Clarence Thomas Just Made Another Mess for His Colleagues to Clean Up
SlateBack in July, the Supreme Court shocked observers by turning down a chance to do what it loves doing most: dismantle the Voting Rights Act, piece by piece. And Thomas, as he is wont to do in cases he loses, extended a conspicuous invitation to right-wing activists and/or lower court judges in a footnote: The opinion in Milligan, he noted, “does not address whether contains a private right of action.” In other words, whatever Section 2 does or does not permit lawmakers to do, Thomas suggested that the basic question of whether people can even get into courtrooms to enforce it remained something of an open question. In an opinion written by Trump appointee David Stras and joined by George W. Bush appointee Raymond Gruender, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit reached the novel conclusion that only the federal government—specifically, the attorney general—can enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. “However, it has repeatedly considered such cases, held that private rights of action exist under other sections of the VRA, and concluded in other VRA cases that a private right of action exists.” His opinion characterizes the majority’s gambit as “ambitious” and “a major upheaval in the law,” which is about as close as a federal judge gets to publicly opining that another federal judge is full of shit. Stras presents this information using language laced with contempt for the very concept of voting rights: “Quarreling over district lines begins like clockwork every ten years,” he says; the plaintiffs who oppose the map, he sighs, “sued nearly everyone who had anything to do with it.” This is not serious legal analysis; it is the collected grumblings of a crank who finds it annoying that Black people keep crowding his docket with cases insisting that they have a right to vote.
History of this topic
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