Supreme Court Justice Thomas Says Courts Lack Authority in Redistricting Cases

Justice Clarence Thomas criticized the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling this week days after its 70th anniversary, suggesting in a redistricting case that the Supreme Court used faulty reasoning when it declared that it was unconstitutional to separate schoolchildren by race. This is a problem because the same defective thinking appears in the court’s redistricting decisions, according to the court’s longest-serving justice. Brown was actually two decisions. In the first ruling on May 17, 1954, the court unanimously overturned the “separate but equal” principle established in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) in a challenge to public school segregation in Topeka, Kansas. The court held that government-sanctioned separation by race violated the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a decision that bolstered the civil rights movement....