The Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais was one of the least surprising opinions ever. The Roberts Court has been chipping away at the Voting Rights Act for years. The only surprise was that Sam the Sham Alito wrote for the majority. The VRA has been something of an obsession for John Roberts since he was a young lawyer in the Reagan DOJ and the point man for an effort to limit the scope of the VRA. The Brennan Center calls it a vendetta. I call it shady, make that shadowy. John Roberts is the justice in the shadows.

Alito’s opinion poses as color blind jurisprudence when it’s an act of raw partisanship. There have been many such cases since the Trump troika were appointed BUT this is worst example since 2001’s Bush v. Gore.

The practical effect of Callais applies mostly to Southern congressional districts but it’s a dark day for American jurisprudence and race relations. Alito wills away racism by pretending it doesn’t exist at the same time Team MAGA is attempting to usher in a new era of Jim Crow, aided and abetted by SCOTUS. The Warren Court dealt a death blow to Jim Crow, the Roberts Court Six is bringing it back. Why? They’re good Republicans.

I expected the Chief Justice to write the Callais opinion. I suspect he assigned it to Alito because Sam the Sham doesn’t give a shit what people think of him: John Roberts does. He was reputedly gutted by the reaction to the immunity impunity case, which shattered his reputation as a warm and fuzzy moderate. That’s why he’s lurking in the shadows and letting Alito serve as his hatchet man: It’s the Eisenhower-Nixon gambit. Tricky would be proud of the Chief Justice.

Josh Marshall has written extensively about SCOTUS corruption and the need to reform this rogue court:

In our thinned out political discourse people often use the term “corruption” to refer only to venal corruption – bribes, conflicts of interest mostly involving money, kept Justices like Clarence Thomas. That is neither the only nor the most significant form of corruption. In most cases venal corruption is significantly self-correcting. It gets exposed and prosecuted. The more general meaning of corruption is when a form of rot takes over an office or institution because of systemic and ingrained abuses of power. That is the case with the Supreme Court and it’s especially dangerous with the Supreme Court because a mix of history and restraint have left very few checks on its abuses. The Supreme Court is given specific powers to achieve specific ends. Over the last 15 years it has assumed vast new powers and used them consistently for anti-constitutional ends. Far from interpreting or defending the constitution it is at war with it. An orderly, proper and essential process of reform is entirely possible by simple statute law on simple majority votes.”

SCOTUS reform should be at the top of the agenda in 2029 if the voters repent their MAGA sins and give Democrats the executive and legislative hammer and take it away from the Trump troika.

I considered doing a detailed legal analysis of Callais, but the combination of Sam the Sham’s turgid prose and illogical logic renders it a bog in which I am unwilling to wade as re-reading is the essence of legal analysis. Roberts is at least a decent legal writer whereas reading Alito is a grind.

Shorter Adrastos: Callais is such a politicized opinion that it defies legal analysis. I hope this doesn’t disappoint my colleague Jamie O who gave me a shout out in his fine post last Friday.

Callais is a Louisiana case. I’ll have more about The Clownfish’s shadowy machinations involving redistricting tomorrow. Why shadowy? In part, the second majority minority district resulted from Landry’s conniving with Cleo Fields to return him to Congress. They’re two corrupt peas in a pod and they’ve helped to make this mess in which the Gret Stet of Louisiana finds itself. Thanks, you malevolent motherfuckers.

I used the shadowy imagery because of Roberts’ cowardice in the Callais case as well as his role in the creation of the dread shadow docket. John Roberts is an ideological right-winger who prefers to be seen as a reasonable justice. He *is* capable of voting with the 3 Democratic appointees but his heart belongs to the Federalist Society.

It’s time to mount my favorite linguistic hobby horse. Last December, I wrote a post called Don’t Call Them Conservatives: Supreme Court Edition. Allow me to pile on: Judicial conservatism centers on deference to precedent and the democratically elected branches. For example, Justice Felix Frankfurter was a man of the left but he was also a judicial conservative. John Roberts is a shadowy and reactionary hack.

Repeat after me: Don’t call them judicial conservatives.

Finally, the featured image is of Orson Welles as The Shadow. I get tired of using news photos for my posts, so I’m always on the prowl for alternatives. In this instance, there’s a story attached. The Shadow’s name was Lamont Cranston. My mother was prone to conflating that first name with that of California Democratic Senator, Alan Cranston. I enjoyed teasing her about it with lines like: Only The Shadow knows who our Senator is.

You say Lamont Cranston; I say Alan Cranston. Let’s call the whole shadowy thing off.

The last word goes to Stephen Stills and Manassas: