https://news.yahoo.com/supreme-court-declines-case-aimed-162803173.html
HuffPost
Supreme Court Declines To Take Case Aimed At Overturning 100-Year-Old
Racist Precedents
Paul Blumenthal
Mon, October 17, 2022 at 9:28 AM
The Supreme Court declined to take a case challenging its 100-year-old
racist precedents that continue to deny equal rights to the 3.6 million
residents of overseas U.S. territories on Monday.
Three American Samoans living in Utah and a Samoan nonprofit petitioned
the court in Fitisemanu v. U.S. to overturn the Insular Cases, the
court’s early 20th-century precedents that enabled the country’s
colonial expansion by allowing it to absorb overseas territories
populated by non-white peoples while denying them equal rights or a path
to statehood.
“It’s a punch in the gut for the Justices to leave in place a ruling
that says I am not equal to other Americans simply because I was born in
a U.S. territory,” John Fitisemanu, the lead plaintiff in the case, said
in a statement. “I was born on U.S. soil, have a U.S. passport, and pay
my taxes like everyone else. But because of a discriminatory federal
law, I am not recognized as a U.S. citizen.”
The Insular Cases that deny people like Fitisemanu equal rights as
citizens were explicitly founded on racist premises. The cases, which
occurred from 1901 to 1922, claimed that the people of the overseas
territories the U.S. conquered in the Spanish-American War came from
“savage tribes” and “alien” and “uncivilized race[s]” who were
“absolutely unfit to receive” the rights provided by the Constitution.
The court invented a new legal class of “unincorporated territory” for
the colonial possessions taken from Spain that denied them equal rights
and statehood.
Today, the Insular Cases still govern the U.S. overseas territories of
American Samoa, Guam, Northern Marianas Islands, Puerto Rico and the
U.S. Virgin Islands. In each territory, Congress has negotiated
different rules for people’s access to their rights as Americans.
For example, unlike other territorial inhabitants, American Samoans are
not officially U.S. citizens, but American nationals. This means that
even if they move to a state or the District of Columbia, they will be
denied the right to vote. This was one of the chief complaints made by
Fitisemanu and the other plaintiffs in the case.
Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch (standing second from the left) and
Sonia Sotomayor (seated furthest left) are the only justices known to
support overturning the Insular Cases. (Photo: Jabin Botsford/The
Washington Post via Getty Images)
Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch (standing second from the left) and
Sonia Sotomayor (seated furthest left) are the only justices known to
support overturning the Insular Cases. (Photo: Jabin Botsford/The
Washington Post via Getty Images)
Fitisemanu v. U.S. challenged the constitutionality of the Insular Cases
by arguing that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause grants U.S.
citizenship to all people “born or naturalized in the United States, and
subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” As these territories are both a
part of the U.S. and subject to its jurisdiction, the residents of the
territories ought to be granted full access to that citizenship, the
plaintiffs argued.
For years now, territorial residents have sought to loosen the grip of
the Insular Cases or overturn them entirely through the courts. In each
case, the courts have refused to do so.
There was some expectation that the Supreme Court may act differently on
Fitisemanu after Justices Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor declared in
the case of Vaello-Madero v. U.S. that they would like to see the
Insular Cases overturned.
“[It is] past time to acknowledge the gravity of this error and admit
what we know to be true: The Insular Cases have no foundation in the
Constitution and rest instead on racial stereotypes. They deserve no
place in our law,” Gorsuch wrote in a concurrence in Vaello-Madero.
In agreeing with Gorsuch that the Insular Cases should be overturned,
Sotomayor called them “both odious and wrong” in her Vaello-Madero dissent.
But four of the nine Supreme Court justices must vote to take up a case.
Clearly, there were not four votes to take up Fitisemanu. There were
also no written dissents from the denial of the case.