http://ace.mu.nu/archives/416900.php Back in the 80s, if I remember right, left-wing extremists began demanding that section 2 of the Voting Rights Act be read to require explicitly race-based gerrymandering to create majority-minority districts. These majority-minority districts just so happened to be Democrat-supermajority districts, and this imposition was placed on the states of the old Confederacy, which just so happen to be Republican states. Left-wing judges agreed with this idea, naturally, and began demanding that red states gerrymander their congressional districts to always guarantee Democrats of 3-4 bonus seats that they would never, ever have in a normal partisan gerrymander. While the blue states worked relentlessly to eliminate all Republican-leaning districts, or to pack all Republicans into just one or two districts to make sure every other district was Democrat-majority, Republicans have been forced by left-wing judges to always carve out special Democrats-Only districts. The state of Louisiana just carved out not one but two strangely-shaped districts to make two seats that only Democrats (specifically, black Democrats) could win. Louisiana citizens sued, claiming -- correctly -- that these districts were drawn on racist grounds and therefore were a violation of the Constitution.
have a couple of gift links left this month. This is a good read The Debate Dividing the Supreme Court’s Liberal Justices Outnumbered and facing vast stakes, Justices Kagan and Jackson are split over the best approach: investing in diplomacy inside the court or sounding the alarm outside. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/31/...e_code=1.xk8.blfx.dGMmElHyYhWY&smid=url-share
if only the article that you have parroted would provide the name of the extremists, at least the leader of the pack. that article did not provide that info because doing so would not fit that preconceived convenient narrative
This is suppose to be the LEAST political arm of the Government but that is obviously not the case In fact it maybe the most political Rocket River Impartial my ***
In a recent ruling against Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Illinois, Kavanaugh clarified his September 7th statement that race “may be used as a factor” when assessing reasonable suspicion under the Fourth Amendment. The examples he cited illustrate his reasoning. Those earlier opinions from him had been called the “Kavanaugh stops,” with legal experts arguing they enabled ICE to stop people based on race. His clarification specifies that ICE stops cannot be based on race or ethnicity. Legal expert slams Supreme Court Justice for attempt to 'narrow the forces he unleashed' - Raw Story In a ruling in September that stayed a lower court block on certain kinds of immigration raids in California, Kavanaugh authored a concurrence in which he appeared to endorse profiling by federal agents outright, while simultaneously denying that American citizens have anything to fear from this. "The Government sometimes makes brief investigative stops to check the immigration status of those who gather in locations where people are hired for day jobs; who work or appear to work in jobs such as construction, landscaping, agriculture, or car washes that often do not require paperwork and are therefore attractive to illegal immigrants; and who do not speak much if any English," he wrote. This ruling sparked a wave of outrage, and several legal and political observers began calling immigration enforcement based on racial or ethnic profiling "Kavanaugh stops," and tallying up the growing number of alleged incidents of this type occurring under the Trump administration. All of this may have stung the justice, because he appeared to qualify or walk back this sentiment in his concurrence in the Illinois case. "The basic constitutional rules governing that dispute are longstanding and clear: The Fourth Amendment requires that immigration stops must be based on reasonable suspicion of illegal presence, stops must be brief, arrests must be based on probable cause, and officers must not employ excessive force," wrote Kavanaugh. "Moreover, the officers must not make interior immigration stops or arrests based on race or ethnicity." This change of tone was not lost on New York University law professor and former Defense Department special counsel Ryan Goodman. "Kavanaugh goes out of his way to pen a footnote not having to deal with the case at hand," Goodman wrote on X. "He appears to be trying to narrow the forces he unleashed with his prior opinion allowing for race- and ethnicity-based #KavanaughStops."
This is some great reporting from the New York Times about the birth of the shadow docket. It is paywalled and too long to quote in its entirety, but you can find it here: Inside the Supreme Court’s Risky New Way of Doing Business - The New York Times Here is the TLDR: For the last decade, SCOTUS has been making politically impactful decisions outside and before their official judgments to resolve cases with things like emergency stays, but we've had no public window into their thinking because they issue orders without explanation. So, their deliberations are called the shadow docket. But, internal deliberations of the first of these Roberts Era shadow docket decisions was leaked to the NYT. The case that launched this new behavior was the states' lawsuits against the Obama Admin to stop the Clean Power Plan. A district court handling the case declined to issue a stay on the implementation of the CPP while litigation was ongoing, so an appeal was made straight to SCOTUS in a hail mary attempt to stop it. Ordinarily, SCOTUS would not entertain this request and force plaintiffs to go through all the lower courts first. But Chief Justice Roberts learned a lesson from a related regulation regarding power plant mercury emissions. SCOTUS struck down that regulation, but the EPA bragged that most plants had already come into compliance before SCOTUS made a decision, so it was moot. Roberts didn't want that to happen again, so he moved to break precedent and put in a stay from on high. The costs to power plant companies was too high to let the Admin get away with a fait accompli on a maybe-illegal regulation. No consideration was given to whether the cost to humanity from climate change was too high. Since then, SCOTUS has been making many more decisions like this where the reasoning is a secret. CPP was probably dead anyway once Clinton lost to Trump. And it probably should have lost anyway because Obama tried to make major changes without legislation. But, it does make me wonder about the caprice that SCOTUS can act with. They could have, for example, put an emergency stay on Trump's illegal tariffs (which also made major policy change without legislation) with the same logic they applied to CPP, but they didn't. Now, the tariffs cannot be unwound -- they can refund importers but they can't refund consumers. The court seems to pick and choose based on the politics. It is small wonder that the legitimacy of the court is questioned.
