{"id":374,"date":"2026-07-08T10:36:34","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T10:36:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=374"},"modified":"2026-07-08T10:36:34","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T10:36:34","slug":"ruling-away-from-americas-second-founding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=374","title":{"rendered":"Ruling Away From America\u2019s Second Founding"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Over a century ago, when the Supreme Court helped usher in Jim Crow, Justice John Marshall Harlan took his colleagues to task for betraying the promise of Reconstruction. Dissenting in Plessy v. Ferguson<\/em>, Harlan insisted that \u201cin view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Is This the End for Graham Platner?<\/a><\/p>\n

In the Supreme Court term that just ended, the Roberts court turned Harlan\u2019s anti-caste reading on its head. This court read the 14th<\/sup> Amendment, time and again, as the justification to lock in racial subordination and to immunize bias and prejudice from scrutiny. A big part of the story of the term that just ended is that this conservative supermajority will give the Reconstruction Amendments the stingiest reading possible.<\/p>\n

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As this term demonstrated, invocations of colorblindness are increasingly a one-way ratchet deployed not to ensure equality but to annul efforts to create equality and undo state-sponsored racial subordination. The centerpiece of this is , in which the Roberts court determined, in a 6\u20133 vote, that Louisiana had violated the 14th<\/sup> Amendment\u2019s guarantee of equal protection by drawing a race-conscious map. Never mind that this map was intended to redress the state\u2019s prior gerrymander, which had packed and cracked communities of color, diluting their voting strength. In the majority\u2019s twisted logic, remedying discrimination is itself discrimination.<\/p>\n

In the name of colorblindness, Callais<\/em> made three huge legal changes. First, it scrapped what was left of the Voting Rights Act, reading one of the act\u2019s most important features\u2014the ban on discriminatory results\u2014out of the statute. Second, it hollowed out Congress\u2019 power to enforce our constitutional promise of racial equality at the polls, insisting that Congress lacked the power to do more than prohibit purposeful racial discrimination. Third, it blessed the power of states to gerrymander communities of color and cement white political control, elevating the authority of states to engage in partisan gerrymandering into a right that trumps the VRA\u2019s protections for equality.<\/p>\n

Ignoring the 15th<\/sup> Amendment\u2019s race-conscious insistence that communities of color need equal voting rights, Callais<\/em>\u2019 crabbed interpretation opens the door to a return to one facet of Jim Crow America: state efforts to wipe away Black representation through a toxic blend of partisan and racial gerrymandering. The ruling even bars Congress from using the 15th<\/sup> Amendment to achieve its purpose of ensuring an inclusive multiracial democracy. In other words, Callais<\/em> turns the 14th<\/sup> and 15th<\/sup> amendments on their heads, misreading those transformative documents into a new way to safeguard the power of states to subjugate communities of color. As shown by post-Callais<\/em> developments over the past two months, the ruling\u2019s blast radius will be far and wide. The court\u2019s post-Callais<\/em> shadow-docket rulings, particularly , when the conservative supermajority rejected a three-judge court\u2019s unanimous finding of discriminatory intent, suggest a high court racing to impose a maximalist reading of Callais<\/em> as fast as it can.<\/p>\n

At the same time that it has annulled the Voting Rights Act as too race-conscious, the court\u2019s conservative wing has gone out of its way to greenlight racist government action, most recently in . There, the Roberts court, once again by a 6\u20133 vote, rejected challenges to the Trump administration\u2019s termination of temporary protected status for immigrants from Haiti and Syria, willfully ignoring anti-Haitian diatribes uttered by President Donald Trump. As Justice Elena Kagan\u2019s dissent spelled out, the record was chock-full of racist anti-Haitian animus and prejudice. Trump called Haiti a \u201cshithole country,\u201d insisted that allowing Haitian people into the U.S. was \u201ca death wish for our country\u201d and was \u201cpoisoning our country,\u201d to name just a few examples. Justice Samuel Alito\u2019s majority opinion, which conveniently omitted these rants, found no equal protection violation, insisting that the president\u2019s statements were not \u201covertly racial\u201d and \u201cexpressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mullin<\/em> illustrates a conservative supermajority that is willing to label nearly any form of state action targeting communities of color as race-neutral. The equal protection clause was written to provide a powerful weapon against entrenched prejudice. But in the hands of the Roberts court, it more often than not immunizes prejudice. The conservative wing\u2019s obsessive focus on and chintzy view of intentional discrimination have no basis in constitutional text and history.<\/p>\n

Read more Brett Kavanaugh\u2019s Anti-Trans Ruling Takes a New and Disturbing Turn<\/a><\/p>\n

Further, the Roberts court\u2019s shadow-docket rulings\u2014increasingly occupying an oversized part of the justices\u2019 work\u2014provide additional examples of the ways in which equal protection no longer protects. Last fall, in , the Republican-appointed supermajority paused a lower-court injunction preventing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from engaging in racial profiling. That order contained no reasoning, but even Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the sole member of the majority to seek to justify the move, saw no constitutional problem with the use of \u201capparent ethnicity\u201d as one factor supporting an immigration stop, sanctioning systematic racial profiling. In Allen<\/em>, the post-Callais<\/em> case concerning Alabama\u2019s effort to undo Black representation, and in an early Texas districting case, , the conservative supermajority also paused lower-court rulings, insisting that these courts had erred in finding racial discrimination. Both cases insisted that the courts should have assumed good faith on the part of the state legislature. A through line in this term\u2019s cases is the conservative justices\u2019 effort to make intentional racial discrimination impossible to prove.<\/p>\n

The court read equal protection to permit discrimination against marginalized persons in other contexts too. In , yet another 6\u20133 ruling, the conservative supermajority refused to apply equal protection to safeguard the rights of transgender people, employing instead a watered-down form of judicial scrutiny to uphold state legislation that excluded from participation in sports all trans women and girls, even those who possess no biological advantage. The 14th<\/sup> Amendment\u2019s universal promise of equality was designed to end prejudicial exclusions of marginalized persons, ensuring equal citizenship stature for all, but B.P.J.<\/em> wrongly suggests that courts should defer to legislatures, even when they deny transgender people rights to participate that others take for granted.<\/p>\n

Even cases that were expected to be lopsided wins, such as , the challenge to Trump\u2019s frontal assault on birthright citizenship, closely divided the justices. Chief Justice John Roberts\u2019 majority opinion spelled out why the president\u2019s anti-birthright executive order flouted the text and history of the 14th<\/sup> Amendment. But only one other conservative justice, Amy Coney Barrett, joined him. Shockingly, the other four conservative justices refused to accept the overwhelming text and history supporting the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship for everyone born in the United States, regardless of the status of their parents. To do this, the justices resorted to made-up suppositions or cherry-picking the historical record to read birthright citizenship out of the 14th<\/sup> Amendment. This means that with the Roberts court, even the most foundational guarantees of the Reconstruction Amendments remain insecure.<\/p>\n

The constitutional vision of the conservative supermajority represents, in many respects, a return to the ideals championed by white politicians who fought tooth and nail against the Second Founding, willfully ignoring racial oppression against formerly enslaved Black Americans while also denouncing federal civil rights legislation seeking to guarantee racial equality and multiracial democracy. To a striking degree, the positions staked out by the court\u2019s conservative supermajority echo the opponents of the 13th<\/sup>, 14th<\/sup>, and 15th<\/sup> amendments back when these amendments were passed. But these views deserve no weight in interpreting the amendments\u2019 transformative guarantees. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson underscores in a masterful concurring opinion in Barbara<\/em>, Black Americans and their allies in Congress were the ones who fought to revolutionize the Constitution \u201cto bring their own antisubordination vision to fruition.\u201d Paying heed to text and history requires an inclusive constitutionalism that centers their views.<\/p>\n

Seeing the attack on the Second Founding for what it is helps expose the lie that this is an originalist court that follows text and history where it leads. To the contrary, this term revealed a Supreme Court repeatedly adopting readings of the 14th<\/sup> and 15th<\/sup> amendments that reject the essential premises of those amendments and read them to lock in subordination and domination of historically marginalized communities. The Roberts court will go down in history for its many rulings hollowing out the amendments that were adopted to make our Constitution more free, more equal, and more democratic.<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more Who Could Replace Graham Platner?<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is one loud lesson to be found in this term\u2019s rulings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":373,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[23,92,15,17],"class_list":["post-374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-jurisprudence","tag-john-roberts","tag-racism","tag-supreme-court","tag-voting-rights"],"yoast_head":"\nRuling Away From America\u2019s Second Founding - Home Move Chronicle<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=374\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ruling Away From America\u2019s Second Founding - Home Move Chronicle\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"There is one loud lesson to be found in this term\u2019s rulings.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=374\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Home Move Chronicle\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-08T10:36:34+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/homemovechronicle.com\\\/?p=374#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/homemovechronicle.com\\\/?p=374\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/homemovechronicle.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/75d86f25dbb870f24983ccc831d1ec4e\"},\"headline\":\"Ruling Away From America\u2019s Second Founding\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-08T10:36:34+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/homemovechronicle.com\\\/?p=374\"},\"wordCount\":1439,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/homemovechronicle.com\\\/?p=374#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/homemovechronicle.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/261bad52f8b708c4878d422250e65060.avif\",\"keywords\":[\"John Roberts\",\"Racism\",\"Supreme Court\",\"Voting Rights\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Jurisprudence\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/homemovechronicle.com\\\/?p=374#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/homemovechronicle.com\\\/?p=374\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/homemovechronicle.com\\\/?p=374\",\"name\":\"Ruling Away From America\u2019s Second Founding - 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