{"id":324,"date":"2026-05-23T13:06:42","date_gmt":"2026-05-23T13:06:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=324"},"modified":"2026-05-23T13:06:42","modified_gmt":"2026-05-23T13:06:42","slug":"americans-fear-civil-war-and-john-roberts-is-making-it-happen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=324","title":{"rendered":"Americans fear civil war \u2014and John Roberts is making it happen"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Is the United States headed for a second Civil War? According to a survey of likely midterm voters published by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, 57% of Americans believe it is. Sixty-nine percent say democracy is under serious threat; and an equal percentage of nonwhite voters say they fear rising white supremacy.<\/p>\n

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While President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement deserve the lion\u2019s share of blame for such findings, the Supreme Court has done its part. Under the stewardship of Chief Justice John Roberts, the court has issued a blistering succession of dangerously polarizing rulings, ranging from presidential immunity, union organizing, the death penalty, and to and . The resulting jurisprudential carnage has accelerated the nation\u2019s rupture into irreconcilable belligerent tribes and prompted speculation that we are headed for another existential conflict.<\/p>\n

The Roberts Court has taken a particularly malevolent interest in destroying the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Last month\u2019s decision in Louisiana v. Callais gutted Section 2 of the landmark legislation, which was amended in 1982 to permit the Justice Department and private citizens to challenge election laws that have the effect of diluting minority voting power.<\/p>\n

The Roberts Court has taken a particularly malevolent interest in destroying the Voting Rights Act. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The court\u2019s 6-3 majority opinion by Samuel Alito invalidated Louisiana\u2019s 2024 congressional map that created a second majority-Black congressional district to operate alongside the state\u2019s five white-majority districts, roughly reflecting the size of Louisiana\u2019s Black population. The ruling handed a victory to the lead plaintiff in the case, Phillip \u201cBert\u201d Callais, an election denier and alleged conspiracy theorist who had attended the Jan. 6, 2021, \u201cStop the Steal\u201d rally on the White House Ellipse that eventually snowballed into the insurrection at the Capitol. Barely concealing their racial animus, Callais and his co-plaintiffs described themselves in court filings as \u201cnon-African American voters\u201d who were the victims of reverse discrimination. Louisiana has since moved to redraw its voting maps.<\/p>\n

With the demise of the \u201ceffects test,\u201d future Section 2 plaintiffs will have to meet the nearly impossible burden of proving that redistricting maps were created with overt discriminatory intent rather than for political purposes. And as the court held in a 2019 opinion written by Roberts in Rucho v. Common Cause, political gerrymandering claims cannot be brought in federal courts because, as the Republican majority sees it, they present nonjusticiable \u201cpolitical questions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both Callais and Rucho built upon Roberts\u2019 2013 majority opinion in gutting two other sections of the VRA that required state and local jurisdictions with histories of egregious voter discrimination to obtain advance federal approval \u2014 known as preclearance \u2014 before making changes to their election procedures. Like Alito in Callais, Roberts declared in Shelby that racial discrimination in voting was a thing of the past and thus special protections for minorities were no longer necessary. <\/p>\n

The combined effects of Shelby and Rucho have led to a proliferation of voting roll purges, onerous photo ID laws and limitations on mail-in ballots in red states across the country. Now, with Callais, election law experts predict that as many as 19 Democratic congressional seats in Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana could be eliminated, returning the former states of the Confederacy to one-party rule.<\/p>\n

The court\u2019s handiwork has sparked outrage and alarm. Rep. Bennie Thompson, the only Democrat in Mississippi\u2019s congressional delegation, who will likely lose his seat to gerrymandering, has condemned Callais as \u201cequivalent to a second Civil War.\u201d Other observers have compared the current moment in the U.S. to the 1850s, when debates over the future of slavery eventually led to secession and war. <\/p>\n

Read more Republicans terrified of Trump are abusing his toady instead<\/a><\/p>\n

Chief Justice Roberts has also drawncomparisons to Chief Justice Roger Taney, whose 1857 majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford held that Black Americans had \u201cno rights that the white man was bound to respect.\u201d The Dred Scott decision helped precipitate the Civil War, and is widely considered the most infamous in the court\u2019s history.<\/p>\n

Neutering the Voting Rights Act represents the culmination of Roberts\u2019 lifelong calling. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The parallels between Taney and Roberts are beyond hyperbole. Both men began their legal careers as zealous partisan political advocates. Before ascending to the Supreme Court in 1836, Taney was elected to the General Assembly of Maryland, and later served as a loyal foot soldier to President Andrew Jackson, first as secretary of war and then as attorney general, in which capacity he penned an advisory opinion that prefigured his Dred Scott ruling, arguing that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were inapplicable to Black people, even those living in free states.<\/p>\n

Similarly, the young Roberts established himself as a dependable right-wing operative, clerking for Chief Justice William Rehnquist and afterward serving as special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith in the Reagan administration. There, he authored upward of 25 memos opposing the 1982 amendment that added the effects test to the Voting Rights Act in addition to ghosting op-eds for Smith and preparing administration officials for their testimony before Congress on the test. Later, as an attorney in private practice, he played an important role as a consultant, lawsuit editor and prep coach for the GOP\u2019s legal arguments in the run-up to Bush v. Gore, the case that decided the 2000 presidential election.<\/p>\n

Neutering the Voting Rights Act represents the culmination of Roberts\u2019 lifelong calling and warrants his ranking alongside Taney as the most disgraceful chief justice in history. As the civil rights activist and writer William Spivey argued in an essay published earlier this month in the online journal Level:<\/p>\n

Taney held that no Black person, free or enslaved, could ever be a U.S. citizen. He believed that Black people were not part of the political community and the Constitution was written for white men only.
Chief Justice Roberts has been more effective than anyone in disenfranchising Black people. Most of what Taney accomplished can be traced to a single decision that remained in place for 11 years before being reversed [by the 13th and 14th Amendments]. Roberts has spent an entire career whittling away at the Voting Rights Act of 1965, affirmative action and, most recently, the diversity, equity and inclusion movement. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Roberts will also be remembered for composing the majority opinion in Trump v. United States in 2024 that gave the president near-complete immunity from criminal prosecution for his official acts. That decision, along with the evisceration of voting rights, has emboldened Trump to threaten the deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the military to polling places and hatch other plots to rig the midterm elections and consolidate Republican power.<\/p>\n

It may be premature to conclude a new Civil War is upon us, but a high-stakes battle for the future of the country is well underway.<\/p>\n

Read more Republicans finally freak out as Trump continues his looting spree<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement deserve the lion\u2019s share of blame for such findings, the Supreme Court has done its part<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":323,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nAmericans fear civil war \u2014and John Roberts is making it happen - Next Address America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=324\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Americans fear civil war \u2014and John Roberts is making it happen - 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