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george wallace
John Roberts Is George Wallace With a Harvard Law Degree
What the infamous segregationist from Alabama could not accomplish with violence, the US Supreme Court Justice has accomplished with a pen.
May 04, 2026
George Wallace was sworn in as Governor of Alabama in 1963 and famously declared in his inauguration speech (written by a Ku Klux Klan leader) "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." Two years later, Alabama state troopers violently broke up a nighttime voting rights march during which a police officer shot and killed young African American protester and Baptist deacon Jimmie Lee Jackson who was unarmed and protecting his mother.
In response, civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King and John Lewis, organized a mass march from Selma to Montgomery over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in an attempt to deliver a civil rights and voting rights message to Gov. Wallace. It became known as "Bloody Sunday" as state troopers gassed and beat the protestors, including fracturing Lewis' skull and sending 57 others to the hospital. Televised images of the brutal attack shocked the nation, directly leading to President Johnson's push for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Numerous Americans, black and white, were injured and even died fighting for the Civil Rights Act. John Roberts and his five Republican Supreme Court colleagues effectively overturned the Civil Rights Act and essentially disenfranchised black voters.
George Wallace tried to disenfranchise black voters with violent state troopers. Roberts disenfranchised black voters with the stroke of a pen. It's not hyperbole to say that while Roberts wears the black robes of a judge, he may as well wear the white robes of the Klan.
It's not hyperbole to say that while Roberts wears the black robes of a judge, he may as well wear the white robes of the Klan.
In her dissent to Louisiana v. Callais in which the 6-member Republican majority of the Court effectively overturned Section 2 of the Civil Rights Act, Justice Elena Kagan wrote: “The Voting Rights Act is—or, now more accurately, was—one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s history. It was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers. It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality." Kagan concluded, " I dissent because the Court betrays its duty to faithfully implement the great statute Congress wrote. I dissent because the Court’s decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity. I dissent.”
But the Court didn't destroy the Civil Rights Act in a day. It was part of a lifelong mission by John Roberts to do so.
Starting as early as 1981, as a 26-year-old lawyer just three years out of Harvard Law School, Roberts began his campaign to undermine the Civil Rights Act. He got himself a job as Special Assistant to Ronald Reagan's Attorney General William French Smith. Congress was about to amend the Civil Rights Act to provide that state laws would be illegal if they had a racially discriminatory effect, without having to prove that they had a racially discriminatory intent—something almost impossible to prove.
Roberts zealously took on the assignment coming up with arguments against the Amendment. Roberts wrote over 25 memos opposing the Amendment. In one, he argued that the Civil Rights Act was "the most intrusive interference imaginable by federal courts into state and local processes."
Despite the efforts of Roberts and others in the Reagan administration, Congress passed the Amendment with overwhelming bipartisan support. Little did anyone imagine at the time that Roberts would become Chief Justice and the leader of right-wing Justices' ultimately successful efforts to undermine the Civil Rights Act as he had initially set out to do as a young Justice Department official.
At his confirmation hearing, Roberts told the Senate "The existing Voting Rights Act, the constitutionality has been upheld and I don't have any issue with that." He was lying.
In 2013, Roberts got his first shot at dismantling the Civil Rights Act. In his 5-4 ruling in Shelby v. Holder, he overturned Section 5 of the Act , which required that states with a history of racist voter suppression pre-clear changes in election laws with the Justice Department to be sure they were not reinstituting racial suppression. He argued that it was no longer necessary since racism in America had diminished since the Act had been passed. In response, many states previously subject to preclearance rushed to enact new voter suppression laws.
In coming years, the Roberts Court further chipped away at the Voting Rights Act. But Roberts finally got his opportunity to make the rest of the Voting Rights Act a nullity when Louisiana v. Calais came before the Court this year. In a 6-3 opinion, which Roberts assigned to his anti-voting rights ally Justice Samuel Alito, the Court overruled the other crown jewel of the Voting Rights Act which had previously held that racially gerrymandered districts were illegal if they had racially discriminatory effect. Instead, racially gerrymandered districts would only be illegal if it can be proven that they have a racially discriminatory intent, a bar that is almost impossible to clear.
This was the argument that Roberts first made as a young Justice Department attorney back in 1982. As Chief Justice, he finally succeeded in his long campaign to revoke the Civil Rights Act.
Meanwhile, if a state can claim that it's gerrymandering is motivated by ensuring that its political party wins, it's totally cool with the Roberts Court. With the Court overturning both Section 2 and Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, it effectively repealed the entire Voting Rights Act that so many had fought and died for.
The very next day, Florida passed a redistricting law that would allow for new levels of gerrymandering designed to erase districts with large populations of black voters.
Roberts accomplished with a pen what George Wallace had tried to accomplish with violent state troopers.
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The Andrew Johnson/Bull Connor Supreme Court: The Colorblind Society That Isn’t
Jul 02, 2023
If Andrew Johnson and Bull Connor were alive today, they’d be mighty happy with this Supreme Court. It might be their ghosts, along with their ideological chums from Roger Taney, architect of the infamous Dred Scott case, to Strom Thurmond, George Wallace and the other Southern Dixiecrats, wearing those Court robes today.
Those defenders of slavery and segregation would be thrilled with the efforts of Roberts and his cabal to rewrite the history of the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection of the laws” clause of the Reconstruction era that is the core of American democracy. And their frontal assault on the goal of a multi-racial society premised on diversity, equity, and inclusion that is so feared by the ghosts of the plantation class ideologues and their descendants longing for a return to those days past.
Chief Justice John Roberts’ labored efforts to pretend his court is not merely a far-right partisan cabal crashed aground in a parade of extremist court rulings in the waning days of the 2022-2023 court term.
In the cynical hands of Roberts and his cronies on the court, the original intent of the 14th has been perverted to instead buttress and protect white supremacy and white privilege. And to strike down reforms designed to expand rights and protections for the marginalized and disadvantaged.
The debauched majority opinion striking down affirmative action, defines the “core purpose” of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th as “do[ing] away with all governmentally imposed discrimination based on race,” by which Roberts argues means historically disadvantaged Black and Brown students should not “be admitted (to colleges and universities) in greater numbers than they otherwise would have been.”
That would surely be news to the authors of the 14th and its precursor, the 1866 Civil Rights Act, who specifically crafted the bill and amendment to reverse the horrors of slavery and the pseudo-scientific racism which buttressed it in the face of virulent racism and increasingly violent repression by the former Confederate soldiers abetted by the white politicians aligned with them.
As Eric Foner, one of the most prominent historians of Reconstruction, wrote in his seminal book “The Second Founding,” President Johnson vetoed the 1866 Act (overridden by Congress) as made to operate in favor of the colored and against the white race” and opponents of the 14th directly attacked it as a violation of white supremacy.
“[E]qual protection of the laws is not achieved through indiscriminate imposition of inequalities,” Roberts pontificated, seeking to obscure and re-write the 14th’s “equal protection of the laws” clause as meant to advocate a colorblind society that as Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her forceful dissent “is not, and has never been, colorblind.”
As with his mugging on the Voting Rights Act, the subtext of his evisceration of affirmative action is infused with his presumption that the racist sins of the past are now past.
Roberts’ interpretation of the 14th, noted Sonia Sotomayor, is not only “contrary to precedent and the entire teachings of our history, but is also grounded in the illusion that racial inequality was a problem of a different generation. Entrenched racial inequality remains a reality today.”
Or as Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson in her dissent, noted in beautiful simplicity, “history speaks. In some form, it can be heard forever. The race-based gaps that first developed centuries ago are echoes from the past that still exist today. By all accounts, they are still stark.”
The Court majority, wrote Sotomayor in her far reaching dissent, “subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal protection by further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society… Reduced to its simplest terms, the Court’s conclusion is that an increase in the representation of racial minorities at institutions of higher learning that were historically reserved for white Americans is an unfair and repugnant outcome that offends the Equal Protection Clause”.
Or as Leah Litman, one of three constitutional law professors who provide colorful takedowns on the Court in their entertaining podcast Strict Scrutiny put it, “there’s almost nothing more that the Republican appointed justices love to do than to deny doing what it is in fact they are doing.”
The veil of Roberts’ deception is easily ripped off by glaring exemptions in the majority opinion, another telling case described by Sotomayor, and a companion Court ruling the next day.
First, there is the court’s transparent acceptance of preferential admission policy for legacy applicants and the offspring of wealthy donors, which ensures special status rather than the “merit” of a supposed colorblind society. Of white Harvard students, 43 percent are either legacies, children of faculty, kin of donors or a recruited athlete who would not have gotten in if not for special treatment that the Court does not challenge.
Second, not well hidden in a footnote, Roberts exempts military academies, allowing them to continue to use race-based admissions “in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.” In other words, the highly diverse military and the need for a diverse officer corps.
“During the Vietnam War,” Sotomayor noted, lack of racial diversity “threatened the integrity and performance of the Nation’s military” because it fueled “perceptions of racial/ethnic minorities serving as ‘cannon fodder’ for white military leaders.” Or as Jackson put it, “the Court has come to rest on the bottom-line conclusion that racial diversity in higher education is only worth potentially preserving insofar as it might be needed to prepare Black Americans and other underrepresented minorities for success in the bunker, not the boardroom.”
To Sotomayor, “the majority recognizes the compelling need for diversity in the military and
the national security implications at stake but it ends race-conscious college admissions at civilian universities implicating those interests anyway.” Diversity is equally essential everywhere in a society that is growing more multi-national, more multi-cultural by the day no matter how hard the Tucker Carlson’s and his ilk, try to stop it.
“Race-conscious college admissions,” Sotomayor added, are, for example, “critical for providing equitable and effective public services. State and local governments require public servants educated in diverse environments who can “identify, understand, and respond to perspectives” in “our increasingly diverse communities.”
Third, Sotomayor cited another case where the Court majority was perfectly comfortable with a race-based exception where “Mexican appearance” could be “a relevant factor” to justify a stop “at the border.” The Court, she wrote, thus facilitated racial profiling of Latinos as a law enforcement tool and did not adopt a race-blind rule. The Court later extended this reasoning to border patrol agents selectively referring motorists for secondary inspection at a checkpoint, concluding that “even if it be assumed that such referrals are made largely on the basis of apparent Mexican ancestry, [there is] no constitutional violation.”
And then came the subsequent ruling the next day ruling 6-3 on partisan lines if a Colorado web designer could hypothetically, as Strict Scrutiny noted, refuse to design hypothetical wedding websites for hypothetical same-sex couples despite a state law that forbids discrimination against gay people.
“For the first time in history”, Sotomayor wrote in another powerful dissent, “granted a business open to the public a Constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.”
“The owner who hangs a shingle and offers her services to the public cannot retreat from the promise of open service. It is to convey the promise of a free and open society and then take the prize away from the despised few.”
Sotomayor aptly recounts the long struggle to achieve a “public accommodations law” that guarantees to every person the full and equal enjoyment of places of public accommodation without unjust discrimination. The civil rights freedom movement won enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 which prohibit discrimination by places of public accommodation on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or disability – laws premised, one might add, on the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment that the Roberts Court majority is so determined to subvert.
Sotomayor and Jackson both emphasized the need for continued popular struggle to win the reforms needed to counter the rightwing assaults.
In a master class history that recounts the pervasive legacy of slavery, segregation and continuing structural racism, Jackson reminded all of us that “the justification for admissions programs that account for race is inseparable from the race-linked gaps in health, wealth, and well-being that still exist in our society (the closure of which today’s decision will forestall).”
From economic opportunity, savings and income to housing to education to the criminal justice system, the examples continue to rip through every fabric of our society. Those are reasons that historically disadvantaged Black and Latino students are disproportionately harmed by the Court’s overturning of President Biden’s plan to cancel federal student debt as well.
One of the most insidious consequences Jackson highlights, is the most basic – health, life and death. Citing the success of the University of North Carolina (UNC) policy outlawed by the court, Jackson wrote: “Beyond campus, the diversity that UNC pursues for the betterment of its students and society is not a trendy slogan. It saves lives.
“For marginalized communities in North Carolina,” she continued, “it is critically important that UNC and other area institutions produce highly educated professionals of color. Research shows that Black physicians are more likely to accurately assess Black patients’ pain tolerance and treat them accordingly (including, for example, prescribing them appropriate amounts of pain medication).
“For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die. Studies also confirm what common sense counsels: Closing wealth disparities through programs like UNC’s – which, beyond diversifying the medical profession, open doors to every sort of opportunity – helps address the aforementioned health disparities (in the long run) as well,” Jackson wrote.
Sotomayor cited briefs submitted by the Southern Governors that increasing the number of students from underrepresented backgrounds who join “the ranks of medical professionals” improves “healthcare access and health outcomes in medically underserved communities.” And another from the Association of American Medical Colleges that all physicians become better practitioners when they learn in a racially diverse environment.
Other medical professionals have issued similar warnings. Lee Jones, dean of medical education at the Georgetown University School of Medicine, observed that the ruling will harm efforts to mitigate the country’s massive racial and health disparities, adding that white residents in Washington, D.C., live more than 15 years more than Black residents.
After California banned affirmative action in the notorious Prop. 209 initiative in 1996, the number of Black and Latino students in colleges and medical schools plummeted. At the University of California San Diego, the entering medical school class in 1997 did not include a single Black student.
Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra noted that people of color had been excluded from attending medical school and joining medical organizations for generations. “This ruling will make it even more difficult for the nation’s colleges and universities to help create future health experts and workers that reflect” the nation’s diversity. “We need more health workers, especially those who look like and share the experiences of the people they serve,” he said.
“It is important to have a representative, culturally and linguistically competent nursing workforce to provide the best care for our communities, and yet only 6.3 percent of RNs are Black and just 6.9 percent are Latinx, despite Black and Latinx people respectively accounting for 13.6 percent and 19.1 percent of the total U.S. population,” said National Nurses United. “We need to diversify the nursing workforce and thus increase, not cut back, educational opportunities for people of color who want to be nurses.”
Fig leaf efforts by Roberts to shroud his racist intent that universities can, as Sotomayor put it, “in some situations, consider race in application essays is nothing but an attempt to put lipstick on a pig. The Court’s opinion circumscribes universities’ ability to consider race in any form by meticulously gutting respondents’ asserted diversity interests. Yet, because the Court cannot escape the inevitable truth that race matters in students’ lives, it announces a false promise to save face and appear attuned to reality. No one is fooled.”
For everyone appalled by the ghosts of Andrew Johnson, Bull Connors et al who sit on the court bench today, it is long past time to revisit proposals for essential court reform, from term limits of the lifetime appointments to expansion of the court to reflect the political reality of the nation.
“Despite the Court’s unjustified exercise of power the opinion today will serve only to highlight the Court’s own impotence in the face of an America whose cries for equality resound, Sotomayor concluded. “As has been the case before in the history of American democracy, concluded, quoting Dr. Martin Luther King, “the arc of the moral universe” will bend toward racial justice despite the Court’s efforts today to impede its progress.”
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The Name of the Only Republican Possibly Worse Than Donald Trump Is Mitch McConnell
Perhaps even more than the morally bankrupt Trump, McConnell is the worst among us
Aug 11, 2019
Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell is from Kentucky, but he epitomizes what is wrong with the nation's capital.
McConnell is a 77-year-old white man who has been running the Senate -- deciding its agenda and what will or will not be voted on by all 100 senators -- longer than any previous Republican in history. He was first elected to the Senate in 1984 and was last re-elected with just over 56% of the vote.
McConnell's second wife is Elaine Chao, another Washington fixture who has served in a number of Cabinet posts and is currently heading the Department of Transportation. McConnell is worth an estimated $22.5 million, most of it inherited from Chao's mother. Chao's Chinese family runs a prosperous shipping company; she now oversees America's shipping industry.
"It's about clinging to power at any cost. It's about getting right-wing judges appointed to lifetime judicial posts who will be counted on for decades to keep the anti-abortion, pro-gun, tax-cuts-for-the-rich, social-safety-net-slashing, unlimited-campaign-donations-for-special-interests and anti-business-regulation agenda in full throttle."
We bring up McConnell, the Senate majority leader, because unequivocally he will never be awarded any sort of profile in courage award.
McConnell is steadfastly refusing to bring up two House-passed bills that would mandate stiffer background checks on sales of guns. After a week of devastating shooting massacres in California, Texas and Ohio, McConnell would not bring the Senate back from its August recess to vote on any form of common-sense gun control. That includes taking away guns from dangerously mentally ill people (red-flag laws), reducing the size of high-capacity magazines, making military-style assault weapons illegal, buying back unwanted guns or requiring tougher background checks.
This is despite the shooting deaths of so many Americans in schools, movie theaters, churches, mosques, temples, festivals, offices -- no place is safe. Two hundred fifty-five Americans have died in mass shootings in seven months this year.
Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown said in disgust that McConnell "has an addiction to gun company money."
Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, said, "Come on, Mitch McConnell, where are your guts? Get off your ... and get something done.... You could walk out of the Senate with your head held high that you actually did something other than pad your pension."
Just days ago McConnell was dubbed "Moscow Mitch" for refusing to bring up bipartisan legislation that had passed the House to strengthen America's elections from manipulation from foreign governments such as Russia. Russia is now proven to have intervened in the 2016 elections in favor of Donald Trump. Intelligence agencies say there is no doubt that Russia will try to interfere in the 2020 elections and is already preparing. Nothing is being done to forestall that.
McConnell first came to the attention of many Americans when he refused to permit confirmation hearings on former President Barack Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland, widely respected by both Republicans and Democrats, to be a Supreme Court justice even though Obama had another year in office.
Trump has now put two justices on the court, turning it solidly to the right, and hopes to win a second term and name one or two more. For that alone, McConnell will support Trump, right or wrong, through racism and white supremacist rants, through trade wars, through alienation of allies, through disregard for the environment, through praising evil dictators, through one moral outrage after another.
Time after time after time, McConnell has defended Trump's indefensible behavior and policy positions that at one time were anathema to the Republican Party.
It's about clinging to power at any cost. It's about getting right-wing judges appointed to lifetime judicial posts who will be counted on for decades to keep the anti-abortion, pro-gun, tax-cuts-for-the-rich, social-safety-net-slashing, unlimited-campaign-donations-for-special-interests and anti-business-regulation agenda in full throttle.
McConnell listens and smiles enigmatically as Trump defends white supremacists, talks about "invasions" of immigrants, separates children from parents and imprisons them, taunts minority members of Congress and abuses his power while being compared more to George Wallace than George Washington, in the words of former Vice President Joe Biden.
McConnell smiles and does nothing but wait to hear from Trump, applaud and implement Trump's agenda.
McConnell is what is wrong with the Republican Party. He is what is wrong with Washington and politicians who put themselves above the people.
Perhaps even more than the morally bankrupt Trump, McConnell is the worst among us. He sees evil and does nothing but permit it to flourish. He closes his heart to what is right and good about America. He is one of the most powerful people in the world but doesn't understand that power has responsibilities as well as privileges. And he is very likely to hold on to that perch of power for the foreseeable future.
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