Supreme Court Not Even Trying Anymore To Pretend It's Not Full Of Bigoted Hacks
If it ever was trying.
Those clowns on the Supreme Court have done it again, the clowns.
No, we’re not talking about allowing the execution of possibly innocent people. Or granting Donald Trump complete immunity for any of the crimes he commits in office. (So, so, so many crimes.) Or allowing ICE and Border Patrol to racially profile. Or letting Trump gut the federal government even while lawsuits about whether the president has the authority to do just that work their way through lower courts. Or boot transgender people out of the military under the sound legal doctrine of Pete Hegseth finds transgender people icky.
No, this is about gerrymandering. As in Thursday’s latest shadow docket decision by SCOTUS affirming that Texas may gerrymander its congressional district maps mid-decade to make them more racist and pro-Republican. All everyone else has to do is pretend that Texas didn’t flat-out admit that’s what it was doing. Call it the LA LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU doctrine.
Let us review how we got here. Earlier this year, Donald Trump got the bright idea – or rather, somebody whose brain isn’t a grilled cheese sandwich left out in the sun on a hot day gave him the idea — that Texas could redraw its congressional map to give itself five more Republican-friendly districts. Given the narrow margin in the House of Representatives, those five seats could be the difference between which party controls the chamber after the 2026 midterms.
Texas needed a legal justification for redistricting five years before the next Census, so Trump’s Department of Justice gave it one. In July, the DOJ sent the state a letter proclaiming that several of its districts were already illegally gerrymandered to create majority-minority districts. In other words, yes, there was racial bias in these maps. But the racial bias was against white people, which to the KKK klavern running the executive branch right now is the worst kind of bias imaginable. Therefore, the DOJ encouraged the state “to rectify these race-based considerations from these specific districts.”
So the Texas Republicans redrew the maps, though they were delayed in passing them after Democrats fled the state to deny the legislature a quorum so it could hold a vote. There was much hollering and threatening of arrests, and governors in other states got a lot of ink for sheltering those Democrats for a few weeks while drawing attention to this naked power grab. But eventually the Democrats went home, and the maps were passed.
Unfortunately for the Republicans, intentionally gerrymandering along racial lines is in fact still illegal. Texas was promptly sued. In November, a federal district court ruled against the state in a decision highlighting just how rushed, sloppy, and yes, flat-out racist the entire effort had been:
“It’s challenging to unpack the DOJ Letter because it contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors,” the judges wrote. “Indeed, even attorneys employed by the Texas Attorney General — who professes to be a political ally of the Trump Administration — describe the DOJ Letter as ‘legally unsound,’ ‘baseless,’ ‘erroneous,’ ‘ham-fisted,’ and ‘a mess.’”
It is hard to overstate just how much of a drubbing Texas got from the district court. The judge who wrote the 2-1 decision for the three-judge panel was even appointed by Trump. Can you imagine how racist you have to be that even a Trump judge notices? Pretty damn racist.
And it was unnecessary. The Supreme Court allowed extreme partisan gerrymandering in 2018. You just say you’re gerrymandering for partisan purposes and not racial ones, and you’re golden. But this is the Trump administration, and it just can’t help itself.
The district court told Texas that is had to use its current, not-racially-biased maps in the 2026 midterms. Texas appealed to SCOTUS. Which brings us to the ruling SCOTUS handed down on Thursday, on its shadow docket, with no briefing or arguments. Perhaps the Republicans on the Court figured why bother, when they were going to reach whatever conclusion they wanted anyway.
The majority opinion was written by Sam Alito, natch, because Sam Alito never met a cheap-shit justification or total lie he couldn’t squeeze into a court opinion. In this case, it was that even though the letter from the DOJ that kicked this whole thing off told Texas to redistrict based on race, even though Texas Republicans said they were basing the redistricting on race, even though the district court found that the entire evidentiary record indicated that the redistricting was based on race, the redistricting was not actually based on race:
First, the dissent does not dispute—because it is indisputable—that the impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple.
The dissent was written by Elena Kagan, who very much disputes this by noting that the district court found the exact opposite to be true. And what is the point of the district court spending weeks hearing arguments, diving into thousands of pages of testimony and evidence, and engaging in fact-finding if SCOTUS is going to dismiss all that by saying, in essence, Nuh-uh:
The District Court conducted a nine-day hearing, involving the testimony of nearly two dozen witnesses and the introduction of thousands of exhibits. It sifted through the resulting factual record, spanning some 3,000 pages. It assessed the credibility of each of the witnesses it had seen and heard in the courtroom. And after considering all the evidence, it held that the answer was clear. Texas largely divided its citizens along racial lines to create its new pro-Republican House map, in violation of the Constitution’s Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The court issued a 160-page opinion recounting in detail its factual findings.
Yet this Court reverses that judgment based on its perusal, over a holiday weekend, of a cold paper record.
Well, sure. The Court had family in town. The Court was busy cooking and watching football and hitting Black Friday sales. Samuel Alito was busy tearing into his plain turkey and his plain carrots and peas and his plain bread, because seasoning is for elitists. You can’t expect them to read through a bunch of boring evidence and give it due consideration like it’s their job and has far-reaching consequences on a weekend when the Commanders are playing.
Especially since, as we mentioned, this was the result the Republican hacks on the Court wanted to reach anyway.
The state of California is currently redistricting to counter the GOP’s Texas power grab, and Governor Gavin Newsom has been very clear that he is doing it for partisan reasons. Which, according to Sam Alito, is A-okay. How will SCOTUS claim otherwise to knock down California’s gerrymander in the coming months? Stay tuned for that episode of American Democracy: Into the Shitter.
[Courthouse News / SCOTUS / Democracy Docket]
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