letterhead

The letter was written on official-looking state letterhead and stamped with a fake Pennsylvania seal.

It is startling, even horrifying, to turn the pages of an archival folder in a beautiful Yale research library and come across such incendiary and racist language on official Supreme Court letterhead and dated during one’s own lifetime.

Now never-before-seen letters and memos show that behind the scenes at the court, Justice Lewis Powell, an influential jurist with an undeserved reputation for decency and moderation, used wildly racist code words on the court’s letterhead as he strenuously—and successfully—drove a decision in City of Mobile v.

It says everything about the success of Powell’s campaign to reimagine right-wing political combat in America that he drafted it on Supreme Court letterhead to the attention of another justice.

His statement, filed on Supreme Court letterhead and overflowing with Alito’s trademark aggrievement, is best interpreted as either an unreconstructed piece of lawless trolling or a meditation on the nature of female autonomy.