Supreme Court will not hear case challenging century-old racist precedents

The Supreme Court declines to revisit its ruling in the Insular Cases, which deny equal rights to residents of US territories

The Supreme Court this week declined to hear a case challenging the precedents it set in the Insular Cases, which deny equal rights to well more than 3 million residents of US territories.

The Insular Cases, which were decided just after the turn of the 20th century, held that the US could deny residents of its territories constitutional rights and did not have to offer those territories a pathway to statehood — in effect justifying the country’s colonial enterprise.

The US still controls a number of territories more than 100 years later, and the plantiffs in the case Fitisemanu v US aimed to get the Supreme Court to overturn the precedents set by the Insular Cases. On Monday, the high court declined.

“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, said in a statement reported by HuffPost. “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.”

Mr Fitisemanu and the two other plantiffs are American Samoan residents living in Utah. As American Samoans, they are subject to the Insular Cases and do not have equal rights as citizens and cannot, for instance, vote in US elections. In addition to American Samoa, the Insular Cases are still the precedent in Guam, Northern Marianas Islands, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

There was some amount of optimism that the Supreme Court might be willing to hear a challenge to the cases after Justice Neil Gorsuch, a conservative Donald Trump appointee, lambasted the Insular Cases in a decision earlier this year and, along with Justice Sonia Sotomayor, called for them to be overturned. But four justices must vote to take up a case, and there were not four votes to hear Fitisemanu v US.

For many, the Insular Cases remain one of the greatest recorded stains on American jurisprudence. The cases came before the court following the US’s victory in the Spanish-American War, in which the US seized new territories from Spain. The Court ruled that the people in those territories were “savage tribes” who were “absolutely unfit to receive” full constitutional rights.

The Supreme Court decided that the territories taken by the US were “unincorporated,” as opposed to “incorporated” territories and states and that people in unincoporated territories were not entitled to equal rights — creating an entirely new classification that continues to disenfranchise millions of people.