I discussed the contortions of Chief Justice Roberts in Parents Involved in this post.

What remains troubling to me is the academic Broderism we see from some. The continuing references to Roberts as a "judicial minimalist" remains a troubling phenomenon. Digby gets it right about Chief Justice Roberts:

Roberts is a particularly unctuous character, with his sunny smile and youthful energy, while he dishonestly passes off wingnut bumper stickers like “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” as judicial reasoning. (I can hardly wait for him to read his decision on gun rights where he says "guns don't kill people, people kill people")

Precisely right. And, as Rick Pearlstein noted, he is not above rewriting history"

Justice Roberts, "restricting the ability of public school districts to use race to determine which schools students can attend," wrote for the plurality of Scalia, Thomas, and Alito that, "Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin."

If I were a high school teacher and young Johnny Roberts wrote this on an exam on civil rights history, I would give him an "F." The idea that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court could cough up such a ludicrous hairball is evidence of a nation gone mad with amnesia. Or, if you prefer, a conservative intellectual class that knows the history full well, and has simply let itself lie.

Do educated people really need this explained to them? It wasn't merely "before Brown" that "schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on their color of their skin." It was long, long after the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka - for the next seventeen years at least.

I mean, do I really have to explain this? In 1955, the year after Brown, the Supreme Court specified the compliance language for the first decision: Southern school districts would have to comply "with all deliberate speed."

Instead, they did not comply at all. Instead, the region staged a self-consious movement of "Massive Resistance." Nearly every Southern congressman signed a manifesto pledging to defy the Court by "all lawful means." In Virginia senator and former Klansman Harry Flood Byrd's minions pushed through the state assembly an order to close any school under federal court order to integrate. And in 1957 in Little Rock—well, has Justice Roberts never heard of this?

The myth of the judicial minimalist needs to be stamped out. I hope intelligent observers can see that if there is such a species, Chief Justice Roberts is not one of them, except when it conveniently helps get him to the result he favors. There is a phrase for that - legal realism.

Speaking for me only