Rep. James Clyburn went on MSNBC's "PoliticsNation" on Saturday and accused the Supreme Court of trying to drag the country back to the 1890s. The South Carolina Democrat told host Al Sharpton that the Court is "attempting to reinstate Plessy versus Ferguson", the infamous decision that enshrined "separate but equal" as constitutional law for more than half a century.
It is a breathtaking claim. And it deserves to be examined on its merits, not simply applauded because it arrived wrapped in civil-rights language on a friendly cable-news set.
Clyburn's remarks, reported by Breitbart, came in response to a question from Sharpton about redistricting battles in several Southern states. Sharpton framed the segment around what he called "attempted gerrymanders" by Southern Republicans following a recent Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act. He noted that Louisiana had eliminated one of its majority-black congressional districts and that a federal appeals court had cleared Alabama to use a map previously ruled discriminatory against black voters.
Clyburn took the bait, and then ran well past it.
The congressman laid out a theory that connects three dots: the Shelby County v. Holder decision, which struck down Section Five pre-clearance requirements of the 1965 Voting Rights Act; a subsequent ruling he described as "getting rid of Section Two"; and the current redistricting fights in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama. In Clyburn's telling, these developments form a single, deliberate arc aimed at reversing the gains of the civil-rights era.
Clyburn told Sharpton:
"We want people realize this is not just South Carolina or Louisiana or Alabama. This is an attempt to undo everything that the 1965 Voting Rights Act had done. They started out with Shelby County v. Holder and got rid of Section Five pre-clearance. And at the time, interestingly, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Roberts, said, well, there may be some problems along the way, but you still got a right of action in Section Two if anybody were to do some mischief. Well, the delay decision came getting rid of Section Two. So we see a trend here that this Supreme Court is attempting to reinstate Plessy versus Ferguson."
He went on to say that Plessy v. Ferguson, decided in the 1890s, "led to this tremendous drought of African-American representation in the Congress that lasted 29 years. It lasted 95 years here in South Carolina."
Plessy v. Ferguson upheld a Louisiana law mandating racial segregation on railroad cars. It established the doctrine of "separate but equal," which state and local governments across the South used for decades to enforce segregation in schools, public facilities, transportation, and nearly every corner of civic life. The decision was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Whatever one thinks of the Court's recent Voting Rights Act rulings, comparing them to Plessy requires a leap that the facts simply do not support. The Shelby County decision did not reinstate segregation. It did not declare any racial group inferior. It struck down a coverage formula, Section Four, that determined which jurisdictions had to get federal permission before changing their election laws. The formula was based on data from the 1960s and 1970s, and the Court found it no longer reflected current conditions.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether that was the right call. But equating it to the legal architecture of Jim Crow is not a serious argument. It is a rhetorical weapon designed to shut down debate rather than advance it.
As Southern GOP legislatures have moved to redraw congressional maps in the wake of the Court's redistricting decisions, Democrats have responded not with legal precision but with escalating moral panic. Clyburn's Plessy comparison is the most extreme version of that pattern so far.
Clyburn referenced Chief Justice Roberts's observation, made during the Shelby County ruling, that litigants still had recourse under Section Two of the Voting Rights Act if states engaged in discriminatory practices. Clyburn then claimed a later decision eliminated Section Two as well, calling it "the delay decision." He did not name the case. He did not explain the ruling. He offered no specifics about what the Court actually held or how it differed from the broad characterization he gave on air.
That matters. Section Two of the Voting Rights Act remains part of federal law. Courts have continued to hear Section Two challenges. The legal landscape around redistricting is complicated, and it is evolving through multiple cases in multiple circuits. Telling a national television audience that the Court simply "got rid of" Section Two, without naming the case or explaining the holding, is at best misleading.
It is worth noting that the Supreme Court has been the subject of intense political pressure from the left on multiple fronts. The Court's recent term has produced friction over birthright citizenship and other politically charged questions, and Democrats have increasingly treated the institution as an adversary rather than a co-equal branch of government.
The segment was not designed to produce a careful legal discussion. Sharpton's question to Clyburn was loaded from the start. He described redistricting efforts by Republican legislatures as "attempted gerrymanders" and told Clyburn that "your seat was saved, thankfully", a framing that assumed the conclusion before the conversation began.
Sharpton also noted that Louisiana had eliminated a majority-black district and that a federal appeals court had allowed Alabama to proceed with a map that had previously been found discriminatory. Those are real developments. But wrapping them together with editorializing language and then asking a sympathetic guest to describe "the mood" at a Friday gathering is not journalism. It is stagecraft.
Clyburn, for his part, delivered exactly the kind of answer the format was built to produce. No pushback followed. No one asked him to name the decision he was referencing. No one pressed him on whether comparing modern redistricting disputes to the legal foundation of Jim Crow was proportionate or accurate.
Conservative jurists have offered a very different reading of the Court's recent work. Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, has been vocal in his view that the Court should take up cases that other justices have been reluctant to hear. His sharp rebukes of the Court's own reluctance to engage difficult questions suggest a bench that is wrestling with hard constitutional problems, not conspiring to resurrect nineteenth-century racial hierarchies.
Redistricting is inherently political. Both parties gerrymander when they have the power to do so. The question of how the Voting Rights Act applies to modern map-drawing is genuinely contested, in the courts, in state legislatures, and in Congress. Those are fights worth having on the merits.
But when a senior member of Congress tells a national audience that the Supreme Court is trying to reinstate Plessy v. Ferguson, he is not contributing to that fight. He is poisoning it. He is telling millions of Americans that the highest court in the land is engaged in a deliberate campaign to restore legal segregation. That is a charge with no factual basis in anything Clyburn said on air, and it carries real consequences for public trust in institutions that are already under strain.
Democrats have spent years arguing that Republican rhetoric about courts and elections is dangerous because it erodes institutional legitimacy. That concern is worth taking seriously. But it cuts both ways. Accusing the Supreme Court of attempting to restore the legal regime of Jim Crow, without evidence, without naming the relevant decisions, without any serious legal argument, is its own form of institutional sabotage.
The pattern extends beyond Washington. In state-level judicial races, Democrats have faced setbacks that suggest voters are not buying the apocalyptic framing. Republican-appointed justices swept Georgia Supreme Court races in what amounted to a sharp rejection of Democratic challengers who ran on similar themes of judicial crisis.
Meanwhile, Thomas has continued to press the Court on cases his colleagues have declined, including a recent rebuke over the Court's refusal to hear Florida's challenge to states licensing illegal immigrant truckers. The conservative wing of the Court is not hiding from controversy. It is engaging it, openly, in written opinions, with legal reasoning attached.
Clyburn has served in Congress for decades. He knows the difference between a redistricting dispute and the legal regime that enforced racial segregation for sixty years. He knows that Plessy v. Ferguson was not about congressional maps. He knows that the Voting Rights Act has not been repealed.
He said what he said anyway, on a friendly cable set, to a friendly host, with no follow-up questions and no expectation of accountability. That is how political rhetoric escalates in an environment where the incentive is to be the loudest voice in the room rather than the most honest one.
The Supreme Court's redistricting decisions deserve scrutiny. Every major ruling does. But scrutiny requires precision, not hysteria dressed up as history.
When you have to reach back to 1896 to find your comparison, maybe the present doesn't look as bad as you need it to.
