John Roberts Is Either Dumb or Racially Obtuse. And He’s Not Dumb. |
John Roberts Is Either Dumb or Racially Obtuse. And He’s Not Dumb.
After the Supreme Court struck down school integration, guess what happened in the schools? The same thing that’s about to happen with congressional districts.
If Chief Justice John Roberts has uttered two quotable sentences in his career that will likely appear high up in his New York Times obituary, they are these. The first comes from his 2005 confirmation hearing: “My job is to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.” The line was meant to convey to senators and America that he would be a neutral arbiter of constitutional interpretation, sans ideological agenda. It was later picked up by the entire conservative legal movement and repeated by numerous other right-wing judicial nominees at their confirmation hearings.
It was a lie. He was there, as we have subsequently learned many times, to bat. And not to spray dinky little singles—to swing for the fences. You may recall Jeffrey Toobin’s stunning 2012 article in The New Yorker detailing how painstakingly the chief justice orchestrated the 2010 Citizens United decision to make sure that it went as far as possible in removing limits on the financing of campaigns. The John Roberts of that article was no umpire. He was Mark McGwire juiced up on steroids, trying to smash the ball out onto Clark Avenue.
The subsequent 16 years have shown us the consequences of that decision, which will go down in American history as one of the most corrosive and reactionary holdings of all time—if not right up there with Plessy and Lochner, then awfully close. It has handed our democracy on a silver platter to men who have nothing but contempt for it (Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, etc.).
The other quote is one that I suspect many people will remember, although they may forget the context: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Ring a bell? He said it early in his tenure, when the Roberts court handed down one of its first major decisions, concerning public school integration efforts in Seattle and Louisville.
The court had already restricted forced integration efforts in a 1991 ruling. Then, in 2007, in two joined cases emanating from the above-named cities, the court went further: It ruled that even voluntary desegregation efforts were out the window. Roberts uttered his famous line while reading his 5–4 majority opinion from the bench.
I remember well the predictions in the decision’s wake. Liberals warned that the public schools would likely resegregate. Conservatives said, Oh pshaw, you delicate little flowers; we’re such a different country from 1954, the year of Brown v. Board of Education. Things will be just fine.
Well, guess what happened? In the 19 years since that ruling, the public schools have resegregated. Not to a mild degree. Not to a “concerning” degree. They have resegregated to a shocking degree.
In 2024, Axios published an article based on two recent academic studies and its own review of official data from 1988 to 2022. In the former year, about 7.4 percent of the nation’s schools were “intensely segregated,” meaning at least 90 percent white. By the latter year, that figure had vaulted to 19.8 percent. In addition, Axios’s Russell Contreras wrote at the time, “several states saw about a 20-percentage point or more increase in intensely segregated schools, from 1988 to 2021.”
Mind you, this happened while the racial demography of the United States went from 67 percent white to 58 percent white. In other words, you might have thought that in an increasingly diverse country, the schools would also become increasingly diverse. Instead, the opposite happened.
Now, fast-forward to this week’s Louisiana v. Callais decision on gerrymandering. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the 6–3 majority, assures us that there’s nothing to worry about in the evisceration of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. We’re a different country. We don’t need it anymore. “Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South,” Alito wrote.
The country has changed for the better in a number of ways, no doubt about that. But has it changed enough that laws to protect minority representation aren’t needed? We’re about to find out.
Consider the following statistics. Mississippi today has a Black population of 38 percent. One of its four congressional districts is majority-minority, for a representation rate of 25 percent. Black Mississippians are ergo underrepresented in Congress. In South Carolina, Blacks make up 25 percent of the population, and one of seven congressional districts was cut for Black representation. That’s 14 percent. So Blacks are underrepresented in that state, as well. And in Tennessee, Blacks are 17 percent of the population but hold zero seats in Congress (0 percent, obviously).
In some other states of the old Confederacy, Black representation is more on par. In Alabama, Blacks are 27 percent of the population and hold two of the state’s seven congressional seats (28 percent). In Louisiana, those population-representation figures are 33 percent and 33 percent (two out of six seats). In North Carolina, they are 21 percent and 23 percent (three out of 13 seats).
Hooray for those three states, I guess. But the question is this: What will those numbers be come 2029, or 2031? It’s hardly going out on a limb to guess that Alabama, Louisiana, and North Carolina will reduce or even possibly eliminate their majority-minority seats. They probably can’t quite get away with that in North Carolina, where there’s a Democratic governor and where Democrats control the state Senate. But Alabama and Louisiana, where the GOP controls the governor’s mansion and dominates both legislatures? Louisiana is already licking its chops: After this week’s SCOTUS ruling, its governor announced he was suspending the House primaries on May 16 so the legislature can redraw districts more favorable to the Republicans. It’s hard to believe they’d really have the gall to cut them down to zero. Then again, a lot of things have been happening lately in this country that once seemed hard to believe.
Speaking of which, I find it kind of hard to believe that Roberts, Alito, and other conservative justices this week did not think back to the aftermath of their fateful 2007 decision on school integration. Can they possibly be unaware that schools aggressively resegregated in the wake of that ruling? That seems impossible. And if I’m right, that leaves only one explanation for this week’s decision. They understand the potential consequences quite fully. They just don’t care. Mark McGwire has hit another one, and the bleak outcome, similar to the one liberals predicted in 2007, awaits us.
Let’s Hope America’s Dumbest War Doesn’t Become Its Most Tragic
Almost nine weeks in, let’s remind ourselves: Trump strengthened Iran and then came back and told us Iran was too strong!
As we barrel toward the ninth week of this two- or three-week war, virtually all of the reporting and most of the commentary is focused on the strategery of the moment: who really controls the Strait of Hormuz, when the ceasefire might actually end, what Donald Trump might do next. That’s all understandable. But it also means that this is a good time to take a step back and summarize exactly what Trump has done here, because if we look at it from 30,000 feet, we see exactly what so many of us knew was dangerous about putting this unstable and petty and frankly stupid man back in the Oval Office.
To put it in a phrase: He and he alone created the conditions that made war possible. He and he alone created the chaos that, he then told the American people and the world, made war necessary. Imagine the mayor of a town where there were acute ethnic or racial tensions taking office and inheriting a fragile but holding truce between the antagonistic parties. He then annuls that truce, calling it weak and fraudulent. Tensions, predictably, flare up again. And the mayor sends in armed agents to disarm the minority. And while he’s doing it, he threatens to destroy their entire culture and compares himself to Jesus, while the man in charge of the military operations constantly invokes God and Jesus as being on his side.
That’s what has happened here. Trump backed out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that Barack Obama and five other nations had negotiated with Iran. Was it perfect? Of course not. It was a compromise, with an enemy that hates the United States. But it capped uranium enrichment at 3.67 percent—far, far short of the level required to make nuclear arms—until 2030. Most provisions expired in 10 years (2025). Still, that’s not nothing. Experts agreed that it was working, and Iran was abiding by its terms, and it left it for a future administration to pick up the baton.
Trump, far from picking the baton up, threw it in the incinerator. The JCPOA ran to around 160 pages. The chance that Trump actually read it is zero. In fact, the agreement, minus the annexes, was only 18 pages. And still, we know to a 99.55 percent certainty that the chance Trump read even those 18 pages is zero. Those 18 pages were agreed to by Obama. That was all Trump needed to know. So he withdrew from the agreement in May 2018. He imposed stricter sanctions and announced a policy of “maximum pressure.” Oooh, tough! Amurka, baby!
But what happened? The other signatory nations tried to hold things together, but without the United States, everyone knew that was a joke. Iran very quickly increased its enrichment. By 2020, outlets were reporting that “Iran is now enriching more uranium than it did before it agreed to the landmark nuclear deal with world powers in 2015, President Hassan Rouhani said Thursday.” It went from 3.67 percent to 60 percent.
In other words: Trump made this problem. Entirely and solely. By pulling out of the JCPOA in 2018, he ensured that Iran would start breaking the terms of the deal. He’s the one who made Iran strong. Then, eight years later, he comes back to us and says, Bad Iran! They broke the terms of the deal! They’re too strong. We must invade them.
But it’s actually even worse than that. Because we didn’t invade Iran because they broke the terms of the deal. We invaded Iran because Trump, having conquered (in his mind) America, needed to conquer farther reaches. Venezuela got him thinking, Hey, this war stuff is kinda fun. So he figured he’d be the guy who toppled the hated regime. A few bombs. Easy-peasy.
It was only when it became clear that it wasn’t easy that Trump settled on his current rationale for the war (that Iran must not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon). Because at first, the rationale was regime change. And we took out the supreme leader, and Trump probably thought well, that was that. But that just handed everything to the supreme leader’s son, who is more radical, and whose father, wife, and son were killed by U.S. bombs. So when it became clear even to Trump that the regime wasn’t going to change, he settled on the rationale about nuclear weapons. And he’s actually been reasonably consistent about it over the last, oh, three weeks or so; shown far more discipline on this one point than he’s ever shown on anything.
It’s a fine rationale. I agree with it, in fact. But there’s a little problem with it. Namely, that Iran is today a hell of a lot closer to nuclear weapons than it was in 2015, after Obama’s deal. So Trump, who created this problem, now tells us that he may have to solve it by eliminating Persian civilization, one of the great civilizations in the history of humanity (these last 47 years, not even a blink of an eye in human history, notwithstanding).
The United States has fought a lot of dumb and unnecessary wars. And it’s fought a lot of wars that cost more lives than this one has so far. But this one has to be the most unnecessary war of all. And now here we sit, the whole world nervously watching the president of the United States, whom everyone in every capital around the globe knows to be impulsive and ignorant and concerned mainly with his vanity, wondering what he’ll do next—hoping that America’s most unnecessary war doesn’t also become its most tragic.
Trump’s Sycophants Just Approved the Tackiest Monument to Him Yet
The Arc de Trump isn’t about America. It’s about one man. It must die.
The Great Sphinx of Giza stands 66 feet tall. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is around 180 feet. Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, 164 feet. The Sydney Opera House soars to 220 feet. But all would be dwarfed by the Arc de Trump, whose golden (of course) statues would rise to 250 feet above the entrance to the Arlington National Cemetery, the final resting place for 430,000 soldiers who gave their lives for this country. You know them; they’re the ones Donald Trump called “suckers.”
Trump says the arch will commemorate America’s 250th birthday, but let’s be honest: It will commemorate Donald Trump. If this monstrosity ever gets built, no one driving or cycling by it along the George Washington Memorial Parkway will look at it and think of the Declaration of Independence or Ben Franklin or John Hancock. They’ll think of one man. And that’s exactly how he wants it.
The federal Commission of Fine Arts officially gave its approval to the project on Thursday. We’ll come back to that commission—who they are, and the testimony they took before casting their votes. But first, for those of you who live outside Washington, I want to describe this place physically so people understand why this arch would land in Memorial Circle with all the grace of a walrus hogging an ice floe.
On many warm-weather weekends, I go for longish bike rides. Washington is one of America’s great bike-riding cities—it has copious bike lanes and the downtown area is mostly flat and incredibly scenic, with the monuments and all the lovely waterfront parks. (Trump also, by the way, wants to steal East Potomac Park, home to an admittedly down-at-heel but historic public golf course as well as gorgeous picnic and fishing areas, from the people and convert it into, you guessed it, a “world-class” private country club.) Most times, I drive down from my home in Maryland and park (for free, and there’s always a space) at the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial, better known as the Iwo Jima Memorial, which is right next to Arlington Cemetery. I circle the memorial and go past the Netherlands Carillon, the modernist bell tower (127 feet high, incidentally) given by the people of that country to the United States for the latter’s role in liberating them from the Nazis.
I then zip across the Memorial Bridge, generally regarded as the city’s most beautiful, with its neoclassical arches, its martial yet tasteful statuary, and its wide pebbled sidewalks, and find myself face to face with the glorious Lincoln Memorial, the reflecting pool, and all the rest. I never, ever do this without feeling grateful to live here and to be able to do something so pedestrian (so to speak) as take a bike ride while being among these and so many other treasures.
I should add a few words about the graceful entrance to Arlington Cemetery. The National Park Service, which owns the land, calls this the Memorial Avenue Corridor. It was designed in the early twentieth century by none other than America’s most famous architectural firm, McKim, Mead, and White, under project architect William Mitchell Kendall, who also worked on the Washington Square Arch (75 feet tall), the Low Memorial Library at Columbia University, and the main New York post office building, now in use as the wonderful........