dictating changes to our rights in defiance of the popular will and dismantling protections that thousands of our representatives voted for and millions of Americans struggled for decades to secure.
Despite Roberts’ gaslighting that the court is not partisan, more and more of the public see these rulings for exactly what they are: hyperpartisan, imperious, illegitimate, and deeply racist. Together, we are going to rebuke and disempower operatives in judicial robes who dare to act as unaccountable kings, including “John Crow” Roberts himself.
In the weeks since Callais, this faction of partisan political operatives on the nation’s highest court has repeatedly put its thumb on the scales of justice–over and over and over again–to benefit the Republican Party in this pivotal midterm election year. The Roberts Court issued this ruling knowing exactly how eagerly Southern legislatures would take up its obscene invitation to redraw their maps to suppress Black representation.
John Roberts may as well have ordered “Whites Only” signs to be printed and hung up on the doors of state legislatures in the South, just like the drinking fountains of yore. As my friend, the brilliant Mike Podhorzer, has dubbed it, this is a “neo-Confederate Court.”
Just look at how eagerly the Roberts Court has aided the party–and the super rich, regressive billionaires–that appointed it, to the disadvantage of Black Americans and our representative democracy. In February 2022, when Joe Biden was president, the Roberts Court blocked a lower court order requiring Alabama to redraw its congressional map, which had packed Black voters into a single district while creating six white-majority districts, despite the white population falling to 62%. The Roberts Court disingenuously claimed that the lower court’s January ruling came too close to the election to allow the maps to be changed, invoking what is known as the Purcell doctrine.....
Not only that, the Roberts Court didn’t even mention Purcell, even though citizens in Louisiana, for example, were already actively voting in an election. Meanwhile, when Democrats in Virginia attempted to counter these machinations by Trump and his minions, the Roberts Court allowed more than three million votes to be canceled out by another Republican-dominated court in Virginia.
There can be no doubt anymore that John Roberts is not a fair umpire. He is bent by his bias, his profound hostility toward the Voting Rights Act as he revealed in the Shelby case in 2013......
The court of public opinion is already delivering its verdict. John Roberts, who infamously said that if the public doesn’t like a ruling, “it’s just too bad,” is about to find out what can happen when you finally catch the whale. More and more people have no confidence in the fairness of the Roberts Court, which is acting as though it stands above the law itself–dictating changes to our rights in defiance of the popular will and dismantling protections that thousands of our representatives voted for and millions of Americans struggled for decades to secure.
Despite Roberts’ gaslighting that the court is not partisan, more and more of the public see these rulings for exactly what they are: hyperpartisan, imperious, illegitimate, and deeply racist. Together, we are going to rebuke and disempower operatives in judicial robes who dare to act as unaccountable kings, including “John Crow” Roberts himself.
I still remember how shocked I was when I read the Shelby County case where Roberts gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (which provided for pre-clearance of major voting changes in certain states). Shelby County was racist decision based on the concept that non-whites did not need to be protected from attempts to disenfranchise their right to vote.
Roberts has earned the nickname "John Crow" Roberts