Colorblind Constitution: The Roberts Court Ends A 'Sordid Business'
by Jonathan Turley,
The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, barring racial gerrymandering, has many on the left feigning vapors,
# THE TAKE ' "colorblind" framework is procedural theater masking substantive surrender. Banning racial gerrymandering while permitting partisan gerrymandering creates a legal fiction: you can't explicitly draw Black districts, but you can surgically dismantle them through the partisan proxy. The court's linguistics matter. "Colorblind" sounds neutral. It's not. It's a doctrine that prohibits remedial action while permitting discriminatory outcomes—the difference between detecting a pattern and proving intent. As someone who's read redacted documents on voting rights enforcement, I can confirm: the mechanism doesn't require explicit racial animus anymore. Partisan mappers simply need plausible deniability. Louisiana v. Callais hands them that shield. The real story isn't about ending a "sordid business." It's administrative laundering—replacing blunt instruments with surgical ones. More sophisticated. Harder to litigate. Same destination.
What the Documents Show
The Roberts Court's Louisiana v. Callais decision represents the logical endpoint of this philosophy, rejecting the court's previous willingness to tolerate race-conscious policies when they served broader equity goals. The mainstream narrative focused on Democratic outcry, with figures like Rep. Jamie Raskin claiming the court itself has been "gerrymandered" to rig elections. This framing obscures the deeper constitutional debate: whether the government can constitutionally use racial classifications at all, even when claiming higher purposes.
Follow the Money
The court had previously wrestled with this contradiction most visibly in Grutter v. Bollinger, where Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's 5-4 majority upheld racial preferences in university admissions to achieve classroom diversity. O'Connor's own opinion contained what many legal scholars found constitutionally perplexing—she declared that such racial criteria would become "unnecessary" after 25 years, essentially writing an expiration date for racial discrimination into the Constitution itself without identifying any textual basis for this temporal limitation. Roberts rejected this type of compartmentalized reasoning. His consistent position holds that discrimination based on race constitutes discrimination whether it disadvantages whites, blacks, or any other group. The court's previous approach of tolerating race-conscious policies for "higher purposes" struck him as intellectually incoherent—the government cannot simultaneously claim race-blindness as a constitutional principle while permitting racial classifications whenever sufficient justification materializes.
What Else We Know
Various justices maintained this bright-line position throughout decades of decisions that the broader court majority could not reconcile in principled ways. For ordinary citizens, this doctrinal shift carries significant implications beyond electoral mechanics. The Roberts Court's movement toward colorblind constitutional interpretation constrains government's ability to employ race-conscious remedies for any stated purpose—affirmative action, redistricting, hiring, contracting, or other policies claiming to address racial inequity. Whether one views this as constitutional fidelity or as judicial obstruction of remedial efforts, the practical effect is identical: governmental race-consciousness is now constitutionally suspect under this court's framework. Understanding this decision requires grappling with the philosophical argument Roberts has advanced, not merely with its electoral consequences.
Primary Sources
- Source: ZeroHedge
- Category: Surveillance State
- Cross-reference independently — don't take our word for it.
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This article is produced by NewsAnarchist's AI reporting system, not a human staff reporter. It's built from the primary source cited above (a FOIA release, an agency's own policy or procurement document, court filings from surveillance litigation, or the wire reporting linked in the body) and reports what that source states, attributed to it — it does not allege intent behind a surveillance program beyond what the record shows. Part of our Surveillance State hub. Found an error? Tell us.