When a Supreme Court justice casually invoked the Americans with Disabilities Act to describe the voting situation of Black Americans, it wasn’t just legal reasoning — it was a shocking display of intellectual sloppiness and political theater. Video and transcripts from the October 15, 2025 oral argument show Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson drawing an explicit analogy between voters who don’t elect their preferred candidates and people denied access to buildings before the ADA.
That comparison understates a dangerous tendency on the left to turn every policy disagreement into a narrative of permanent victimhood, where entire communities are recast as helpless bystanders in need of racial remedies. Conservatives rightly bristled at the image of a sitting justice describing citizens as “disabled” in the political sphere, a rhetorical sleight-of-hand that risks stripping the concept of disability of its dignity while excusing race-based remedies.
This isn’t simply a matter of tone — it’s jurisprudence. By analogizing the Voting Rights Act’s Section 2 to the ADA, Justice Jackson signaled she favors expansive, race-conscious remedies that treat historical disparities as ongoing disabilities warranting remedial districting. That doctrinal leap cannot be separated from politics; it reads like activist law dressed up as compassionate concern.
Predictably, conservative commentators and opinion leaders pounced, calling out the spectacle for what it was: performative grievance parading as constitutional interpretation. On conservative platforms the reaction was fierce and immediate, with hosts arguing that Justice Jackson’s rhetoric undermines equal protection principles and fuels distrust in a politicized judiciary.
The practical stakes are real. If the Court embraces a view that disparities in political outcomes equate to a kind of societal “disability,” then race will remain central to how maps are drawn, how voting remedies are fashioned, and how millions of Americans are parceled into identity categories. That is a perilous path away from colorblind law and toward permanent racialized policymaking under the guise of remedy.
Conservatives should use this moment to press for clarity, consistency, and a return to constitutional principles that protect equal citizenship rather than entrench racial classifications. The judiciary must be a bulwark for individual rights, not an engine of group-based entitlement; Americans of every background deserve judges who apply the law, not judges who sermonize from the bench.
