Tag: race

“Black” voting districts are unconstitutional, unfair, and condescending

The map shows the contorted Congressional District in Louisiana that is at issue in the Supreme Court case that was argued yesterday.

You won’t see this map in most of the news reports on the case – not because it’s not newsworthy, but because it is. This picture speaks a thousand words about the absurdity at issue.

All parties to the case – and the Supreme Court Justices, as well – agree that this strange amalgamation was created for the express purpose of establishing a district that is supposedly Black* so that Blacks could be assured of electing Black representatives.

(I say “supposedly Black” because most Blacks in Louisiana, as in other American states, are actually of mixed race.)

There are several problems with this notion of Black Congressional Districts. First, it assumes that people identifying as Blacks can be represented in Congress only by other people identifying as Blacks. Why is that the case? I’m white and I’ve voted for Black candidates, and I’m sure many Blacks have voted for white candidates. In fact, Donald Trump got a substantial share of the Black vote last year.

Second, the flip side of concentrating Blacks into Black districts is to concentrate whites into white districts. If we’re to have separate Congressional Districts, should we also have separate schools? Separate drinking fountains?

In a region of the country with a sordid Jim Crow history of “separate but equal,” having separate Congressional Districts strikes me as a vile throwback.

Third, what happens if one of the white districts in Louisiana elects a Black? That would result in Blacks having too many seats, right? Conversely, what happens if a Black district elects a white? Does that mean we need to go back to the racial gerrymandering board to re-draw the districts again?

Fourth, this notion that Blacks are entitled to Congressional representation in exact proportion to their population (or more in the event a Black gets elected in a white district) would seem to apply equally to other races.

In Washington State, for example, about 10% of the population is of Asian descent. Many of their ancestors were exploited and discriminated against. Should we gerrymander the Congressional Districts in Washington to ensure that 10% of the representatives are Asian?

What do we do if the Asian voters don’t go along? What do we do if they “wrongly” vote for a white or Black or Hispanic rather than for the Asian candidate that they’re supposed to vote for? What if they vote for politicians on the basis of policy, not race? Or on the basis of the content of their character, not the color of their skin?

Gee, that’d be horrible, huh?

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Wait, an NAACP Lawyer Did Not Just Say That About the Voting Rights Act

Jeff will have more on the oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais, which concerns race-based legislative districts and could gut a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. It’s a case that if liberals lose, could see massive implications for the 2026 midterms. 

And yes, some of the arguments made by lawyers fighting to keep this provision in place are downright embarrassing. An NAACP lawyer said that race-based congressional districts are essential, since white Democrats don’t support black candidates regardless of party affiliation. You cannot make this up.  

That’s not true. In fact, one could argue that liberal white women are the reason the Democrats haven’t fallen into total irrelevancy. Second, white liberals are the most hyper-aggressive about these issues and have voted in droves for black candidates. Party affiliation be damned, frankly. These white Democrats now vote based on race alone. The only thing that stops them is seeing an “R” next to the name. There is nothing more insufferable than the white, college-educated progressive who even repels nonwhite voters, which we’ve seen since 2020.  

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Clarence Thomas Wrecks Another Race Argument at SCOTUS

Supreme Court Clarence Thomas isn’t buying arguments that the Voting Rights Act allows for congressional districts to be drawn along racial lines (more specifically to help Democrats retain power in Washington D.C.). 

During a back and fourth with Louisiana Solicitor General Benjamin Aguinaga Wednesday, who is opposed to race based lines, Thomas argued an all black district in the state wouldn’t exist without the state being forced to consider race in districting. 

“Would the maps that Louisiana have currently be used if they were not forced to consider race?” Thomas asked. 

“We drew it because the courts told us to!” Aguinaga explained. “They said a majority black district was required. And our legislature saw the marching order.”

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Gorsuch Gets NAACP Lawyer To All But Admit Support For Racial Discrimination In Redistricting

UPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES — Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch got a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to all but admit support for states intentionally discriminating on the basis of race in the redistricting process.

The moment came during the Supreme Court’s Wednesday oral arguments for a pair of cases known as Louisiana v. Callais and Robinson v. Callais, which center on the Louisiana Legislature’s use of race when creating its recent congressional map.

As The Federalist previously reported, the matter first arose “following ‘a previous lawsuit … where plaintiffs argued that the prior map’ put forward by the state ‘violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by diluting minority votes,’ according to Oyez.” A district court order and subsequent legal battle prompted the Louisiana Legislature to “draft a new map last year ‘that included a second majority-black district,’ which plaintiffs in Louisiana v. Callais contend violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause by ‘prioritizing race in its creation.’”

While the Supreme Court was initially supposed to issue a verdict on the matter during its 2024-2025 term, the court announced on the last day of the session that it would be rehearing arguments in the case this fall. The justices notably issued an order over the summer instructing parties in the case to address the question of “[w]hether [Louisiana’s] intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”

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KBJ Suggests Black People Can’t Vote, Compares Them To The Disabled

During oral arguments for a major case that could put an end to race-based gerrymandering on Wednesday, Democrat-appointed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggested that race should be a consideration when drawing congressional districts because black people are systemically “disabled” and don’t have proper access to voting systems.

Jackson drew a comparison between the redistricting cases in question, Louisiana v. Callais and Robinson v. Callais, and accessibility under the Americans with Disabilities Act. She implied that minorities like black people are systemically blocked from accessing voting polls (a demonstrably false claim) and compared this to disabled people not being able to access a building. She used this faulty comparison to bolster her underlying argument that past race-based discrimination should allow for a present race-based remedy.

“Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act against the backdrop of a world that was generally not accessible to people with disabilities, and so it was discriminatory in effect because these folks were not able to access these buildings,” Jackson said. She argued that whether such discrimination is intentional is irrelevant.

“I guess I don’t understand why that’s not what’s happening here. … We are responding to current-day manifestations of past and present decisions that disadvantage minorities and make it so that they don’t have equal access to the voting system, right? They’re disabled. … We say that’s a way in which you see that these processes are not equally open.”

The case considers possible 14th Amendment violations of a congressional district map in Louisiana. As The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood has reported, the origins of the case date back to 2022, “when the Louisiana Legislature drafted a congressional map with a single black-majority district.” This led to a lawsuit by a group of plaintiffs — “represented by left-wing groups like the ACLU” — who alleged that the map violated Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act by “dilut[ing] black voting strength.” 

“Following an injunction barring the map’s implementation by a district court judge, continued litigation in the case ultimately resulted in the state redrawing the map to include a second black-majority district. This led to another lawsuit from a different group of plaintiffs, who claimed the state unlawfully prioritized race in the map’s creation and therefore violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause,” Fleetwood reported. “A three-judge panel on a separate district court agreed with these plaintiffs and blocked the new map’s implementation.”

The Supreme Court was initially slated to decide the case during its 2024-2025 term, but announced in June that it would rehear the case this fall.

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Will the Supreme Court upend the Voting Rights Act?

The Supreme Court may very well upend one of the last remaining central pieces of the Voting Rights Act – that elections or voting practices cannot discriminate based on race.

And, in doing so, the high court may bolster efforts by Republican state legislatures to redraw congressional maps to expand the party’s majority.

The justices’ ruling could actually crush minority representation in Congress.

According to two voting rights groups, Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter Fund, a ruling gutting the race provision would let the GOP nationwide redraw up to 19 House seats to favor the party.

It could also prevent Black voters from challenging political maps they believe don’t accurately represent them.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Wednesday in Louisiana v. Callais.

Arguments lasted for more than two hours in an unusually lengthy, complicated debate.

It stems from a complex congressional redrawing dispute starting in 2022.

Louisiana’s GOP-led legislature drew a map that only had one Black majority district and five mostly white districts, despite Louisiana’s population being one-third Black. So, a group of Black voters sued.

A federal judge struck the map down and ordered a redraw. Instead of letting the judge redraw it, Louisiana Republicans passed the current map that added a second Black majority district (but protected districts of key Republicans in the state, like House Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise).

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Why a Student With a 1590 SAT Score Was Rejected by 16 Colleges

Stanley Zhong did everything right. A 4.42 weighted GPA (3.98 unweighted). A 1590 SAT score (1600 is perfect). He’d even launched his own startup (RabbitSign).

Yet the 18-year-old Palo Alto-area graduate was stunned when he found himself rejected by 16 of the 18 schools he’d applied to, including multiple state schools.

“Some of the state schools, I really thought, you know, I had a good chance,” Zhong told ABC7 News. “I didn’t get in.”

Zhong’s story has begun to gather some media attention, which was the subject of discussion at a recent House Committee on Education and the Workforce hearing. Yet almost all of the stories failed to mention the likely reason Zhong was rejected: He’s Asian.

For years, colleges have been quietly discriminating against Asians in the admission process, admitting white, black, and Latino students with lower SAT scores and lower GPAs in the name of inclusivity. The problem for Asians is that, as a group, they tend to score really well.

This means there’s an abundance of highly qualified Asians applying to universities each year. This would not be a problem for Asian students if not for race-conscious universities, which, in recent years, have demonstrated a preference for social equity and racial balance over merit.

As a result, untold numbers of Asians have found themselves excluded from universities simply because of their race.

Harvard, which was sued in 2013 by Students for Fair Admissions for racial discrimination, is a high-profile example. Several years ago, the university released data showing that over an 18-year period (1995–2013), Asian American students outscored every other racial peer group, averaging an SAT section score of 767 (max 800). That is substantially higher than white people (745), Hispanic people (718), Native Americans (712), and black people (704).

In other words, Asian Americans had to outperform other racial peer groups to be admitted.

“[Asian Americans were] being held to a higher standard than [others], all else equal,” Duke economist Peter S. Arcidiacono wrote in a pretrial report.

The dirty secret was that Harvard, like most universities, was using racial discrimination to admit certain racial groups at the expense of others.

Many colleges and defenders of affirmative action, i.e., “positive discrimination,” refused to admit this was actually racial discrimination. Some supporters of the policy, however, had the intellectual honesty to do so.

“I can accept the trade-offs as the necessary cost of this policy,” Jonathan Chait wrote in a 2022 New York magazine article. “What I can’t accept is the refusal by Harvard and its defenders to admit what the policy is.”

Chait described their refusal as “gaslighting,” and the Supreme Court agreed. In a watershed 2023 decision, the court held that race-based admissions violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause.

The high court was right, but we should look beyond the legal problems of affirmative action.

America is built on the idea that all people should be treated equally, but today, we’re divided on the question of whether racial discrimination should be used so long as it results in preferred outcomes. The vast majority of people (73%) oppose race-based admissions, but it’s a policy supported by many liberals—indeed, demanded.

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In Race-Based Redistricting Battle, Louisiana Urges SCOTUS To Uphold America’s ‘Color Blind’ Constitution

Is the use of race in the redistricting process unconstitutional?

That’s a key question the U.S. Supreme Court will be considering in a pair of high-profile cases set to be argued before the justices on Wednesday. Known as Louisiana v. Callais and Robinson v. Callais, the matters provide the court with the opportunity to end longstanding conflicts between the Constitution and race-centric voting provisions that have plagued states and the redistricting process for decades.

We believe these cases are “good vehicle[s] for the Supreme Court to address some of these issues that have been percolating for a very long time,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill told The Federalist.

As The Federalist previously reported, the origins of the dispute date back to spring 2022, when the Louisiana Legislature drafted a congressional map with a single black-majority district. This prompted a group of plaintiffs — represented by left-wing groups like the ACLU — to sue, alleging that the map “dilut[ed] black voting strength” and therefore violated Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Following an injunction barring the map’s implementation by a district court judge, continued litigation in the case ultimately resulted in the state redrawing the map to include a second black-majority district. This led to another lawsuit from a different group of plaintiffs, who claimed the state unlawfully prioritized race in the map’s creation and therefore violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. A three-judge panel on a separate district court agreed with these plaintiffs and blocked the new map’s implementation.

While the Supreme Court agreed to take up the case and was expected to issue a verdict during its 2024-2025 term, the justices announced on the final day of the session that it would be rehearing arguments in the case this fall. The court notably issued an order in early August instructing parties in the case to address the question of “[w]hether the State’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U. S. Constitution.”

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The Freeway Phantom murdered six girls and was never caught….so why did the case barely make headlines?

He was the faceless predator who hunted children on the streets of Washington D.C., snatching, raping, and strangling at least six little girls during his 17-month reign of terror.

The serial killer, who called himself the Freeway Phantom, tortured and murdered his young victims – one just ten years old – before dumping their bodies on the side of the freeway. 

From April 1971 to September 1972, he terrorized the nation’s capital and to this day has never been identified. His heinous crimes should place him among America’s most notorious serial murderers: Son of Sam, the Zodiac killer, the Boston Strangler or now the Gilgo Beach killer. 

Yet outside of D.C., very few people have even heard of the mystery murderer or his killing spree.  

The reason, investigators now admit, is as disturbing as the murders themselves: the killer’s victims were poor black girls from neglected neighborhoods, and didn’t matter to law enforcement at the time. 

‘Those black girls didn’t mean anything to anybody – I’m talking about on the police department,’ Tommy Musgrove, who had once headed the D.C. homicide unit, told the Washington Post in 2018.

‘If those girls had been white, they would have put more manpower on it, there’s no doubt about that.’

Now more than half a century after the murders America chose to forget, the case has been dragged into the spotlight thanks to a podcast, Monster: Freeway Phantom, which explores the shocking failures of the investigation.

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Federal Government Freezes $2.1 Billion for Chicago Transit Projects Over Alleged Race-Based Contracting

The federal government will withhold $2.1 billion for two Chicago infrastructure projects, the U.S. Department of Transportation has announced, citing a new rule that bars race- and sex-based contracting requirements from federal grant programs.

The agency said in an Oct. 3 statement that the Chicago Transit Authority’s (CTA’s) Red Line Extension and Red and Purple Modernization Program have been placed under administrative review “to determine whether any unconstitutional practices are occurring.”

The suspension follows similar moves in New York earlier this week, where $18 billion for the Hudson Tunnel and Second Avenue Subway projects was also put on hold, amid similar concerns around constitutionality.

White House Budget Director Russell Vought took to X to say that the reason the two projects have been put on hold is to “ensure funding is not flowing via race-based contracting.”

The pause stems from an interim final rule the Transportation Department issued on Sept. 30 that rewrites the agency’s longstanding Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) program, which aims to assist small businesses owned and controlled by “socially and economically disadvantaged individuals.” The rule now states the department must operate its programs “in a nondiscriminatory fashion,” and it specifically “removes race- and sex-based presumptions of social and economic disadvantage that violate the U.S. Constitution.”

Under the new standard, all applying businesses must make individualized showings of disadvantage to qualify as DBEs. The rule eliminates automatic presumptions previously granted to women and members of certain racial and ethnic groups.

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