Like most people who follow the news, I spent much of the week thinking about Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who (for reasons I’ll explain in the featured post) has long been my least favorite justice. (I suppose one sign that you might be a news nerd is that you have a least favorite Supreme Court justice.)
Alito made headlines this week because we found out that an insurrectionist flag flew over a second Alito home. This led to a lot of calls for him to recuse himself from any cases concerning January 6, which he obviously will not do, in keeping with the well-established grade-school principle of “Make me.” I’ll cover all that in the weekly summary.
But what struck me is a decision the Supreme Court released this week in which Alito wrote the majority opinion: Alexander v South Carolina NAACP. In this decision, the Court gives its approval to a congressional map that a lower court said was an illegal racial gerrymander. But (as with Alito’s abortion opinion in Dobbs), the implications go much further: Under the logic laid out in Alexander, just about any racial gerrymander is OK, as long as you don’t say it out loud. Going forward, any racist legislator who wants to pass a new round of Jim Crow laws should know that he’ll get a sympathetic hearing at the Supreme Court.
This week’s featured post centers on Alexander and its larger implications. It’s called “Alito’s Flags Aren’t the Worst of It”, and it should appear shortly.
That leaves the weekly summary a lot to cover: the flags, the International Criminal Court targeting Israel, the Manhattan Trump trial, Trump’s crazy charge that the FBI tried to kill him (and Jack Smith’s response), Nikki Haley endorsing Trump, Memorial Day, and a few other things.
In addition to the newsy stuff, I found some more general articles worth your attention, like Cory Doctorow’s comparison of AI to jetpacks, and a thoughtful woman’s blog from rural Missouri. I’ll try to get that out by noon, but it’s a holiday, so the schedule might slip.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
Jim Crow is yesterday our black fellow citizens can no longer be fooled
I love following you! Thank you for the effort you make.
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div dir=”ltr”>Erik
Got a kick out of this “Jetpack” ad at the bottom of your column ….
Get the Jetpack app
when our constitution was signed it was the most perfect document at its time but not perfect of course
we the people not a monarch was a success
religious self evidence was a compromise like was power sharing between states and feds
checks and balances closed the deal including Supreme Court proposed by president vetted approved by senate not Congress and for life not to be bought or intimidated
impeachment to remove if conditions were met
this power was used to sneak abortion as a right despite not written in the constitution and thus not constitutional
same power enabled court to push back to states where not enough support which is why court not congress had ever approved it
if a justice ever did not excuse herself or himself or themselves when a personal friend or benefactor would have a case before this court support would be there for impeachment but not simply because friends offered jet flights cruises or anything else that politicians offer every day as taxpayer gifts to buy votes
all 9 are excellent jurists textually interpret our constitution not what they or we would like it to say
that is why amendments were invented if enough support by we the people was there
The assertion that each and every right has to be explicitly provided for by the Constitution or else it doesn’t exist is in direct contradiction of the document itself, as well as the legislative history of the Bill of Rights.
It also contradicts the fundamental principle of judicial review, as that also appears nowhere in the Constitution, but rather was found to be a logical necessity in Marbury v. Madison.
Your assertions are nothing more than what you’d like the Constitution to say, not what it actually does, both explicitly and via logical reasoning. But, you do have the same approach the reactionary majority who thinks it knows better about what’s best for our country than its legislature, foundational document, and decades of jurisprudence uses to rewrite our nation’s laws. Whatever you want is in there; it’s a matter of torturing reality enough to find it.