Pick your favorite zombie movie or television show and you’ll eventually be confronted with dialogue justifying the killing of the zombies with the idea that they are no longer human.
“They aren’t people, Rick. They’re just bodies. We have to stop thinking of them as if they’re still alive.” – The Walking Dead
“They’re not human. Look at them. They’re just… meat.” – Shaun of the Dead
The point is that there should be no ill feelings towards the treatment of a zombie, because they aren’t like us any more. They aren’t worthy of compassion. They deserve no quarter, only violence. They are a threat to our very survival and doing away with them, or at least keeping them away from where humanity exists, is the only solution.
Or, if you’re the Trump administration, you use this same justification as a bank-shot for immigration policy by hosting a Tetris clone game on the White House website.
The White House’s “Build the Wall” game asked players to stop a “Zombie Border siege” by stacking Tetris-styled bricks in an attempt to “hold the line.” Unlike in Tetris, though, the blocks in “Build the Wall” don’t disappear when you complete a line, meaning each brick contributes to an impassable barrier for the pixel-art “zombies” marching in from the “Southern Border.” That change makes the gameplay pretty uninteresting for anything but cheap propaganda, and it also means that every game quickly and ironically ends with a “Border Breached” message when the blocks inevitably fill up the well.
Amerika Garcia Grewal, co-director of Texas migrant rights group Frontera Federation, told AFP last week that the makers of the game “have lost touch with what it means to be human and care for others.”
The game is now thankfully gone from the site, though several other obvious game clones remain. This is not new ground for this administration, of course. Team Trump has made a habit when campaigning and while in office of using video game imagery for all kinds of things, such as touting MAHA nonsense, shitposting about the horrors of its own immigration activity, or bragging about the body count of the wars Trump promised he’d never start.
So, why did the game get taken down? Did someone in the administration realize how horrible and racist the whole thing was? Did Trump himself suddenly suffer from a spasm of moral clarity?
Doubtful. More likely it was this.
In a statement on Friday, a spokesperson for The Tetris Company said it was “reviewing the matter” and that the company “was not involved in the creation of ‘Build the Wall’ and did not authorize or license the Tetris brand or intellectual property for the game.” The company reiterated that message in a social media post Friday afternoon, writing that it “believe[s] in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them.”
Now, I’m not going to sit here and cheer on the enforcement of our overly broad copyright system. But I sure as hell understand why the Tetris people don’t want there to be even the barest chance for them and their game to be associated with something as disgusting as Trump’s Build The Wall “game.” And ArsTechnica is right to note that the Tetris Company has a long history of being very protective of its intellectual property rights, which government lawyers almost certainly are aware of.
Whether taking the game down will be enough to keep the Tetris Company from acting, I do not know. What I do know is that this administration is filled with deeply unserious, racist, and troubled people. Immigrants, illegal or otherwise, are not zombies. They shouldn’t be compared with zombies. Whatever immigration policy you prefer, they are people.
And that really shouldn’t have to be said out loud.
For decades, the U.S. Department of State gave money to groups protecting free speech, human rights and persecuted minorities in poor and authoritarian countries.
To decide what to fund, staffers with deep expertise typically pored over reams of information on abuses under the most repressive regimes and held an open competition to fund groups to work in those countries.
This year, Trump administration officials presented State Department workers with their own list of organizations that should be funded. To the shock of many staffers and lawmakers, they proposed at least a dozen grants that would bypass the normal open bidding process. They also sought to give taxpayer dollars to groups aligned with conservative and anti-immigration movements in Europe as well as advocates for white South Africans, according to interviews and documents reviewed by ProPublica.
Among the organizations appointees have considered funding in recent months are a British free-speech organization that has fought against bans on “gay conversion therapy” and an Afrikaner group run by a controversial figure who has called for self-governance of the white ethnic minority within South Africa.
This type of giving would mark a stark departure from the traditional aid that helped torture victims and documented rapes, political violence and other abuses in some of the most oppressive countries in the world, according to more than a dozen former State Department employees. One new program with $4.9 million of competitive funding available to groups to develop “civilizational self-confidence in Europe” is slated for “research, conferences, cultural engagements, and support for civil society” in wealthy democracies. The call for proposals says recipients should “not attempt to reform the legislative processes,” but experts and lawmakers have expressed concern that the U.S. is seeking to influence politics in allied countries.
That emphasis on Western nations was evident in a grant the State Department has been working on for months to a fledgling British American think tank dedicated to “renewing our Judeo-Christian culture and civilisational mission.” After pushback from Congress, the State Department abandoned those plans in recent days.
“I’ve never before seen U.S. government funding for such groups,” said William Allchorn, a senior research fellow at Anglia Ruskin University and an expert on radical-right extremism in the United Kingdom. “It’s crossing the Rubicon, isn’t it?”
A review of proposed grants shows several are being directed to more traditional human rights purposes, but even some of those have raised concerns in and outside the State Department.
Strict agency rules have long required an open bidding process whenever possible to guard against waste, fraud and abuse. Generally, the State Department is allowed to offer awards directly to a single entity or to a small group of potential grantees in rare instances, such as when only one organization is capable of the work or an emergency necessitates providing money so quickly that open competition is impossible. It has also used such “sole-source” and “limited-source” awards, which are not publicly announced, in highly sensitive countries where openly working on human rights can be dangerous.
None of those justifications appear to apply here, according to contracting experts and former staffers consulted by ProPublica. The situation is all the more concerning, they said, because Trump officials handpicked the potential recipients, decisions previously made by a panel of government experts who evaluated applicants based on the organizations’ experience and qualifications.
“It’s not good governance to have political appointees give grants to individuals for unknown reasons,” one former bureau staffer said.
Directing awards to organizations in high-income countries further complicates the funding. The practice is so unusual that an internal waiver justifying the choice is typically required.
The State Department did not answer when asked whether it had sought waivers for the grants to high-income countries.
During private briefings this month, members of Congress expressed concern over both the list of potential recipients and the plan to award no-bid or limited-bid grants, according to officials familiar with the closed-door meetings who weren’t authorized to publicly discuss them.
In response to a detailed list of questions about this story, the State Department sent a short written response, noting that “programs are still in active deliberation and receipt of a grant is not guaranteed to any organization that does not meet all requirement and standards for federal grants.” A State Department official who declined to be named stressed that the process for awarding grants was ongoing and that multiple offices provide input. They also said the administration has serious concerns about the human rights situation in South Africa that need to be addressed.
Asked about the potential grants, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire and the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, said Congress expects the State Department “to invest resources to advance human rights, democratic institutions, civil society, freedom of expression and worker rights” and that the proposals are “an appalling departure from that practice and an affront to our democratic allies.”
“These awards suggest that the Department intends to select awardees for federal funding based on their political ideology,” Shaheen said, “not in the interest of American taxpayers or national security.”
Internal records and interviews show one of the key figures involved in the grants is Samuel Samson, a 27-year-old deputy assistant secretary of state who previously worked as a fundraiser for a group that aims to bring people with an “America first” worldview into government.
On the day of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Samson started work as a senior adviser to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, also known as DRL, the State Department unit that selects and distributes the human rights grants.
Over the past 18 months, he has courted far-right leaders in Europe, an area with which he believes the U.S. shares a “common civilizational struggle.” In recent weeks, Samson has defended the agency’s grantmaking plans during private meetings with lawmakers.
One group expected to receive a no-bid grant is the Free Speech Union, a British organization founded in 2020 to counter “cancel culture.” The group often steps in to defend people accused of being transphobic and has created a petition opposing the U.K.’s proposed ban on discredited therapy practices that attempt to convert gay people to heterosexuality. It’s unclear if the grant would go to the British-based organization or its international offshoot. The $5 million grant is to be used to combat “digital overregulation,” provide support for individuals facing “deplatforming” and advocate against “restrictive online safety and hate speech laws,” according to a document reviewed by ProPublica. Trump officials met with the group during a European tour late last year, according to Politico.
Scholars said the U.S. government’s support for these groups could give them a layer of legitimacy they wouldn’t otherwise have.
“We see them as intellectualizing or sanitizing radical-right ideas that are then taken up by the parties in power,” said Allchorn, the U.K. extremism expert.
The Free Speech Union’s website says it is nonpartisan and does not take government funds. In response to questions from ProPublica about the potential grant, the organization’s founder, Toby Young, said, “We have neither applied for nor been awarded a grant from the US State Department or any other branch of the US Government.” He did not respond to criticisms about the award or his organization.
The largest award the bureau has put forward this year, $40 million, is for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which was created by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The foundation’s goal is to memorialize those killed by communist regimes and pursue freedom for people still living under totalitarian rule.
The proposed sum is staggering to people familiar with the State Department’s allocation practices and would dwarf the organization’s budget. Victims of Communism has received a handful of government grants in the past, but for much smaller sums. Its most recent publicly available tax forms, from 2024, show its total assets come to about $12 million. Four sources familiar with the foundation’s previous U.S.-funded work questioned its ability to manage such a large award.
Samson has a personal connection to the organization. The foundation’s board chair, Elizabeth Spalding, is a visiting fellow at a graduate school branch of Hillsdale College in Washington, D.C.; Samson was enrolled in the same small graduate program of the Christian conservative college as recently as this year, according to his LinkedIn profile (which is no longer publicly available). Spalding’s husband, Matthew, is that graduate school’s dean, and Samson has taken classes with one or both of them, according to a State Department official.
The State Department official who declined to be named said Samson’s relationship with the Spaldings had nothing to do with the grant.
The foundation’s proposed award is to “amplify the voices of dissidents and political prisoners while educating global audiences about the dangers of communist and authoritarian regimes,” according to a document reviewed by ProPublica.
In response to questions from ProPublica about the award and concerns about its ability to manage it, the foundation said it was not aware of the proposed funding, but “if true, the 100 million victims murdered by communism in the past, and another 1.5 billion men, women, and children still enduring communism today will rejoice.”
The State Department declined to comment on awards in process but noted that Victims of Communism has long worked with the State Department. “As President Trump has said, communism is a mortal threat to American liberty — and as Secretary Rubio has repeatedly emphasized, America will not allow radical extremists to undermine our sovereignty and national security,” the agency said in a statement. “Our foreign assistance programming is aligned to support our strategic priorities.”
Trump officials are also planning to finance at least one organization to research crime and atrocities against minority populations in South Africa. This spring, DRL staff were initially told to begin the process of awarding funds to Lex Libertas, a South African organization founded by a prominent member of the nation’s white Afrikaner movement. The group, which claims that white South African farmers are victims of racial discrimination and violence, is fundraising to place 3,000 white crosses on the National Mall in remembrance of attacks on South African farmers.
The proposed award to fund the South African crime research was later widened to allow other invited groups to apply for a $1 million grant, according to people with knowledge of the process. The State Department declined to say whether Lex Libertas will be among those invited to compete, saying the grant is still under deliberation.
Extensiveresearch shows white South African farmers are not victims of crime at higher rates than other groups. But Trump has argued there is a genocide of white South Africans and is using claims that white people are subjected to disproportionate violence to justify cutting off South Africa’s funding for HIV treatment and research.
Former diplomats told ProPublica that it makes little sense to focus on the victimization of white South Africans given the enormous suffering elsewhere in the region. “It’s laughable to suggest that on the African continent, the prime issue of human rights concern is whites in South Africa,” one former agency official told ProPublica.
Lex Libertas did not respond to questions.
One of the most controversial grants that officials singled out for funds was recently dropped, the State Department official told ProPublica. The decision came after Democratic lawmakers raised objections during briefings last week about the months-old organization and its agenda. That grant was to 878, a British American think tank created this year focused on “existential threats to Britain, to America, and to our shared Judeo-Christian civilisation,” according to its website. The sole-source $7 million grant aimed to advance “Anglo-American values” in the U.K., Europe and “allied partner countries,” according to a document ProPublica reviewed.
Since at least 2011, as anti-LGBTQ+ laws and violence spread globally, the bureau added a specific focus on people persecuted for their sexual orientation or gender identity.
Throughout most of its existence, DRL has enjoyed bipartisan support. Democrats applauded its championing of international labor standards and marginalized communities, while Republicans favored its defense of democratic freedoms in China, North Korea, Cuba and other communist countries. As a senator, Marco Rubio was a strong supporter of the bureau and human rights broadly, once arguing from the Senate floor that safeguarding the freedoms of gay men who were persecuted in Chechnya — and all people — was in the national interest. In 2018, he urged the president to appoint an assistant secretary to oversee DRL, a post Trump had left vacant for over a year.
But after Rubio became secretary of state in January 2025, the fate of DRL dramatically changed. Trump suspended all foreign aid in his first week in office. Within months, cuts by Trump’s newly installed Department of Government Efficiency decimated the bureau, and Rubio closed most of its offices. In April 2025, Rubio published a Substack post smearing the bureau he once championed as “a platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas against ‘anti-woke’ leaders.”
Samson also sent shock waves through the bureau. In March, he traveled to the U.K., meeting an anti-abortion protester and the anti-immigration politician Nigel Farage. In his own essay on the State Department’s Substack, Samson lashed out at the U.K. for arresting anti-abortion protesters and at Germany for labeling its hard-right Alternative for Germany party “extremist,” likening the countries’ actions to the “censorship, demonization, and bureaucratic weaponization” used against Trump.
Meanwhile, DRL’s remaining skeleton crew was tasked with removing trigger words from documents. “We would try to talk about human rights defenders in talking points, only to have them struck,” said one former bureau employee, requesting anonymity for fear of retribution.
“We went from having a real, dynamic appreciation for individuals and their human rights and fundamental freedoms to erasing that, especially if individuals were part of an underrepresented group or marginalized community,” the former employee said.
The bureau is working with a severely reduced budget — about $190 million compared with over $500 million in 2024. Now the administration is preparing to put money behind its new priorities.
“We’re just implementing the agenda of the president as we’ve been directed through the national security strategy and the White House,” the State Department official told ProPublica.
Earlier this year the Trump administration decided to illegally dismantle the 2021 Digital Equity Act, which was intended to help push internet access into long-neglected parts of the U.S. The Act took very vague aim at digital redlining, or the longstanding practice by telecom giants of refusing to upgrade (or at times even timely repair) broadband service in minority and low-income neighborhoods.
Big ISPs like AT&T have long been caught not only refusing to upgrade or repair broadband access in minority areas of cities like Detroit and Cleveland, but charging minority neighborhoods more money for slower service than their less diverse, more affluent counterparts.
Here’s the thing: the Digital Equity Act barely mentions race; it simply included some vague language stating that deployments and broadband grants must be even and non-discriminatory. The law identified minority status as one of eight nonexclusive indicators of barriers to digital access, while separately prohibiting discrimination in programs receiving funds.
Last week, the DC District Court issued a ruling that allowed the Act to survive, but stripped out the already modest race-based components of the law, declaring them unconstitutional.
Groups like the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, which had done a lot of good studies on broadband redlining, celebrated the decidedly mixed bag:
“We are proud to have pushed to keep the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program alive. This crucial program provides communities across the country not just with access or technology, but the skills, confidence, and pathways necessary to fully participate and thrive in our digital age. We fundamentally object to the government’s position that empowering Black and Brown communities is unconstitutional.“
So the competitive grant program at the heart of the law will continue, but there’s no real consensus on what that will look like or how helpful it will be under a federal government too racist and corrupt to function in the public interest. And there’s not much left to address the very real issue of broadband digital discrimination, which runs parallel with racial discrimination in other U.S. infrastructure sectors like energy.
The Infrastructure Act not only featured $42.5 billion to expand broadband access, it featured a lot of included (and adjacent) legislation intending to address racism in broadband and broadband affordability more generally. Most of that’s been brutally stripped away by the Trump administration, which is instead funneling billions of dollars to Elon Musk for costly Starlink service, then declaring the problem solved.
It’s a lovely bundle of corruption, racism, and regulatory/court capture all thrown into a stew by a bunch of zealots keen to pretend they’re engaging in policy reform and serious legal analysis.
A month ago, I wrote that the Supreme Court’s six conservative Justices have exactly one consistent rule on whose votes count: Black people’s votes shouldn’t count. The pattern was simple. If a ruling would help Black votes count, the Court — led by Justice Samuel Alito — found a reason to block it. If it would help suppress the Black vote, that was treated as normal and fine. Indeed, it would be treated by Alito as “race-neutral.”
Now Alito has given us an even starker version of the same instinct, and this time it’s not even about votes. It’s about whether the most openly racist rhetoric imaginable counts as racist at all. To Alito, apparently, it doesn’t — because to Alito, it’s just how the world works.
It’s in the case of Mullin v. Doe, regarding the Trump administration terminating “Temporary Protected Status” (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians. The lower courts had blocked that effort, but Alito leads the MAGA Six in reversing it, and primly insists that there’s simply no evidence at all of any racial motive in ending TPS status for Haitians. If there had been a racial motive, then it could violate the Equal Protection Clause, but Alito insists that it’s not racist to hate Haitians. It’s just normal and “race-neutral.”
The President’s comments fall into four main categories. First, many express strong objections to the immigration that this country has experienced in recent decades and to many of the immigrants who have come here, particularly those who have come to or stayed in the United States illegally. These statements associate these immigrants with crime and other social ills. Second, some statements express great displeasure with TPS. They note, among other things, that TPS designations have often been far from temporary and that aliens who are allowed to stay in the United States under the program are not vetted like other aliens who seek admission. Third, some statements broadly denigrate the countries for which TPS designations have been granted—including Haiti—portraying them as hellish places in which to live. And fourth, some statements malign Haitians who have come to the United States….
…. None of the cited statements by either the President or the Secretary was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications. For example, one may oppose TPS and favor tighter restrictions on immigration for economic or other reasons that have nothing to do with race.
Justice Kagan, in her dissent, points out how full of shit Alito is by noting he can’t even bring himself to quote Trump’s vile bigotry, which would immediately broadcast the lie that Alito is pushing: that the ending of TPS for Haitians has nothing to do with race:
Even putting the clear-error standard aside, the Haiti plaintiffs have carried their burden. The evidence they have offered includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print. (Indeed, one measure of the President’s way of speaking about Haitians is to compare it with the majority’s, which is unfailingly respectful.)
So here are some of those statements. Haitians are “eating the dogs . . . . They’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live [in Springfield, Ohio].” … And: Haitians are also eating “other things too that they’re not supposed to be.” … And: Haitians in the United States “probably have AIDS.” … And: Haiti is a “shithole country,” which is “filthy, dirty, [and] disgusting.” … And: Haitian immigration is “like a death wish for our country.” … And: Haitians, along with some others, are “poisoning the blood” of our country. … And: “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries” like “Haiti [and] Somalia”? “Why cannot we have some people from Norway [and] Sweden?” … The majority briefly replies that those remarks are not “overtly racial,” ante, at 21, but it is hard to know what that means. Haitians are Black. (Norwegians and Swedes not so much.) The references—of filth, disease, and primitiveness—are shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes. It is hard to imagine the statements being made today of any White community. No very “sensitive inquiry,” of the kind Arlington Heights compels, is needed to see them for what they are, 429 U. S., at 266; judges, as we often say, are “not required to exhibit a naiveté from which ordinary citizens are free,” Department of Commerce, 588 U. S., at 785. The statements fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.
This is how an extreme racist who doesn’t think of himself as one operates. Alito can’t see Trump’s bigotry as racist because he shares the underlying worldview — and a worldview that feels like simple common sense to you doesn’t register as “bias.” That’s not a charitable read of Alito. It’s the least charitable one: the racism is so deeply baked in that it’s become invisible to him, the default setting. He can squint at a “they’re eating the pets” / “they probably have AIDS” / “shithole countries” rant and call “race-neutral” with a straight face.
And here’s the tell that collapses the whole “race-neutral” defense. Alito’s argument depends on the idea that all of this could rest on some neutral, non-racial criterion — poverty, crime, lax vetting, take your pick. But the same administration has built what is effectively a whites-only refugee policy: all but three of the 4,499 refugees admitted under Trump are white South Africans. If the criterion were really poverty or danger or vetting, that is not the population you would end up with. The only criterion that explains both halves — Haitians out, white South Africans in — is the one Alito insists isn’t there.
Adam Serwer, over at the Atlantic, points out that this particular makeup of the Supreme Court has now made it clear: they are so overtly racist that they will never, ever deem anything as racist.
In his opinion, Alito notes that the administration had previously eliminated TPS protections for countries in Asia, Africa, South America. “Most would regard this as a racially diverse group,” he writes, as if racism toward all nonwhite people doesn’t count as racism. But that’s a perfectly coherent ideological principle, the same one that led to the eugenics-inspired racist immigration restrictions that Miller has insisted should be restored, right down to the preference for Nordic immigrants.
And here’s where it connects back to where I started. That “any pretext will do” logic isn’t new — it’s the exact machinery I described last month in the voting cases. In Louisiana v. Callais, the Court decided that requiring Louisiana to draw a second majority-Black district — so that Black voters could actually elect someone — was itself the real racism. The trick is the off-ramp: a state caught discriminating against Black voters just has to say the magic words “we were being partisan, not racist,” and the Court waves it through.
Mullin now sets up an even more impossible double standard. If the government wants to discriminate against Black people, any pretext will do. “As long as there is a plausible basis—any plausible articulable basis—for the government’s action, then the Court will look to that basis as sufficient,” Aderson Francois, a law professor at Georgetown University, told me, “even in the face of evidence that government actors were motivated by animus.” If a Black person wants to prove they’ve been discriminated against, however, no amount of evidence will suffice.
Well, there is one exception to the idea that “no evidence” will be seen as racism. If a policy is seen as helping minorities, Alito will eagerly claim that’s totally racist.
Alito’s insistence on ignoring the possibility of someone using a pretext to engage in racial discrimination is actually quite selective. In a 2009 case on affirmative action, Ricci v. DeStefano, for example, Alito was happy to dismiss as “pretextual” the city of New Haven’s reasoning for why it threw out test results in which white firefighters performed better than their Black colleagues (it feared a lawsuit). When a Virginia school implemented a race-neutral, class-based affirmative-action policy, however, Alito insisted that the policy was by definition racist because it changed the demographic composition of the student body.
This is exactly how a racist thinks: any bigotry towards non-whites is normal and good and “race-neutral.” But anything seen as attempting to help fight back against bigotry is unfairly making decisions based on race, and therefore racist.
Indeed, as Serwer quotes law professor Melissa Murray in his piece:
“This Court sees race when it wants to, and blinds itself to racism in most other cases,” Melissa Murray, a law professor at NYU, told me. “It’s hard to imagine how egregious the statement would have to be to be considered ‘overtly racial’.”
Georgetown law professor Aderson Francois goes further — arguing that Alito’s pretense is in one respect uglier than the Court that ushered in Jim Crow:
Francois compared the Roberts Court to the 1880s justices who opened the door to Jim Crow. That Alito “pretended these statements were or could be race-neutral means that in some ways,” the current Court is worse than that earlier one, Francois told me. At least the 19th-century Court had “the intellectual courage to state its racist convictions plainly.”
“It’s Haitians who many times are taking care of your mom or your dad who has Alzheimer’s, taking care of family members who might be in a nursing home,” DeWine said. “And to say we’re going to pull all those out, it’s just not in our own self-interest.”
History will not be kind to Samuel Alito. He is already widely viewed as one of the worst Supreme Court Justices, one who is overtly political and regularly engages in obviously biased and partisan judging. But it’s time to stop pretending he’s not driven by a pretty aggressive, extreme, and despicable level of out-and-out racism. It appears to be a key driving force behind his judicial decision making, and it should have no place in modern America.
Once again, it’s time to expand the court to at least 100 Justices, so that no single Justice — such as the overtly racist Samuel Alito — has as much power as he does. Yes, it’s true that the other MAGA five have no problem going along with and enabling Alito’s brand of racism, which many of them may harbor as well. But the fact that Alito’s name keeps appearing on so many of these blatantly racist decisions needs to be called out as an example of how broken the Supreme Court is.
The Supreme Court’s conservatives have spent years systematically dismantling the Voting Rights Act, but the last seven months have been something else — a rapid-fire series of emergency docket rulings, procedural maneuvers, and carefully worded opinions that, taken together, make it effectively impossible to challenge racial gerrymandering. Not difficult. Impossible. And Justice Alito, in particular, seems almost gleeful in how mask-off he is in enabling the suppression of Black votes.
Yesterday’s per curiam ruling in Allen v. Milligan is the exclamation point on that project. None of the conservatives were willing to put their name on it. They didn’t need to. The result was never really in doubt — not after what they’d already done in Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama over the preceding months. This was just the moment it became undeniable that the rule is: if it disenfranchises Black voters, we’ll allow it, if it empowers Black voters, we’ll block it.
Here’s the trail.
In November last year a (Trump appointed!) judge threw out Texas’ gerrymandered brand new maps, by pointing out that they clearly violated the Voting Rights Act prohibition against race-based gerrymandering. As the judge pointed out, if Texas had done the gerrymandering for political reasons (to block Democrats from being elected), that would have been legal under a different recent (but still troublesome) Supreme Court ruling. But the incompetent Trump DOJ had pressured Texas explicitly over the racial makeup of its maps, which was seen as the clear racial reason for doing the gerrymandering.
In December last year, the Supreme Court put the racist gerrymandered maps back into play, with a ruling by Justice Samuel Alito saying that, even though the lower court found those new maps (which had only been created months earlier and used in no elections) to be clearly illegal for being created for racist reasons, “Texas needs certainty on which map will govern the 2026 midterm elections.” Given that (1) the primaries were still many months away and the ramification of rejecting these new maps was simply… going back to the same map that Texas had used during the last Congressional election, none of this made any sense.
In April, the Supreme Court came down with its decision in Louisiana v. Callais, in which the conservatives on the court said that to show gerrymandering was done for racial reasons (which the Voting Rights Act makes illegal), plaintiffs can’t just show evidence of the impact — they have to produce additional evidence of actual racist intent behind the redistricting. In this ruling, Justice Alito said that the ruling had no bearing and did not overturn previous rulings, either about the Voting Rights Act or in an earlier case the Supreme Court had heard, in which it found that Alabama’s new voting maps gerrymandered to deprive Black people of representation in Congress.
In May, Justice Alito (again, that guy) took the surprising step of rushing to certify the Callais ruling (something that is very, very rare) to assist the state of Louisiana in redrawing its maps for the election that was happening days away. Again, there is no way to square Alito’s step there with his statement about “certainty” in December unless the only “certainty” is “Black people’s votes shouldn’t count.”
Then, just a few weeks ago, the Supreme Court weighed in on an updated challenge to the Alabama maps — a follow-up to the earlier case where the Court itself had found Alabama violated the law. Despite lower courts finding that Alabama’s latest maps were still illegally race-based, the Supreme Court said that under Callais, those maps could go into effect anyway — eight days before the election. So: in Texas, Alito said you couldn’t remove racist maps four months before an election because people needed “certainty.” In Alabama, Alito says you can install more racist maps eight days before an election. The only certainty Alito seems interested in protecting is the certainty that Black voters get suppressed.
The election occurred 8 days later, but the State of Alabama, buoyed by the Supreme Court’s “racism is okay now!” attitude, simply discarded the votes in four districts, while keeping them in other districts, and said “we’re going to redo those primaries with our more racist maps later in the summer.”
Last week, a three judge panel (two of whom were appointed by Donald Trump) at the district court, taking instruction from all of those recent Supreme Court rulings, still found that Alabama’s new maps were clearly violating the Voting Rights Act, showing in another very detailed ruling that there was tremendous evidence that the maps were created specifically for racial reasons to suppress the impact of the Black vote. They were directly following the rulings in both Callais and Allen, where Sam Alito and friends said you have to be able to show actual racist intent to violate the VRA. The judges (yes, including a majority appointed by Trump) said “okay, yes, here we have overwhelming evidence of racist intent.”
Those three judges laid out pages upon pages showing that the most fair, the most constitutional, and the most reasonable conclusion — under the very Supreme Court rulings Alito had authored — was to throw out this map, exactly as the Supreme Court itself had done a few years earlier.
So that brings us to yesterday. Alabama had rushed to the Supreme Court’s emergency docket, because of course they did. And the conservatives on the court did what they were expected to do: in a per curiam ruling that none of the conservatives were willing to put their name on, they shoved the (already deemed racist by multiple lower court rulings) Alabama map back into effect while the election was already underway.
The ruling claims this is necessary after Callais — that the lower court didn’t apply the new standard correctly. But that’s a misreading of what the lower court actually did (and also the Court’s own ruling in Callais!). The district court found overwhelming evidence of racist intent. That’s exactly what Callais demanded. The Supreme Court’s stated reason for overriding that? The lower court “did not heed the presumption of legislative good faith.”
Even more ridiculous, the ruling claims that the district court’s ruling would have upset that “certainty” so close to an election again:
We have repeatedly cautioned that lower federal courts should not “alter the election rules on the eve of an election.”
I mean come the fuck on. These same six twerps literally “altered the election rules” in neighboring Louisiana a month ago and altered Alabama’s election rules just a few weeks ago. This new map is what “alters the election rules on the eve of an election.”
The sheer racist chutzpah it takes to scold a lower court for “changing the map at the last minute” while actually changing the maps with the very same ruling is something else.
There is, yet again, a dissent written by Justice Sotomayor (and joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson) laying out the ridiculousness of all of this, including calling out the conservatives past claims of trying to avoid “chaos and confusion” while guaranteeing that these recent elections are nothing but chaos and confusion:
Before the Court are two paths. Down one lies an orderly election, held under a tried-and-tested congressional map that protects Black Alabamians’ right to vote and with which all voters, elections officials, and candidates alike are familiar. Down the other lies a chaotic election, held under a never-before-used congressional map that intentionally discriminates against Black Alabamians, that Alabama adopted in unashamed defiance of a prior court order directly affirmed by this Court, and that will require officials to change the voter registrations of hundreds of thousands of voters in just days at best, a task that Alabama previously represented would take months.
Sotomayor points out that the last time this case came before the court — when the majority agreed the Alabama maps were racist — Alito and Kavanaugh whined that changing the maps with months to spare would cause “chaos and confusion.”
She points out that what is happening now, because of the same rulings endorsed by Alito and Kavanaugh, we are now seeing actual chaos and confusion, including already made votes being thrown out:
After this Court’s order, Alabama announced that it intended to use the 2023 Redistricting Plan for the upcoming election and took the unusual step of splitting its congressional primary. In the three congressional districts unaffected by the change in congressional map, the May 19 primary election went ahead as scheduled. In the other four districts, voters still cast their ballots. Their votes for Congress, however, did not count. Instead, Alabama’s Legislature passed a law permitting the Governor to call a special primary election in the four congressional districts whose lines changed as a result of this Court’s order, and the Governor set that election for August 11.
Sotomayor repeats how multiple district court rulings and the Supreme Court (with the same makeup) had already found that the Alabama maps violated the law. And she points out that, unlike the Supreme Court the district court followed the earlier rulings in looking at the actual evidence:
The District Court’s account of the evidence here is more than plausible. The record is bereft of evidence suggesting that Alabama took seriously this Court’s finding of discriminatory vote dilution in Allen. Speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives Nathaniel Ledbetter put it bluntly: “‘If you think about where we were, the Supreme Court ruling [in Allen] was five to four. So there’s just one judge that needed to see something different.’” Singleton, 782 F. Supp. 3d, at 1348. That admission, the District Court observed, suggests “that Speaker Ledbetter was not focused on trying to remedy likely vote dilution” when the Alabama Legislature passed the 2023 Redistricting Plan.
As she notes, under the current Alito-doctrine, there is simply no way to ever invalidate a gerrymandered map:
The record is crystal clear. Even if Alabama may have unintentionally drawn the first racially discriminatory map, when it later adopted redistricting criteria that made it mathematically impossible to remedy racial discrimination, the District Court drew the obvious (and certainly not implausible) inference that Alabama intended to discriminate. If the District Court clearly erred by doing so, then there is no realistic case in which the presumption of legislative good faith can ever be rebutted.
Then she goes back to the point she made in her dissent on the last ruling. Callais is entirely about the Voting Rights Act. But the maps in Alabama didn’t just violate the VRA, they also were found to violate the Fourteenth Amendment. And while the Supreme Court can rewrite the VRA, it can’t ignore the Constitution. Yet it did. And it did so again in this ruling, pretending that Callais also covers the Fourteenth Amendment.
It is hard to see how the District Court’s finding of discriminatory intent under the Fourteenth Amendment could have departed from an opinion that purported to say nothing about how to find discriminatory intent under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court’s apparently oblivious insistence to the contrary today cannot be squared with what Callais said on its face just over one month ago.
And then there’s the chaos argument, which is where Alito and Kavanaugh’s earlier hand-wringing gets turned directly against them.
As the District Court explained, the path of least change in Alabama is keeping the District Court’s remedial plan in place. According to Alabama Director of Elections Jeff Elrod, all voters in Alabama are currently assigned in countylevel voter rolls to congressional districts based on the remedial map that the District Court previously ordered and that the State used for the 2024 election cycle. 2 App. 135. To run an election using the remedial map, then, the State need not make any changes to its voter rolls or change the status quo.
To switch to the 2023 Redistricting Plan now, however, county elections officials will have to reassign hundreds of thousands of voters across the State to new congressional districts.
Once again, the only actual consistency from the conservatives on the court seems to be “you cannot upset maps if they are racist against Black people” but “you can absolutely shake up maps at the last second, throwing out votes, if the new maps will be racist against Black people.” The only clear “consistency” is that it is only okay to disenfranchise Black voters.
And there will be massive chaos:
Elrod testified below that county elections officials would have to reassign those 600,000 voters manually. “The system,” he explained, “is not automatic” and “requires manual input” from elections officials who must “physically manually interface with the system.” Id., at 146. Reassigning voters in precincts split across two districts is particularly complicated, he continued, as it “cannot be done with a simple click” and instead requires officials to check street-level data to determine how to assign individual voters. Id., at 156–157. Worse yet, Elrod warned that reassigning voters requires using complicated computer software that officials must be trained to use, as “most of the counties’ registrars are not tech savvy” and “registrars are the only ones who can make the changes . . . to a voter’s record.” Id., at 147– 148. This process also requires many prechecks and backend quality control steps, all of which add to its time-intensive nature.
[….]
Here, county officials do not have four months. When Alabama filed these applications on May 27, they had just seven days. Elrod explained that voter rolls were locked throughout the State following the State’s May 19 primary election, meaning that county officials could not reassign any voters to their new congressional districts under the 2023 Redistricting Plan for the August 11 special primary election. ECF Doc. 530–1, p. 17. The rolls were unlocked on May 27, but they are set to lock again today, June 2, ahead of Alabama’s primary runoff election on June 16. As a result, county officials in the three most heavily impacted counties in Alabama had at best just seven days to reassign 600,000 voters by hand. The two smaller counties, which are together responsible for reassigning 100,000 voters, each have just three elections officials who can make these changes. 2 App. 122. Mistakes will inevitably occur, as overworked elections officials sprint around the clock to make all the necessary changes. Even then, the officials may fall short. As far as Elrod is aware, no county in Alabama that was split under a redistricting plan has ever managed to complete voter reassignment in just seven days.
That seems bad. That seems like the kind of inconsistency, chaos, and confusion that the conservatives on the Supreme Court insisted could not be allowed (when it would mean getting rid of a racist map). Weird that here they are not only fine with it, they are encouraging of the chaos.
In fact, Sotomayor points out that Alabama officials have changed their position on how much chaos would be caused depending on which result helped them more:
Alabama has taken wildly inconsistent positions on how much time it needs to implement a new redistricting plan throughout these cases, which suggests it is attempting to game this Court’s emergency docket through shifting positions on the equities. As noted above, Alabama previously sang a very different tune. In January 2022, it asked the District Court to stay its initial preliminary injunction in these cases. See ECF Doc. 110. In its motion, the State complained that changing its congressional districts four months before Alabama’s primary election that year “thr[ew] the [2022] election into chaos” and left “almost no time for maps to be redrawn, hundreds of thousands of voters to be reassigned to new districts, and thousands of new signatures to be obtained by candidates and political organizations seeking ballot access.” Id., at 20. Alabama continued: “To pull the rug out from . . . candidates and their voters in the run-up to an election requires extraordinary justification,” for “‘elections are complex to administer, and the public interest is not served by a chaotic, last-minute reordering of districts.’” Id., at 21 (alterations omitted). The State made similar arguments to this Court when it successfully sought a stay following the District Court’s denial. See Merrill Application 38 (citing “the last-minute reassignment of hundreds of thousands of voters to new districts” as imposing significant “harms not only [on] the State,” but also on “voters and candidates”).
If all the above was true in 2022, then it is also true in 2026. Alabama, however, no longer seems to think so. What was previously impossible to achieve in four months is suddenly possible to achieve in less than one week, as concerns about the administrative burdens associated with “the last-minute reassignment of hundreds of thousands of voters to new districts,” ibid., have apparently melted away. A State that once decried pulling the rug out from under voters, elections officials, and candidates now seems determined to do just that. The Court should not reward such gamesmanship, especially when it accepted Alabama’s arguments in granting Alabama a stay in 2022.
Again, Alito and Kavanaugh explicitly called out the supposed “chaos and confusion” that would be caused by adjusting maps with four months notice in 2022. Yet here, they seem to see zero issue with it happening in mere days.
Once again, there is no way to square all of this that does not come down to the judges who voted for this simply supporting blatant disenfranchisement of Black voters.
What’s happening now is even more disturbing. We’re killing people simply because they happen to be in boats spotted exiting certain shores and headed towards international waters.
The War on Drugs has always been evil. It has always relied on the ends justifying the malicious means, especially when the means usually meant the killing or incarceration of non-white people.
Under Trump, it’s gotten even worse. Trump has pretended the mere existence of a drug trade — something that involves the exchange of money for goods by consenting adults — justifies the wholesale slaughter of people in boats in international waters.
The Defense Department and Trump himself have posted clips of boat strikes on social media, almost always accompanied by self-serving statements about protecting Americans from foreign-based drug cartels.
But the government has offered very little in support of its social media postings and public statements. Almost no documentation exists to buttress assertions about the at-sea execution of alleged drug traffickers. Almost nothing connects these random murders to cartel activity.
The government has shown absolutely no interest in identifying the victims of its extrajudicial murder program. And why would it? Identifying drone strike victims might undercut the government’s unproven assertions. Worse, it might expose it for what it is: small-scale genocide meant to kill non-white people whose ultimate destination might be the United States.
It’s up to everyone else to do what this government and its historically large deficit won’t do: address the human cost of its antagonism towards any nation located south of the US border. Those doing this heavy lifting don’t have the benefit of billions of dollars of funding or internal pressure to discover the truth. They’re doing it because our government won’t.
Twenty journalists involved with the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP) have managed to identify 13 victims of Trump administration drone strikes. And even though it’s only a small percentage of the nearly 200 people our nation has murdered in open waters since Trump took office, it still matters.
This administration may prefer these people to remain faceless and nameless, since it makes their killing that much easier to shrug off. But anyone with an operating conscience shouldn’t pretend this effort is too small to matter. It does, and these are the names of a small portion of the people this administration has presumably straight-up murdered — an assumption that should stand until the administration is willing to produce evidence that says otherwise.
Of the 16 victims now identified, eight are Venezuelans: Juan Carlos Fuentes, 43; Luis Ramón Amundarain, 36; Eduard Hidalgo, 46; Dushak Milovcic, 24; and Robert Sánchez, Jesús Carreño, Eduardo Jaime and Luis Alí Martínez, whose ages are unknown. Three are Colombians: Alejandro Andrés Carranza Medina, 42, and Ronald Arregocés and Adrián Lubo (ages unknown). Two are from Ecuador: Pedro Ramón Holguín Holguín, 40, and Carlos Manuel Rodríguez Solórzano, 34; two are Trinidadians: Chad Joseph, 26, and Rishi Samaroo (age unknown); and one is from Saint Lucia: Ricky Joseph (age unknown).
Some of the people murdered by Trump’s Defense Department were simply going from one country to another to secure employment. Some of them may have been transporting drugs, but they were mules, rather than key members of international drug cartels. What’s actually known about the nearly 200 people the administration has killed is minimal. And the one entity that could provide more insight on its drone strike targets isn’t interested in sharing this information with anyone.
In the eight months since the airstrikes began, the US has not provided any evidence that any of the 194 victims were involved in drug trafficking.
Read that again: the US government has not provided evidence about any of its 194 murder victims. Instead, it has produced a steady stream of baseless invective meant to persuade the stupidest of Americans that these killings were justified.
What is being said by government officials doesn’t erase its refusal to provide evidence backing its claim, much less justify killings it’s unwilling to honestly discuss with the US public or its congressional oversight.
A spokesperson for US Southern Command said that all the strikes were “deliberate, lawful and precise, directed specifically at narco-terrorists and their enablers. We have full confidence in the operations and intelligence professionals who inform our missions.”
This is not evidence of anything. This statement is conclusory, which is the exact opposite of evidence, as any court will tell you. It simply says the government is in the right because the government says it’s in the right. That’s not justification. That’s someone representing entities swallowing up billions of federal officers telling the people paying its outsized paycheck “because I said so” and expecting that to be the end of the discussion.
The American public is not the government’s child. It’s actually the other way around. The government is reliant on the public, which makes the general public the adult in this conversation. That far too many MAGA enablers refuse to be the adults in the room makes it that much easier for the government to pretend it owes the public nothing. But that doesn’t change how this actually works. The government works for us, rather than the other way around. And when it doesn’t, it’s up to the public to remind it of its place.
In this case, it took people in other countries to generate the modicum of accountability this nation — under Trump — appears unwilling to do itself. That’s just fucking sad.
Back in February the Trump FCC announced it was launching new “reforms” of a major bipartisan FCC program that helps poor people afford broadband. Dubbed Lifeline, the program provides a modest $9.25 stipend to help low-income Americans afford either broadband or phone service.
Lifeline, developed and supported as a popular bipartisan initiative, is one of countless government programs being gutted by the Trump administration under the pretense of reform and cost savings. Earlier this year, FCC boss Brendan Carr falsely claimed that the “reform” (read: destruction) of the program was necessary due to a bunch of fraud by immigrants. From his original press statement:
“Lifeline providers received nearly $5 million in federal dollars to provide phone or Internet service to more than 116,000 dead people in the three optout states. Over 80% of those scams took place in California alone. That type of waste, fraud, and abuse is completely unacceptable.”
This was, you’ll be surprised to learn, a lie. One that mirrors similarly racist claims made by the Trump administration as it targets what’s left of the U.S. social safety net. It didn’t take long for Carr’s lie that “California immigrants are stealing taxpayer dollars” to bounce around the right wing propagandaverse.
But as the California Public Utilities Commission noted shortly thereafter, the 116,000 people cited died while on the program. There was no fraud. There’s not even coherent evidence they were immigrants (as if that would matter one way or the other):
The Trump FCC reforms aren’t finalized yet. There’s first a public comment period where Brendan Carr will pretend to listen to outside parties and the public. So groups like Public Knowledge and the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) recently filed their complaints about the proposed changes with the FCC (spotted first by Light Reading).
They make several excellent points, one being that historically, most of the fraud occurring in the Lifeline program has been at the hands of private companies:
“The Q-Link case in 2025, the Armstrong Group in 2024, and the 2022 San Francisco whistleblower complaint each illustrate that providers, not eligible and subscribing Lifeline households, are the primary entities engaging in fraud and abuse concerns within USF programs.”
Brendan Carr’s policies generally involve a strange fusion of racism and gutting oversight of corporations. U.S. broadband wouldn’t be so expensive if regulators like Brendan Carr actually believed in holding regional monopolies accountable. Instead, Carr’s policies generally involve mindless deregulation of industry, resulting in muted competition, high prices, spotty access, and poor customer service.
Groups say Carr’s goal of imposing new Lifeline restrictions are particularly problematic because only somewhere between 19 and 22 percent of all eligible homes sign up for the program, suggesting it could benefit from improved outreach and education, not cumbersome new barriers to participation.
The groups also stated they were “extremely concerned” about the potential that data collected will be used to harass minority Americans:
“For a program that garnered bipartisan support and cooperation for decades, it is difficult to ignore the timing of this proposal alongside expanded federal data-sharing initiatives targeting immigrant communities among other anti-immigrant strategies deployed by the Trump Administration.”
The Trump administration attacks on Lifeline mirror other simultaneous efforts to make broadband less affordable for everyone, whether they’re fresh immigrants or Trump supporters in the deepest red state. In just the last year or two, Republicans and the Trump administration have:
Tried relentlessly to destroy the FCC’s Universal Service Fund program that provides cheaper broadband to schools, libraries, and rural communities (many of which voted for Trump).
Hijacked the BEAD infrastructure bill broadband grant program so they could redirect money intended for rural fiber to instead slather Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos with subsidies they don’t need, for satellite broadband services they already planned to deploy.
You can probably see why Brendan Carr and Donald Trump would want misinformed voters focused on “immigrant fraud.”
Again, I feel like I’m going crazy here, but the obviously extremely partisan Supreme Court has struck again. I will repeat some of the basics, because it’s hard to believe how blatant all of this is. In November, a (Trump-appointed) judge threw out Texas’s new congressional maps, noting that the Texas state government had made it quite clear it was done for racial reasons, making it a violation of the Voting Rights Act. The judge wrote a detailed 160-page ruling showing how the Trump administration itself had essentially locked in the Texas legislature’s need to draw maps based on race, by threatening them with a civil rights complaint if they didn’t.
The Supreme Court, however, blocked that new map in December, saying that because of the upcoming midterm elections (still months away in December), Texas had to use those new maps (which had only been created in August) because (according to Samuel Alito) Texas voters needed “certainty.” Of course, they could have gone right back to the maps Texas had been using up until August — but somehow that would have shaken things up too much.
Then, a few weeks ago, the Supreme Court issued its Callais decision, effectively wiping out the remaining bits of the Voting Rights Act. Louisiana immediately declared a state of emergency and sought to throw out the map it had already started using for primary season — to redraw it in a much more racist way. And Samuel “the voters need certainty” Alito helped them along by rushing the certification of the Callais decision.
Now, just a few days later, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court has also vacated an even more detailed ruling rejecting maps in Alabama for being racist. The conservative majority claims that this is in light of the ruling in Callais:
The judgment of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama in that case is vacated, and the case is remanded to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit with instructions to remand to the District Court for further consideration in light of Louisiana v. Callais
Now, that’s already odd for the same reason I raised earlier about the Supreme Court (led by Justice Alito) claiming back in December that they couldn’t overturn Texas’ new map (which has only been announced, and never actually used, months earlier) for the sake of “voter certainty.” Yet here they are issuing a ruling EIGHT DAYS before the Alabama primary.
What the fuck?
It’s bizarre for multiple other reasons as well, including that the Supreme Court already heard a related case regarding the map in Alabama and ruled that it violated the Voting Rights Act (Alito, naturally, dissented). The state went to redraw its map based on that, but the lower court rejected the new maps almost exactly a year ago in an astounding 571-page ruling.
Notably, while that ruling does find that the new maps violate the Voting Rights Act (in multiple ways), it also found that the maps directly violate the Fourteenth Amendment (this discussion is towards the end of that 571-page ruling, so perhaps Alito and the other conservative Justices didn’t read that far?). And, as much as the Court believes it can invalidate the Voting Rights Act, it cannot invalidate the Constitution.
So we have a ridiculously thorough 571-page district court ruling — finding that the maps violate not just the VRA but also the Fourteenth Amendment — and the conservative majority just waves it away. Yet the conservatives on the Supreme Court — the same group who said no last-minute map changes for “voter certainty” — just ordered that clearly discriminatory, unconstitutional map into use, because of how they changed their interpretation of the Voting Rights Act.
But, as Justice Sotomayor points out in her dissent, that would totally ignore the Fourteenth Amendment part!
At the end of that trial, the District Court concluded “with great reluctance and dismay and even greater restraint” that Alabama had not merely spurned the opportunity to remedy past discrimination, but in fact had intentionally violated the Fourteenth Amendment.
Given that, the ruling in Callais could only possibly impact the VRA part of the lower court decision. Not the Fourteenth Amendment bit. But the majority on the Supreme Court just ignores that.
Nothing in the District Court’s Fourteenth Amendment analysis is affected by this Court’s opinion in Callais. Most obviously, Callais changed the legal standard for vote-dilution claims under §2. See 608 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 19) (“[W]e must understand exactly what §2 of the Voting Rights Act demands”). It said not a word about the standard for Fourteenth Amendment intentional-discrimination claims like the one that the District Court decided on remand in round two.
Even worse, Sotomayor points out that in Callais itself, the majority had claimed that the earlier 2022 ruling regarding the Alabama maps (where they said it violated the VRA) remains good law. But this new ruling clearly contradicts that claim.
Callais also insisted that this Court’s prior decision in Allen remains good law. See id., at ___ (slip op., at 36) (“[W]e have not overruled Allen”). These cases are, of course, Allen. So if Allen is good law anywhere, then it must be good law here. This Court’s finding of racially discriminatory vote dilution is an inextricable, permanent feature of this case, and Alabama’s willful decision to respond by entrenching rather than remedying that dilution is, as the District Court correctly recognized, evidence of discriminatory intent
So, was Alito lying a week and a half ago when he said that Allen was still good law? Or did he just change his mind now, because he’s decided that he needs to proactively strip Black voters of their franchise for the sake of helping Republicans get a few more seats in the House?
And John Roberts wonders why people claim the Supreme Court is “partisan.”
Sotomayor also points out the ridiculousness of doing this a week before the election:
Even if Callais had something to say about the evidence necessary to establish discriminatory intent, it still would not be appropriate to vacate the decision below at this time. That is because Alabama’s congressional primary election is next week, and vacating the District Court’s injunction will immediately replace the current map with Alabama’s 2023 Redistricting Plan until the District Court acts, even though voting has already begun. Vacatur is an equitable remedy, and the Court should not lightly wield it to unleash chaos and to confuse voters.
Honestly, I’m a bit disappointed that she didn’t point to Alito’s “voters need certainty” claim for refusing to block Texas’ new maps back in December.
There is no good-faith reading of these events. Alito said Allen was still good law — then acted as if it wasn’t, twelve days later and eight days before an election. He said voters need “certainty” — then vacated a 571-page ruling finding unconstitutional discrimination with a week to go before Alabama’s primary. And the majority just waved away the Fourteenth Amendment finding entirely, as if they simply didn’t notice it was there.
John Roberts keeps insisting the Court isn’t partisan. At some point, the gap between that claim and what the Court actually does becomes its own kind of answer.
In late 2023, I wrote a feature for The Verge exploring the FCC’s attempt to stop race and class discrimination in broadband deployment. For decades, big telecoms have not only refused to evenly upgrade broadband in low income and poor areas (despite billions in subsidies for this exact purpose), they’ve provably charged poor and minority neighborhoods significantly more money for worse service.
To be clear: the Biden FCC’s plan didn’tactually stop such discrimination. The previous FCC didn’t even have the moral courage to call out big telecoms with a history of such practices (see: AT&T’s “digital redlining” in cities like Cleveland and Detroit). The FCC simply acknowledged that this discrimination clearly exists and set up a complaint process for consumers who had been discriminated against.
I’m not sure the loophole-filled rules would have ever resulted in meaningful accountability for providers, given holding telecom monopolies accountable has never been a serious priority for either party. But it was at least an acknowledgement that this obvious discrimination exists. For the first time ever. Which was important for what I would hope is obvious reasons.
No longer: the Republican-stocked 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has struck down the entire FCC effort in a ruling, stating the FCC exceeded its legal authority by imposing liability for actions resulting in “disparate impact,” instead of merely policing “disparate treatment.” And by extending the complaint process to include subcontractors who help ISPs with deployment:
“[The FCC] exceeded its statutory authority in two respects that are the core of the final rule—disparate impact liability and the definition of covered entities. We therefore vacate the final rule in its entirety, leaving the FCC with an unfinished obligation to ‘adopt final rules to facilitate equal access to broadband Internet access service’ in compliance with 47 U.S.C. § 1754.”
That resulted in the whole effort being discarded.
The FCC could try to re-establish the rules with a new effort, but that new effort likely wouldn’t survive our new reality created by our corrupt courts dismantling Chevron Deference. Republicans and corporate power have made holding large U.S. companies accountable for almost anything illegal, and it’s still somehow not being talked about enough, given the vast (and quite deadly) looming ramifications.
While the Judges and case intervenors like to put on a very serious adult face and pretend they’re engaging in very serious legalese, the goal here really is no meaningful oversight of telecom monopolies. There’s always something they concoct to suggest the U.S. government can’t engage in basic consumer protection oversight of telecoms. If it wasn’t this, it would be something else.
The impact of this assault on the U.S. federal regulatory state is everywhere you look. Especially in broadband access, where dominant regional monopolies and state and federal regulatory capture (read: corruption) result in spotty access, slow speeds, and abysmal consumer service for everyone. Minorities and marginalized communities just get hit hardest, and usually first.
The ruling, issued unanimously by three judges appointed by Republican presidents, is a double win for folks like FCC boss Brendan Carr, who likely enjoys both the racism and protecting lumbering telecom monopolies from accountability for decades of predatory behavior. As usual, Carr insisted in a statement that fighting discrimination somehow discriminates against white people:
“Today’s appellate court decision is another common-sense win for nondiscrimination.
…the FCC’s decision to adopt those illegal rules only made it harder for providers to bridge the digital divide and took the FCC’s focus off of our core mission.
Now, the FCC is focused on advancing our Build America Agenda and ensuring that regulated entities do not discriminate, including through our efforts to end invidious forms of DEI discrimination. I commend the appellate court for correcting the FCC’s misguided 2023 decision. The court’s ruling follows the Supreme Court’s decision last week making clear that intentional discrimination is unlawful.”
That is, well, patently false. And weird. And an extremely dystopian inversion of reality by zealots. Consumer groups fighting for equitable and affordable broadband (like Public Knowledge) were, in contrast, not impressed. From Public Knowledge’s Legal Director, John Bergmayer:
“The practical effect is to eliminate a rule that addresses a documented problem,” he said. “Lower-income neighborhoods and communities of color get slower service, older equipment, and higher prices for the same product their richer neighbors buy. After today, the FCC can act only when it proves a smoking-gun case of conscious bias, which almost never exists in writing.”
Great stuff. Thanks again to all the folks (especially rich Silicon Valley CEOs) who decided that a corrupt kakistocracy at the hands of racist zealots was just what an already struggling America needed.
I will continue to make the case for a 100 Justice Supreme Court because we need to get to the point that no single Supreme Court Justice matters. As it stands, each individual Justice has way too much power, and when they go mad with it, they can undermine the very structure of democracy. And while I’m sure some people will insist this is sour grapes about cases not going the way I want, it’s not that. I can accept rulings I disagree with, where I can see and understand the Constitutional logic behind them. For example, while I agree that the post-Citizens United change in campaign finance has been disastrous and needs to be fixed, I think the actual ruling in that case is not just defensible, but correct on the law (i.e. I think the fixes to campaign finance should come from elsewhere, not from getting rid of that ruling).
Similarly, while the underlying hatred and bigotry animating the decisions in 303 Creative and Chiles v. Salazar are deeply problematic, the actual rulings make some level of Constitutional sense on First Amendment grounds.
But the Roberts Court keeps handing down rulings that have no basis in any actual Constitutional principles, and are instead very clearly ideological and results-driven approaches to deciding cases. The Dobbs decision on abortion, most famously, but also (obviously) Trump v. US in which the Supreme Court effectively ruled that Trump could violate any law he wanted while President. And now we can add to that Louisiana v. Callais, which effectively brings back Jim Crow segregation and turns the Fifteenth Amendment into a dead letter.
If you want deeper analysis on just how fucked up this ruling is, I’ll point you to voting law expert Rick Hasen’s writeup in Slate, where he calls it “the worst ruling in a century.” But even more useful is his follow-up piece on just how cowardly Alito’s reasoning is:
In Callais, Alito purported to overturn no precedent, claiming he was merely “updating” a framework that the Supreme Court constructed in the 1986 Thornburg v. Gingles case to determine when a redistricting plan violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by diluting minority representation. This follows his 2021 majority opinion in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, where he purported to provide mere “guidelines” for determining when a state violates Section 2 in passing a law related to voting or voter registration.
In both cases, however, Justice Alito made it impossible for plaintiffs to win their cases, leaving Section 2 on the books, but essentially toothless. Since Brnovich, as I showed in a recent law review article, no plaintiffs have brought successful suits under Section 2 challenging a law alleged to suppress votes. Justice Elena Kagan’s exasperated dissent in Callais cited this research and rightly predicted the same fate for redistricting claims under Section 2: “The consequences are likely to be far-reaching and grave. Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter.”
But I want to focus on something a bit different, which is just how hypocritical many of the recent decisions are. The supposedly “conservative” Justices contradict themselves over and over again to reach the motivated result they are seeking. We’ve already seen some of this in other rulings, such as when the court decided that nationwide injunctions by district courts were bad… but only when they were used against Trump (after blessing many against Biden).
In Callais we see more of the same. Remember, just two years ago in the Loper Bright case, this same Supreme Court pretended to stand on principle against the administrative state by arguing that the executive branch had way less power than it had previously suggested in its old Chevron case, arguing that the power of Congress to define things rather than delegate decisions is key. Well, the Fifteenth Amendment explicitly says that “Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation” in order to make sure that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race….”
So in one case it’s left for Congress to legislate to clarify governmental power, and in the other Justice Alito and the other conservatives on the Court have decided they can take that Constitutionally granted power away from Congress — not based on any actual Constitutional reason, but because they’ve concluded that racism is over. That’s literally the crux of Alito’s argument, in which he notes that:
By 2004, the racial gap in voter registration and turnout had largely disappeared, with minorities registering and voting at levels that sometimes surpassed the majority. Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than white voters in two of the five most recent Presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana.
Of course, this is both highly misleading and beside the point of what the Constitution actually says in the Fifteenth Amendment, which gives that power to Congress to decide. It’s misleading because he cherry-picked “two of the five most recent” elections to obscure the fact that it wasn’t true in the last three — elections that occurred only after the Court had already hollowed out the rest of the Voting Rights Act.
As we discussed last year in the Texas redistricting case, the Supreme Court has made it clear in previous rulings that it’s totally legal to gerrymander for partisan reasons, just so-long as it’s not explicitly for racial reasons. The problem in Texas was that its legislature had initially rejected the (already flimsy and obviously pretextual) partisan reasons for redistricting until the Trump DOJ threatened them over the racial makeup of districts, leading to the last minute decision to redistrict, solely in response to the warning about the racial makeup of districts from the Trump admin. The lower court (in a ruling issued by a Trump appointed judge) found that to be a violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
But, bizarrely, this Supreme Court also tossed out that ruling on the shadow docket (naturally) in December, claiming it had to do this because it was too close to the election in Texas to toss out the redistricted maps… even though the election was many months away and the “redistricted” maps had only been created a few months earlier. Literally none of it made sense. That ruling was just a stay to allow the redistricted maps for the 2026 midterm elections, but the case technically continued over whether or not there could be an injunction against the maps.
In an absolutely bizarre ruling on Monday (right before this Callais ruling) the Supreme Court effectively further rejected the challenge to Texas’ redistricting by simply citing its original shadow docket ruling, even though (1) the issue before the court now is different and (2) that original shadow docket ruling was based on no significant briefing or oral arguments. Court watcher (and shadow docket coiner/criticizer) Steve Vladeck notes that this is a dangerous power grab by the court:
I can’t remember a prior case with this kind of (true) summary reversal—where the Court just reversed a three-judge district court on the merits without any detailed explanation.
The original (already questionable) order was procedural, and apparently deemed necessary due to the “emergency” nature of an election that wasn’t happening for months and for which there was plenty of time to adjust. But to then claim to rule on the merits of the case by simply pointing back to that other emergency ruling, without more detailed briefing and without explanation, is bizarre.
But remember: the stated basis for the December ruling was the supposedly imminent 2026 midterm primaries. And then look at what happened in Louisiana after the Callais decision, where Governor Jeff Landry literally declared a “state of emergency” to suspend the already ongoing primary election in order to initiate redistricting, based on the Callais ruling.
So if you’re playing along at home, in Texas they redrew the Congressional maps in August of 2025 for blatantly racial reasons (as called out by a Trump-appointed judge in November, who provided a ton of evidence). In December of 2025, the Supreme Court said that those racially-biased new districts had to stay because it was too close to the 2026 midterms (which were still months away) to try to redistrict (despite the ability to easily go back to the pre-August districts which were the existing districts). But now, in late April, based on this new Supreme Court ruling, Louisiana can magically stop elections in which voting has already occurred in order to redistrict to create more racist gerrymandering.
And all this because Alito and Roberts are happy to literally ignore the Fifteenth Amendment when they don’t like the results.
That is what results-driven judicial decision-making looks like. And it’s why the court is viewed as increasingly illegitimate across the board.
I can live with the Court issuing principled rulings I disagree with. But here there are no principles on display beyond “we’re racist and we want to deprive non-white people of their vote.” The Supreme Court makes it clear that it is illegitimate with such a move, and not worthy of any respect at all.
And that won’t change until we get real reform, such as by shifting the Court so that no single Justice (or small clique of Justices) has so much power.
