'A vision that would horrify': Op-ed shreds Clarence Thomas for 'radical' attack on rights

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wants to overrule any ability of federal courts to hear accusations of rigging legislative maps based on race, wrote court watcher Mark Joseph Stern for Slate on Thursday — and in the process, he took aim at the landmark ruling that prohibited segregation in public schools.

This came out of the court's ruling this week in Alexander v. South Carolina NAACP, in which Justice Samuel Alito, currently under fire for a series of scandals about the display of extremist symbols on his property, wrote for the six right-wing justices to greatly restrict the circumstances in which courts can overrule racial gerrymanders.

"And yet, as bad as Alito’s opinion was, it didn’t go far enough for Justice Clarence Thomas, who penned a solo concurrence demanding a radical move: The Supreme Court, he argued, should overrule every precedent that limits gerrymandering — including the landmark cases establishing 'one person, one vote' — because it has no constitutional power to redraw maps in the first place. And he places much of the blame for the court’s allegedly illegitimate intrusion into redistricting on a surprising culprit: Brown v. Board of Education," wrote Stern.

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This is the famous ruling that dismantled "separate but equal" and required public schools to integrate. In recent years, this ruling has been weakened as later courts have placed limits on how racial segregation can be policed — but Thomas is enraged that the ruling even created a presumption courts must protect equity in the first place.

"'The view of equity required to justify a judicial map-drawing power emerged only in the 1950s,' Thomas wrote. 'The court’s impatience with the pace of desegregation caused by resistance to Brown v. Board of Education led us to approve extraordinary remedial measures,'" Stern noted. "According to Thomas, the court 'took a boundless view of equitable remedies,' inventing an illegitimate new 'flexible power to invent whatever new remedies may seem useful at the time.'" That includes the subsequent rulings that established a right to one person, one vote, which Thomas would say is also outside courts' authority to police — because, he says, at the time the Constitution was adopted, courts in England did not handle legislative districts.

"Here, by gutting the 14th and 15th Amendments through an ultra-narrow interpretation, Thomas is telling us that he prefers a nation where state legislatures can divvy up citizens on the basis of race to create maps that openly discriminate against racial minorities," wrote Stern. "It is a vision that would horrify the abolitionists who sought to end such state-sponsored racism once and for all, as well as the justices who sought to vindicate their aims in Brown."