The Supreme Court Shows No Love To Anxious White People

“Equality of representation in the legislature is a first principle of liberty.”—John Adams, 1776

 very important decision was handed down this morning by the U.S. Supreme Court. And I bet you didn’t even know it was coming. I know I didn’t and I follow this stuff fairly closely. And what this case, Evenwel v. Abbott, shows is that some white conservative activists in this country are not only suspicious of a democracy filled with brown people, they are openly hostile to it.

Before we get to the motives behind the plaintiffs in the case that was decided today, here is a quick summary from a story on MSNBC.com:

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rejected an effort to change political boundaries and reduce the voting strength of the nation’s Latino population on Monday.

Two residents of Texas urged the court to rule that in drawing legislative boundaries to create districts with roughly equal populations, states should count the voting population, not the total population.

Using the total population figures, the challengers said, dilutes the voting power of residents in districts with large numbers of people who are not eligible to vote, violating the one-person, one-vote requirement.

From an article in The Atlantic last year, we find that simply selecting the voting-age population as the criterion for creating voting districts “would produce districts that are older, whiter, richer, and more likely to vote Republican.” Get it? There are just too many pigmented people around who either don’t vote or can’t vote and if they live in a district with white people who do, then they are “diluting” the power of those white voters.

A group of white (let’s stop pretending race has nothing to do with this stuff) conservatives calling themselves (falsely) the Project on Fair Representation was behind this lawsuit, ostensibly brought by two Texas conservative voters, Sue Evenwel and Ed Pfenninger, who Raw Story described this way in December of last year:

Evenwel is a Tea Party activist who has thrown her support behind Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Sarah Palin and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), and she helps promote “birther” conspiracy theories at local political meetings in Titus County.

Pfenninger is a security guard who has posted dozens of YouTube videos explaining his disdain for Jews, the Catholic Church and short-haired women, and he also believes that unicorns are real and the sun revolves around the earth.

Raw Story points out that these two upstanding white citizens were recruited by the Project on Fair Representation, who proudly claims the group was “designed to support litigation that challenges racial and ethnic classifications and preferences in state and federal courts,” and says its mission “is to facilitate pro bono legal representation to political subdivisions and individuals that wish to challenge government distinctions and preferences made on the basis of race and ethnicity.” Clear enough? This is the same group that has been largely behind legal attacks on the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action.

You can read more details about the theories both in favor of this anti-democratic scheme and against it (even the state of Texas was against it, if you can believe that), but suffice it to say those in favor of this scheme—again, white conservative groups afraid of the browning of America— were sorely disappointed this morning. By a unanimous vote of 8-0, the Court left in place the very democratic idea of “one man, one vote,” which, oddly, only began to be articulated by the Court in the Earl Warren era, starting with the well-known Baker v. Carr in 1962, followed by the colossally huge case in 1964, Reynolds V. Sims, where the phrase—now a part of the lexicon of all those fighting for the right to vote around the world—was used to summarize the idea that state legislative districts should be drawn according to population rather than geographic districts.

Writing for the majority on the Court today, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said something so simple, yet apparently something so controversial among anxious white people who feel their cultural privilege slipping slowly away from them:

As the Framers of the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment comprehended, representatives serve all residents, not just those eligible or registered to vote.

Ya think? Should that even have to be articulated in 21st-century America? Ginsburg also reached back into time and rubbed a little salt into the wounds of conservatives by citing a Founder, Alexander Hamilton:

There can be no truer principle than this – that every individual of the community at large has an equal right to the protection of government.

“No truer principle.” That doesn’t leave much room for white cultural angst, does it?

On a local note, it is interesting that the Cato Institute, a libertarian group-think tank co-founded by Charles Koch, filed a brief urging the Court to take up the case of Evenwel v. Abbott. Sitting prominently on the board of directors of the Cato Institute is Joplin’s own Ethelmae C. Humphreys, part of a family that has showered conservative and libertarian causes with tons and tons of cash. Here’s how the great legal writer for Slate, Dahlia Lithwick, described Cato’s argument:

As a practical matter, if the plaintiffs win this appeal, power will shift markedly from urban voters to rural voters and to white and Republican districts over minority and Democratic ones. In their brief asking the court to take the case, the Cato Institute was quite clear: If we apportion seats based on population, “a relatively small constituency of eligible Hispanic voters … have their votes ‘over-weighted’ and ‘over-valuated,’ effectively diluting the votes of eligible voters” and giving Hispanic voters “disproportionate power.”

Does anyone in their right mind think that Hispanic voters have “disproportionate power”? No. Only people in their white mind. That phrase in Cato’s brief, “diluting the votes of eligible voters,” can fairly be translated, “diluting the vote of eligible white voters.” 

Fortunately, Cato’s argument, and the argument of other brown-fearing white groups and their pawns, failed to convince even the rightiest of the right-wingers on the Supreme Court. And the vital concept of “one-man, one-vote” will live on.

At least for now. Joplin’s Humphreys family and the Koch brothers and those like them have plenty of cash available to keep on challenging what most of us, and all of those sitting on the Supreme Court, still see as fundamental to the success of our democratic experiment. The fight isn’t over I am sure. All of which makes this coming presidential election, with Antonin Scalia now resting in his everlasting home, more important than ever.

Posted by R. Duane Graham on April 4, 2016

https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2016/04/04/the-supreme-court-shows-no-love-to-anxious-white-people/