On Sunday's Velshi show, frequent MSNBC guest Elie Mystal charged that Chief Justice John Roberts is the "biggest enemy towards black people" on the Supreme Court since the pro-slavery Dred Scott decision from1857.
His typically hyperbolic attack on Justice Roberts came during a segment devoted to fretting over the possibility that the U.S. Supreme Court will strike down legal precedents that for decades have required that oddly shaped congressional districts be drawn to ensure the existence of black-majority districts, mostly filled by black legislators.
Host Ali Velshi suggested that a conservative court ruling would be as bad as taking voting rights back to 1964 as he posed his first question to the race-obsessed justice correspondent for the far-left The Nation magazine. Here's Velshi:
I have a lot of specific questions, including questions about how this case is going to end up, but I first just want your take on this because, for a lot of people, this has become like the air we breathe, right? The Voting Rights Act was something, they thought certain things were fixed, and now we are literally going back to 1964.
On the Left, your "voting rights" are somehow compromised if blacks don't get to elect someone of their own skin color. Mystal excoriated Justice Roberts:
Before the 1965 Voting Rights Act, this is an apartheid nation where black people are not allowed political power and representation in the country. After the 1965 Voting Rights Act, we are something approaching a democracy. So that is the demarcation line, and John Roberts has been an enemy of the Voting Rights Act -- as you pointed out in your opening -- for his entire career. John Roberts is the biggest enemy towards black people that this court has seen since Chief Justice Roger Taney, who authored the Dred Scott decision.
Factually, this is Pants On Fire. Mystal then took a shot at conservative Justice Sam Alito as he added:
Now, white media generally doesn't talk about him like that because he's a genteel man, you know -- he's not running around letting his flag fly like Sam Alito. But, make no mistake, whenever black people are asking to have equal representation of their -- in this country, John Roberts is the man standing at the door telling us no. He is the problem, and we're going to see that play out in Louisiana v. Callais when that decision comes down later this -- later next year.
So in this fictional narrative, the chief justice evokes Alabama Democrat George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door. A bit later, even though there are currently several black members of Congress or Senators who represent white majority districts or states, including in Southern states, Mystal asserted:
And the math in Louisiana and, quite frankly, across the South, shows, that even white Democrats will not vote for a black candidate. White Democrats would rather vote for a white Republican than a black Democrat in Louisiana and all across the South and, in general, all across this nation.
So if black people are to have representatives that look like us, whether those representatives be Republican or Democrat, you kind of need to have majority minority districts because white people won't vote for a person of color no matter what party they're running in, generally speaking. And that is one of the reasons why you need two minority majority districts in Louisiana to counteract that problem.
He soon added: "The core of the conservative argument is that you can use race if it's helping white folks, but you can't use race if it's stopping white folks from taking advantage and disenfranchising black people."
Transcript follows:
MSNBC's Velshi
October 19, 2025
10:30 a.m. Eastern
ALI VELSHI: I have a lot of specific questions, including questions about how this case is going to end up, but I first just want your take on this because, for a lot of people, this has become like the air we breathe, right? The Voting Rights Act was something, they thought certain things were fixed, and now we are literally going back to 1964.
ELIE MYSTAL, THE NATION: The Voting Rights Act is the most important piece of legislation in American history. It is the thing that makes the promise of America -- the idea that we are a fully fair and equal society with equal political participation -- it is the thing that makes that idea real. Before the 1965 Voting Rights Act, this is an apartheid nation where black people are not allowed political power and representation in the country. After the 1965 Voting Rights Act, we are something approaching a democracy. So that is the demarcation line, and John Roberts has been an enemy of the Voting Rights Act -- as you pointed out in your opening -- for his entire career. John Roberts is the biggest enemy towards black people that this court has seen since Chief Justice Roger Taney, who authored the Dred Scott decision.
Now, white media generally doesn't talk about him like that because he's a genteel man, you know -- he's not running around letting his flag fly like Sam Alito. But, make no mistake, whenever black people are asking to have equal representation of their -- in this country, John Roberts is the man standing at the door telling us no. He is the problem, and we're going to see that play out in Louisiana v. Callais when that decision comes down later this -- later next year.
(...)
The lawyer defending Louisiana's maps argued that, "Well, if the people that we were disenfranchising had been white Democrats, then everything would be the same. Louisiana would have done the same thing. We were discriminating based on party, not based on race." That was a key argument from Louisiana because John Roberts has previously said it is okay to discriminate based on party, but not necessarily okay to discriminate on race, right? And -- but, again, Ali, we had math here, right? And the math in Louisiana and, quite frankly, across the South, shows, that even white Democrats will not vote for a black candidate. White Democrats would rather vote for a white Republican than a black Democrat in Louisiana and all across the South and, in general, all across this nation.
So if black people are to have representatives that look like us, whether those representatives be Republican or Democrat, you kind of need to have majority minority districts because white people won't vote for a person of color no matter what party they're running in, generally speaking. And that is one of the reasons why you need two minority majority districts in Louisiana to counteract that problem.
VElSHI: There's this weird concept that goes around that somehow the Founding Fathers and the document that they produced -- the Bill of Rights and the Constitution -- were colorblind. That's absolutely, actually not true. That's gaslighting. But it now persists in this issue of affirmative action and now this case in that you can't use -- you can't consider race to adjust for racism.
MYSTAL: The core of the conservative argument is that you can use race if it's helping white folks, but you can't use race if it's stopping white folks from taking advantage and disenfranchising black people. And here you mentioned section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. That's the thing that is currently on the chopping block and most likely will be taken away. One of the really important functions of section 2 is that it doesn't require a showing of intent, which is to say, if we can look at a state, a map, a gerrymandered situation that has the outcome of discriminating against black people, we don't have to also prove that that's what Louisiana or some other state intended to do, right?
They don't -- they don't have to say, like, "We trying to do some racism today," before they -- we can just look at the results and say, look, you know what, Louisiana might say, "I don't have a racist bone in my body" -- doesn't matter. If the outcome is racist, then section 2 is allowed to operate. And that is the core of what they're taking away. One of Roberts's -- one of the pegs he always hangs his hat on is that unless litigants are in his courtroom openly saying they intend to be racist, Roberts pretends that racism doesn't exist.
What you literally have to -- at one point, Janai Nelson -- who was arguing the case for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund -- Janai Nelson said that the Voting Rights Act requires neither a confession nor an admission. White people don't have to confess to what they're doing, nor admit it -- we can just look at the outcomes. And that is exactly at the heart of what Roberts is trying to rip out here. He's trying to say that unless there is intent, unless white people self-report as being racist, you cannot use laws to stop them.
