Racism is dead. Hurrah, again, for the Day of Jubilee!

Let us pause for a moment to congratulate, again, all those idiots who claimed that voting for Hillary Rodham Clinton solely for the purpose of fending off a radical right Supreme Court was “extortion.” None of those people are likely to be affected by Monday’s decision in Abbott v. Perez, the latest in a series of decisions aligned with Chief Justice John Roberts’ lifelong quest to crush the ability of the federal government to protect the franchise of its minority citizens. This decision to keep in place Texas's current voting districts is not only obviously delusional on the issue of race, it’s yet another one that indicates that the five-vote conservative majority on this court lives in Happy Gumdrop Land—or, rather, Exxon-Mobil Happy Gumdrop White People’s land.

In merciful brief, the case involved the unholy mess that Texas made of its redistricting maps in 2010. A year later, and before this Court gutted the Voting Rights Act—which held Texas had to pre-clear its maps in Washington—a federal court there threw out the maps. Meanwhile, a federal district court in Texas drew up its own maps, and the Supreme Court tossed them. Thus, Texas faced the prospect of going into the 2012 elections with no maps at all. In March of that year, in a kind of blind panic, the Texas court concocted some interim maps which, shockingly, looked as badly gerrymandered by race as all the others had. Those were the maps Texas used in 2012. In 2013, the Texas legislature adopted these “interim maps” as permanent, racial gerrymanders and all.

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The question before the Court in this case was whether or not it could assume that, having gerrymandered the state by race three times in as many years, the Texas legislature made the interim maps permanent because they maintained the racially rigged districts. In other words, can we assume, based on the fact that many of us are not three years old, that the members of the Texas legislature were satisfied with the racial gerrymandering that helped many of them all get elected. Follow? Good, because it gets worse. Justice Samuel Alito is stepping up to the plate.

No, said Alito, from his perch high atop Mount Disingenuous, we cannot assume that at all.

Whenever a challenger claims that a state law was enacted with discriminatory intent, the burden of proof lies with the challenger, not the State… The allocation of the burden of proof and the presumption of legislative good faith are not changed by a finding of past discrimination. “[P]ast discrimination cannot, in the manner of original sin, condemn governmental action that is not itself unlawful.” Mobile, 446 U. S., at 74 (plurality opinion). The “ultimate question remains whether a discriminatory intent has been proved in a given case.” Ibid. The “historical background” of a legislative enactment is “one evidentiary source” relevant to the question of intent. Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp., 429 U. S. 252, 267 (1977). But we have never suggested that past discrimination flips the evidentiary burden on its head.

The “past discriminatory intent,” which Alito seems to believe occurred under the administration of Governor Sam Houston, was two years earlier and the beginning of one continuum that ended on Monday. In 2013, the Texas legislature did not have to “intend” to discriminate. It already had, in 2010.

In addition, Alito seems to be saying that the 2013 decision by the Texas legislature to adopt as permanent the interim maps that had been proven to be racially gerrymandered was not discriminatory, possibly because there is no video of the legislature waving Confederate battle flags, drinking moonshine out of mason jars, and trying on white hoods to see if they go with gray suits.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor was having none of this folderol.

This disregard of both precedent and fact comes at serious costs to our democracy. It means that, after years of litigation and undeniable proof of intentional discrimination, minority voters in Texas—despite constituting a majority of the population within the State—will continue to be underrepresented in the political process. Those voters must return to the polls in 2018 and 2020 with the knowledge that their ability to exercise meaningfully their right to vote has been burdened by the manipulation of district lines specifically designed to target their communities and minimize their political will. The fundamental right to vote is too precious to be disregarded in this manner.

There seems not to be much doubt that the president* will get to appoint at least one more justice; the latest rumor has Justice Clarence Thomas retiring, not that many people would notice. And Merrick Garland still labors away down the street. Tell me more about “extortion.” I’m keen to learn.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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