Trumpist judges prep ‘get out of racism free’ card

Less than two weeks after President Donald Trump took office, a Republican federal judge in Alabama handed down an absolutely shocking opinion.

The legal claims in Lewis v. Bentley are, to be fair, a bit of a stretch. After the majority-black city council in Birmingham, Alabama enacted an ordinance raising the minimum wage in Birmingham, the state legislature passed a law invalidating that ordinance. Every state lawmaker who supported this law was white, as was the governor who signed it. The plaintiffs in Lewis claim that this state law was enacted with racist intent — which would make it unconstitutional — rather than simply out of a desire to maintain conservative labor policy throughout the state.

Yet Judge R. David Proctor, a George W. Bush appointee, did not simply dismiss this case. He handed down an opinion that, if embraced by higher courts, would eviscerate virtually any civil rights plaintiff’s ability to challenge a facially neutral law that was enacted in order to harm people of color. When a state can offer a “legitimate” — that is, a non-racist — explanation for why a law should exist “only the clearest proof” that lawmakers acted with racist intent will allow a court to look past that explanation.

It should be noted that none of the cases Judge Proctor cited to support this novel legal rule even come close to supporting it. And a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit tossed out Porter’s “clearest proof” standard last July. “Recklessly plucked from an unrelated line of precedent,” Judge Charles Wilson wrote of Proctor’s attempt to immunize racist lawmakers from suits, “this requirement runs contrary to decades of established equal protection jurisprudence.”

Yet there is an unhappy epilogue to this story for future civil rights plaintiffs. The full Eleventh Circuit, now flush with three Trump judges, announced on Wednesday that it was tossing out Judge WIlson’s opinion and that the full court would rehear the case. There’s now a very real risk that Proctor’s “clearest proof” test will become the law in several Southern states.

EDIT: THe article goes on to show how this is no outlier and rulings all over are basically trying to criminalize attempts to address civil rights or racism with the good ol’ projection machine.

Trump may have successfully destroyed the very concept of civil rights for decades to come. We may just be eternally fucked because this asshole got to remake the courts.