Column By John Young
Call them Justice Roberts and the Colonials.
“Original intent”? Truly, they are of another era.
When the butter churn was high-tech. When whittlin’ and fiddlin’ were home entertainment. When non-males were non-citizens.
When black people were property.
And why would they not? Slavery was legal precedent for 244 years. Court after court. Congress after Congress.
Judging by recent actions, the Roberts Court would have nodded assent to the Fugitive Slave Act, to the Chinese Exclusion Act, to any indignity Jim Crow could conjure.
“Hey, people,” the chief justice would write for the majority, “don’t you know Abe Lincoln ended racial oppression?” Roberts and the Colonials would rule henceforth that people who got shut out and strung up because of skin color most likely deserved it.
Justice Samuel Alito said “heated language” from our president was insufficient to find pure racial animus behind his order last week to let the president remove en masse the temporary protected status the U.S. government had granted 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians.
Providing context about motivation, Justice Elena Kagan put some of the president’s language into the court record:
That Haitian immigration is “like a death wish for our country.” That people from “shithole countries” are “poisoning the blood” of the nation. That Somalis are “garbage.”
What if he had said the same about the Scots, the Swedes, the Finns? He’d have his hide flame-broiled by his own partisans.
Kagan said the administration’s statements before the court “fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the president’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.”
Justice Roberts and Colonials, tragically, are OK with this president’s tune, which is that he can be as racist as he wants to be.
And, so, the same shameless court majority that grants him authority to deport Haitians and Syrians without due process says he can stop asylum-seekers at the border the same way.
For the time being, the only fearing-for-their-lives people entitled to asylum are white South Africans. So fitting. So telling.
Then there was the court’s gerrymandering-on-steroids edict in April: Louisiana v. Callais. If you think the South’s white power structure marginalizes people of color now, just wait.
This and more, writes New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, signifies the court’s surrender to an administration that fundamentally “thinks the United States is a white country.”
If you think that’s hyperbolic, listen to JD Vance speaking recently to a pale gathering at the hard-right Claremont Institute:
“America is not just an idea,” he said. “It’s a group of people with a shared history and a common future.”
As academic — even poetic — as that sounds, Bouie says that our vice president, his boss and their ilk have in mind “tiers of belonging” to which immigrants — you can insert “people of color” there — have only feeble claims.
Hear these scary tones in the rhetoric of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who unabashedly believes that, in a fighting force, diversity is the ultimate weakness.
“In almost every instance where there has been poor leadership or people in positions they’re not qualified for,” he writes, a “diversity hire” was to blame.
Pursuant to his grievances about the hiring of highly qualified women and minorities, Hegseth has purged them from the highest ranks of the military, starting with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Charles Brown, and the Navy Chief of Operations, Lisa Franchetti.
Wow. Two and a half centuries since “all men are created equal,” we have this.
Hard to contemplate. But remember: We remain a democratic republic.
New leaders can bring about common-sense and fair immigration policies with a path to citizenship.
New leaders can restore the Voting Rights Act and curb gerrymandering.
New leaders can serve human needs rather than their own.
A crucial election is around the corner. And after that another.
At the big two-five-oh, in spite of our past, we still control the future of this nation.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email him at jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this editorial are those of the author.
