Robert B. Hubbell (on Substack, alas), after Callais v. Louisiana, which he argues (convincingly) “is nothing less than the resurrection of the Jim Crow Era” and places “the profound constitutional injury inflicted by Callais” squarely on the shoulders of Chief Justice John Roberts:

Whatever we call it—Jim Crow 2.0, the John Roberts Jim Crow Era, or the John Crow Era—no person in America is more responsible for the return to the Jim Crow Era than John Roberts. The resurrection of the post-Civil War Jim Crow brand of racism is the crowning achievement of John Roberts’ life work—and we should make him wear it as a badge of shame for the rest of his days. He should understand that centuries hence, he will be remembered as the legal architect of the virulent racism that saw a rebirth as white Christian nationalism, which then shape-shifted into the MAGA movement under Donald Trump.

Let the record reflect that Chief Justice John G. Roberts devoted his considerable legal talents to a rebirth of state-sanctioned racism that will forever bear his name. The John Crow Era.

Hubbell traces the history of the 15th Amendment, the laws created to enforce it, and the “bad-faith strategies” former Confederate states used to circumvent those laws. He notes:

The anti-voting artifices of the Jim Crow era employed the fiction that voting requirements like literacy tests, poll taxes, and property ownership were race-neutral. They were not. Their intent and effect were to discriminate.

John Roberts has resurrected that fiction by destroying the Voting Rights Act—which attempted to reach racial discrimination by examining intent and effects. […]

We have come full circle to the Jim Crow Era, where states are engaging in bad-faith strategies to frustrate Congress’s constitutional authority to enforce the 15th Amendment.

I support saddling Roberts with “John Crow Laws,” even if it’s not as catchy as “Kavanaugh Stops.” We’ll just have to rely on repetition and history to make it stick.

Callais is a profound constitutional injury that requires structural reforms of the Supreme Court. […]

“Structural reforms” include the next Democratic president appointing “12 or more justices all at once by breaking the filibuster for good.”

If those measures seem too extreme for you, do not tell me. Instead, tell your Black friends and neighbors that their right to vote must be subordinated to political decorum, that they must be patient enough to wait decades for 18 year term limits to result in a modest turnover in the Court, that their right to vote must respect the “legitimacy” of the Court and the ossified rules of the Senate, and that change must be slow and incremental because that’s the way Democrats do things. Tell them, not me, that we must be “nice” to Republicans because if we aren’t, Republicans will do mean things like ignore the Constitution, suppress voting rights of Black Americans, tell women they are not in charge of their reproductive choices and bodies, and deny LGBTQ people the right be free from discrimination by businesses offering services to the public.

Republicans don’t believe in democracy, only in power. With the Callais decision enabling extreme Republican gerrymandering, it’s incumbent upon Democrats, in defense of democracy, to aggressively wield the same power for themselves.