Citizens United To Supreme Court: Landmark School Desegregation Case Was Wrong

Citizens United, the conservative group that successfully sued to enable wealthy corporations to buy elections, also has it in for same-sex couples. Yet an amicus brief they recently filed in the Supreme Court backing the unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act would not simply deny marriage equality to gay people, it calls upon the Supreme Court to toss out a landmark decision ending public school segregation in the District of Columbia and declare that the federal government is free to discriminate against minorities and women.



To translate this a bit, the Fourteenth Amendment provides that “o State shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” and thus this guarantee against discrimination explicitly applies only to state laws and not to the federal government. On the same day that the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education, however, the Court also held in Bolling that a shield against public school segregation is one of the liberties protected by the Fifth Amendment, which does apply to the federal government. Thus, the District of Columbia, which is a federal entity, could not have segregated public schools.
Citizens United is now claiming that Bolling was wrong, and that the Constitution does absolutely nothing to prevent the United States from engaging in discrimination of any kind. If the justices buy their argument — as they were all too willing to do in the case that bears Citizens United’s name — it would mean that Congress is free to set up its own Jim Crow laws.