Louisiana v. Callais Belongs in the Supreme Court's Anti-canon

Justice Thurgood Marshall did not dissent from the bench in a fractured 1980 decision interpreting the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. His written dissent warned that if the Court rejects the principle that the Constitution nullifies sophisticated discrimination, victims will not respect political channels for redress. He argued that granting the right to vote while shutting Black people out of the political process amounts to nothing more than meaningless ballots. The text calls for widespread condemnation and collective action to restore Black political power and to discipline a Supreme Court that allegedly usurps congressional authority. The ruling is portrayed as threatening multiracial democracy and likened to infamous anti-canon decisions that caused lasting harm.

"If this Court refuses to honor our long-recognized principle that the Constitution 'nullifies sophisticated, as well as simple-minded, modes of discrimination,' it cannot expect the victims of discrimination to respect political channels of seeking redress."

"As he saw it, granting Black people the right to vote while effectively shutting them out of the political process in the South was akin to granting them "nothing more than the right to cast meaningless ballots.""

"Then and now, widespread condemnation and collective action in service of restoring Black political power, as well as the need to discipline a Supreme Court all too willing to usurp congressional authority, remain the only acceptable responses to - a decision that stands to turn the South into a neo-Confederacy and that threatens the very idea, written into the text of the post-Civil War amendments that we live in a multiracial democracy."

"Which is to say: Callais is well on its way to becoming the Dred Scott of our time, a decision so reviled by civic society that it marks a before and after in our constitutional democracy. And like Dred Scott, which denied Black citizenship, and other anti-canons that live in infamy, the ruling will be remembered less for its full caption or precise legal holding than by the harm it caused Black and marginalized people, our body politic, and the idea of these United States."

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