1/x As far as SCOTUS goes, I think the lesson black people learned since slavery is to hold in the mind two things that seem to be in contradiction but are not. The first is this: the court is constructed and for the most part operates as a protector of power and the status quo.
2/x You don’t have to be a nihilistic legal realist to realize that, with some exceptions, the court has at one point or another explicitly endorsed or implicitly acquiesce to virtually every single one of the worst human rights violations and abuses in the country.
3/x But the second idea matters too and it is that SCOTUS is the one institution with the power to constitutionalize human rights because, even if we the people succeed in amending the constitution, eventually SCOTUS will in one way or another settle the meaning of that amendment
4/x So, i think our job is akin to what Charles Hamilton Houston, former Dean of @howardlawschool, had to do when he first began to challenge separate but equal before a frankly hostile court presided over by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes in the 1930’s.
5/x During one oral argument Justice Reynolds was so offended that a black lawyer was appearing before him that he turned his chair around and faced the wall during the entire time of Houston’s argument. What Houston never said explicitly but really believed is that,
6/x just as Frederick Douglass argued that he, a former slave, understood the Declaration of Independence better than the slaveholding founders, Houston valued the constitution more than the justices who’d been charged with interpreting and safeguarding it.
7/x So, yeah, unless I’m mistaken, this court in years to come is going to restrict human rights while insisting it is doing nothing of the kind because it is defending what (to me) will be a poor vision of economic and religious liberty.
8/8 In the end, the court will bend back to its historical norm. And the job of those with an expansive vision of human rights will be what it’s always been: to argue that we value the constitution more (and understand it better) than those charged with interpreting it
