Clarence Thomas Just Made Another Mess for His Colleagues to Clean Up

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

62% : "However, it has repeatedly considered such cases, held that private rights of action exist under other sections of the VRA, and concluded in other VRA cases that a private right of action exists."
54% : The good news (to the extent that there is "good news" about a decision limiting Voting Rights Act enforcement in Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota to the Department of Justice) is that I do not think Stras' argument will find a receptive audience.
49% : And Thomas, as he is wont to do in cases he loses, extended a conspicuous invitation to right-wing activists and/or lower court judges in a footnote: The opinion in Milligan, he noted, "does not address whether [Section 2] contains a private right of action."
48% : It is "unclear," he says, whether the statute provides for a private right of action, which he, for some reason, counts as a strike against it.
48% : (This is already happening in Second Amendment law, where the court in United States v. Rahimi is expected to "clarify" its decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which declared the government all but powerless to address the gun violence crisis.)
47% : "Admittedly, the [Supreme] Court has never directly addressed the existence of a private right of action" under Section 2, Smith writes.
43% : (Nothing says, "Respect for a co-equal branch of government" like finding reasons to ignore that co-equal branch when it says things you don't like.)
41% : Everyone else, from voting rights organizations to state law enforcers to regular people who are just tired of decennial attempts to gerrymander them out of electoral existence, is out of luck.
31% : His opinion characterizes the majority's gambit as "ambitious" and "a major upheaval in the law," which is about as close as a federal judge gets to publicly opining that another federal judge is full of shit.
26% : Given how many glowing headlines Roberts and company earned from Allen v. Milligan, though, I sort of doubt that the court allows two random appeals court judges to rewrite civil rights law in the graven image of Kris Kobach.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.