Louisiana v. Callais Belongs in Supreme Court’s Anti-canon |
Justice Thurgood Marshall did not dissent from the bench in Mobile v. Bolden, the fractured 1980 decision that interpreted the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to make it all but impossible for Black people to elect candidates of their choice. His written dissenting opinion, short of calling on Congress to correct the Supreme Court’s error, suggested something far more immediate and visceral.
“If this Court refuses to honor our long-recognized principle that the Constitution ‘nullifies sophisticated, as well as simple-minded, modes of discrimination,’” Marshall wrote, “it cannot expect the victims of discrimination to respect political channels of seeking redress.” This is the language of protest and repudiation. As he saw it, granting Black people the right to vote while effectively shutting them out of the political process in the South was akin to granting them “nothing more than the right to cast meaningless ballots.”
Then and now, widespread condemnation and collective action in service of restoring Black political power, as well as the need to discipline a Supreme Court all too willing to usurp congressional authority, remain the only acceptable responses to Louisiana v. Callais — a decision that stands to turn the South into a neo-Confederacy and that threatens the very idea, written into the text of the post–Civil War amendments that we live in a multiracial democracy. The ruling has all the makings of the next anti-canon.
Which is to say: Callais is well on its way to becoming the Dred Scott of our time, a decision so reviled by civic society that it marks a before and after in our constitutional democracy. And like Dred Scott, which denied Black citizenship, and other anti-canons that live in infamy, the ruling will be remembered less for its full caption or precise legal holding than by the harm it caused Black and marginalized people, our body politic, and the idea of these United States.
Indeed, the new civil-rights movement that has awakened and descended on Montgomery and Selma this past weekend understands well that Callais and other aftershocks the Supreme Court has issued in its wake aren’t mere judicial pronouncements. Callais “was not only a legal decision, it is a moral disgrace and a shameless assault on Black political power,” Bernice King, the daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said on Saturday, according to the Alabama Reflector.
From the stage at the All Roads Lead to the South day of action, Louisiana native Damon Hewitt of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law chastised the justices for “telling a whole ’nother........