In Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court invalidated Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which required certain jurisdictions with histories of discrimination to "preclear" changes to their voting practices under Section 5 before those changes could become effective. This Article proposes that Congress ground its responsive voting rights legislation in the Constitution's Guarantee Clause, in addition to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The Court has made clear that the Guarantee Clause is a power granted exclusively to Congress and that questions of its exercise are nonjusticiable. It is also clear from the Federalist Papers and from scholarly writing - as well as from what little the Court has said - that the purpose of the Guarantee Clause is to protect majority rule. That is precisely what was at issue after the Civil War when Congress first used the Guarantee Clause to protect African American votes. As an absolute majority in three states and over forty percent of the population in four others, African Americans possessed political control when allowed to vote; when disenfranchised, they were subjected to minority rule. African Americans are no longer the majority in any state. But in a closely divided political environment, whether African Americans and other minorities can vote freely may be decisive in many elections. For this reason, Congress could legitimately ground a revised Voting Rights Act in the Guarantee Clause, and the Court should treat its validity as a nonjusticiable political question committed by the Constitution to Congress.

Critics of the criminal justice system observe that the promise of Gideon v. Wainwright remains unfulfilled. They decry both the inadequate quality of representation available to indigent defendants and the racially disproportionate outcome of the criminal process. Some hope that better representation can help remedy the gross overrepresentation of minorities in the criminal justice system. This Essay is doubtful that better lawyers will significantly address that problem. When the Supreme Court decided Gideon, it had two main purposes. First, it intended to protect the innocent from conviction. This goal, while imperfectly achieved at best, was explicit. Since Gideon, the Court has continued to recognize the importance of innocence claims at trial, issuing important, pro-defense decisions in the areas of confrontation, jury factfinding, the right to present a defense, and elsewhere. The Court's second goal was to protect African Americans subject to the Jim Crow system of criminal justice. But, as it had in Powell v. Alabama, the Court pursued this end covertly and indirectly, attempting to deal with racial discrimination without explicitly addressing it. This timidity was portentous. Gideon did not mark the beginning of a judicial project to eliminate race from the criminal justice system root and branch. Since Gideon, the Court has made it practically impossible to invoke racial bias as a defense; so long as those charged are in fact guilty, discrimination in legislative criminalization, in enforcement, and in sentencing practices are essentially unchallengeable. Since Gideon, racial disproportionality in the prison population has increased. Not only might Gideon not have solved the problem, it may have exacerbated it. To the extent that Gideon improved the quality of counsel available to the poor, defense lawyers may be able to obtain favorable exercises of discretion in investigation, prosecution, and sentencing for indigent white defendants that they cannot for clients of color. For these reasons, racial disparity likely cannot be remedied indirectly with more or better lawyers. Instead, the remedy lies in directly prohibiting discrimination and having fewer crimes, fewer arrests, and fewer prosecutions.

During Reconstruction, Congress amended the Constitution to fundamentally reorder the legal and social status of African Americans. Congress faced the challenge of determining how Chinese people would fit in to the emerging constitutional structure. This article draws on a method of digitizing the Congressional Globe to more broadly explore the arguments about Chinese rights and privileges during Reconstruction. Unlike African Americans, Chinese were part of an international system of trade and diplomacy; treatment of other people of color was understood as a purely domestic question. In addition, while a core feature of Reconstruction was ending the enslavement of African Americans and overruling Dred Scott by making Africans Americans born in the U.S. citizens and granting them eligibility for naturalization, for Chinese, Congress chose to leave in place racial restrictions on naturalization, which had existed since 1790. This rendered them perpetual foreigners in America. With regard to labor rights, by abolishing slavery, Congress intended to raise up the freed men, giving African Americans a chance to work on equal terms with other citizens. In the main, Congress continued to treat the Chinese people as constitutive of the so-called “Chinese question,” a nominalization that ascribed to them features of caste, from which there was little possibility of upward mobility. Congress recognized that some Chinese workers in the U.S. who were building railroads or working in mines might be subject to labor exploitation from bosses and from jobbers, sometimes white and sometimes Chinese. However, rather than intervene to liberate Chinese laborers through laws that would free them from involuntary servitude, and give them fair terms on which to compete, Congress eventually moved in another direction: excluding the Chinese altogether in 1882.

In Whren v. United States, the Supreme Court held, unanimously, that Fourth Amendment analysis was so radically objective that an otherwise legitimate search or arrest would not be invalidated even if an officer's decision to act was based on race. Although the Court has adhered to the view that the Fourth Amendment is applied objectively, the controversy over Whren's practical legitimation of racial profiling has only grown over time. This Article argues that it has become clear that Whren was wrongly decided, for reasons courts and scholars have not previously articulated. First, the Court never explained why it created a rule making motivation absolutely irrelevant when there was a readily available alternative, namely applying the standard applicable to review of prosecutorial discretion. Prosecution decisions are unassailable, unless they are based on unconstitutional grounds. The Court did not have to approve racial profiling to preserve the broad scope of legitimate law enforcement discretion. Second, since Whren, the Court has elaborated the reasons for an objective approach; these include grounds such as holding officers to objectively high standards and promoting even-handed law enforcement. The Court's aims would be promoted by prohibiting race-based searches whereas they are undermined by allowing them. Most fundamentally, searches or arrests motivated by race are "unreasonable" under the Fourth Amendment. First, based on the Court's precedents, other provisions of the Constitution inform Fourth Amendment reasonableness. A search based on motives violating other parts of the Constitution is therefore unreasonable. Second, under the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine, a search is unreasonable if it rests on an antecedent constitutional violation. Unless the Equal Protection Clause is a distinctly unimportant part of the Constitution, a proposition the Court has rejected, its violation should trigger application of the doctrine, just like violations of other provisions. Application of these principles would minimally affect police discretion, and it would remain difficult to prove that police engaged in illegal racial profiling. But, it would also eliminate Whren's unfortunate and influential statements that racial discrimination is constitutionally reasonable.