Robert Parry — The Neo-Confederate Supreme Court

The Right’s desperation over U.S. demographic changes has spread to the U.S. Supreme Court where its five Republican partisans appear ready to tear up the most important part of the Voting Rights Act and thus clear the way for suppressing the votes of minorities, reports Robert Parry....

The Supreme Court’s apparent intention to gut the Voting Rights Act also could be viewed in the continuum of its five-to-four ruling in the Citizens United case of 2010 in which the right-wing justices freed up rich Americans to spend unlimited amounts to influence political campaigns. In other words, the Court’s majority seems intent on tilting the political playing field in favor of white plutocrats. 

But the Court’s Neo-Confederate rationale was underscored mostly openly by Justice Scalia and his sneering remark about minority voting rights being a “racial entitlement” and by Justice Kennedy’s insistence that Alabama has the “independent sovereign” right to set its own voting rules without federal oversight.

Consortium News
The Neo-Confederate Supreme Court
Robert Parry

The Civil War is still raging in some quarters and portends to go national as white rule is perceived to be under threat as demographics shift. This has the potential to seriously undercut US soft power globally as the US is increasingly perceived as a rogue state. Unchecked it will also result in rekindling domestic civil unrest.

Due to this neo-Confederate trend that harkens back to the Articles of Confederation, as Parry observes, the issues that led to the Civil War are being revived at the highest levels of the state. Parry presents a useful short lesson in American history that is becoming more and more relevant as whites seek to enshrine their privileged status by using law and enforcement to maintain their position.