Far-right appeals court hands Trump a win in his segregation-enabling crusade

The MAGA movement is touting yet another development that stands to enable more racial segregation in the United States. 

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The president has falsely — and revealingly — complained that the Civil Rights Act was harmful to white people. And true to form, he has overseen a regime that has helped usher in a Jim Crow resurgence. 

I’ve written on numerous occasions about Donald Trump’s administration taking steps to roll back desegregation measures. That trend has included a push by the Justice Department to target consent decrees that force school systems to comply with desegregation obligations. Trump officials have provided no evidence showing that the places with consent decrees have ended segregation, and many parents from these areas have said the decrees are still needed.

Several of these killed decrees have occurred with the blessing of Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who has sought to roll back the decrees using “joint stipulated dismissals,” which don’t require proof that segregation has been rooted out.

That brings us to Tuesday, when the ultraconservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided it would uphold the Trump administration’s lifting of a consent decree for schools in Louisiana’s Concordia Parish — an order that originated with a lawsuit in 1965, when segregation and the Ku Klux Klan reigned supreme in the region.

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It’s certainly telling that the Louisiana attorney general’s statement in response to the court’s decision effectively mirrored the “states’ rights” arguments that white supremacists have used throughout history.

In 1981, as an adviser to Ronald Reagan, Lee Atwater was infamously quoted explaining the art of racist dog whistling.

By 1968, he said, politicians couldn’t say the N-word, because “that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff.”

And that’s proper context for Murrill’s response to Tuesday’s ruling.

“The good people of Concordia Parish elected their School Board to govern their schools — not unelected federal judges,” she said, adding that the decision “puts that authority back where it belongs.”

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