If Justice Samuel Alito is any indication of movement conservatism, and his life is largely a creation of the movement, then his opinion on the Louisiana non-unanimous jury law indicates why Republicans will never win the minority vote.<\/p>\n
For him, any mention of of white people being racist is the real racism<\/a>.<\/p>\n It is important to understand that this means that you can never find common cause with these people with issues of race, because they believe that non only is there no racism now, but that there was no racism ever: <\/p>\n Justice Sam Alito just delivered a dissent that could be described as blistering if it wasn\u2019t so cringe-worthy. For six paragraphs, Alito rails against the majority opinion, written by Justice Gorsuch, as a breach of \u201crational and civil discourse\u201d because it includes a recounting of the history of the laws at issue in the case. But that history requires delving into Ku Klux Klan influence and a public record of racist motivations for the specific laws, and if there\u2019s one thing Justice Alito hates, it\u2019s using ouchy words like \u201cracism\u201d to describe\u2026 well, racism.<\/span> Too much public discourse today is sullied by ad hominem rhetoric, that is, attempts to discredit an argument not by proving that it is unsound but by attacking the character or motives of the argument\u2019s proponents. The majority regrettably succumbs to this trend. At the start of its opinion, the majority asks this rhetorical question: \u201cWhy do Louisiana and Oregon allow nonunanimous convictions?\u201d And the answer it suggests? Racism, white supremacy, the Ku Klux Klan. Non-unanimous verdicts, the Court implies, are of a piece with Jim Crow laws, the poll tax, and other devices once used to disfranchise African Americans.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Now, it\u2019s not clear why Justice Gorsuch suggested that a legacy of racism motivated these laws, but it\u2019s probably because this is entirely and indisputably accurate. Louisiana is, of course, one of those deep South states with a well-known history of institutionalized racial prejudice \u2014 at least until Chief Justice Roberts declared racism cured in Shelby County \u2014 and the history of this law is no exception with lawmakers going on record to call it critical for \u201cthe supremacy of the white race.\u201d Oregon\u2019s a little harder to envision as a state steeped in racist policymaking until you learn that it was founded as a white supremacist haven and actually had a law banning black people until 1926. So, it\u2019s not all craft brews and shrooms over there. With its jury provision, lawmakers called out immigrants as the reason white people needed to be able to convict people without unanimous consent. It\u2019s all around a disturbing legacy.<\/span> Alito and his ilk not only believe that personal racism is a constitutional right, but that racism from the state is a fundamental right as well.<\/p>\n The party of Abraham Lincoln has become the party of Jefferson Davis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If Justice Samuel Alito is any indication of movement conservatism, and his life is largely a creation of the movement, then his opinion on the Louisiana non-unanimous jury law indicates why Republicans will never win the minority vote. For him, any mention of of white people being racist is the real racism. It is important …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[364,387,407,398],"class_list":["post-176640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-evil","tag-hypocrisy","tag-justice","tag-racism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176640"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176640\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>
<\/span>But in Louisiana and Oregon, 12 Angry Men would have ended with a conviction in about 10 minutes. For years, the two states allowed criminal convictions on the basis of non-unanimous verdicts, a justice system curiosity developed to prevent the occasional black or immigrant juror from interfering with the government\u2019s interest in throwing the book at minority defendants. States that outright refused to seat minority jurors would run afoul of the Constitution, but if those jurors could be seated but ignored\u2026 well, the Supreme Court just threw up its hands at a solution so clever!<\/span>
<\/span>In any event, the Supreme Court just closed this loophole permanently, holding that the Sixth Amendment by incorporation requires states to convict people unanimously. Justice Gorsuch wrote a fractured opinion that won\u2019t necessarily satisfy scholars but gets the result right.<\/span>
<\/span>Justice Sam Alito isn\u2019t pleased to be closing the door on the right of states to perform end-runs around the Constitution. He opens, as previewed at oral argument, with an unironic admonishment of the majority for overturning a precedent from the 1970s. Apparently, precedents that make a mockery of Sixth Amendment rights are sacrosanct while those that impinge on no rights other than a janky First Amendment claim concocted from whole cloth must be overturned with abandon. But it\u2019s his next section aimed directly at Justice Gorsuch where Justice Alito decides to get his inner Justice Taney on.<\/span><\/p>\n
<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>
<\/span>Make no mistake, Justice Alito\u2019s ill-advised outburst is all about his (along with Chief Justice Roberts, who joined the dissent) desire to purge jurisprudence of a vocabulary to discuss racial animus. It\u2019s why their ideological brethren refuse to admit that segregation was unconstitutional<\/a> \u2014 they balk at the idea that racism can even be a subject in legal discourse. If the committee chair who passed this law saying that it was done to \u201cestablish the supremacy of the white race,\u201d \u2014 one of the quotes Justice Gorsuch cites that so egregiously rankles Alito \u2014 cannot be raised in an opinion, then really what\u2019s left?<\/span>
<\/span>This, for Alito, is not \u201crational or civil discourse\u201d because it offends him. Everyone should really wonder why he\u2019s so offended by calling Jim Crow racist.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n