What they're not telling you: # Colorblind Constitution: The Roberts Court Ends A 'Sordid Business' The Supreme Court's decision in Louisiana v. Callais banning racial gerrymandering marks the culmination of Chief Justice John Roberts's decades-long judicial crusade to eliminate all race-based government classifications, a victory that mainstream outlets have framed primarily as a threat to Democratic electoral prospects rather than examining the constitutional philosophy driving it. Roberts has made his position unambiguous since 2006, when he wrote that considering race in government decisions is "a sordid business, this divvying us up by race." This articulation wasn't rhetorical flourish—it represents a consistent constitutional interpretation that the 14th Amendment's prohibition on racial discrimination means precisely what it says, with no exceptions for purportedly noble purposes.
# THE TAKE Roberts' "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
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