The Dictatorship
Kavanaugh stands alone in claiming interest in the NFL’s race discrimination appeal
Justice Brett Kavanaugh was alone among his high court colleagues this week in claiming an interest in hearing an appeal from the NFL and several professional football teams in a dispute over whether they could force a race discrimination case into arbitration led by league commissioner Roger Goodell.
Because it takes four justices to grant review of a Supreme Court petition, Tuesday’s denial means the civil case brought by former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores can proceed in court.
In declining to take up the appeal, the justices passed on what the petitioners said was an important question: whether a sports league’s arbitration agreement is unenforceable because it makes the league commissioner the default arbitrator and lets the commissioner develop the arbitration procedures.
Flores, now the Minnesota Vikings’ defensive coordinator, filed suit in the Southern District of New York in 2022, alleging he was unfairly treated and impacted by systemic race discrimination in the league. He claimed discrimination in his termination by the Miami Dolphins, and in the New York Giants’ and Denver Broncos’ failures to hire him.
“While racial barriers have been eroded in many areas,” he said in the complaint, the NFL “lives in a time of the past” and “remains rife with racism, particularly when it comes to the hiring and retention of Black Head Coaches, Coordinators and General Managers.”
Joined by fellow Black coaches Steve Wilks and Ray Horton, Flores later filed an amended complaint adding retaliation claims against the Houston Texans based on his removal from consideration for a head coach position after filing suit, as well as claims from Wilks and Horton alleging discrimination against the Arizona Cardinals and Tennessee Titans, respectively.
The Supreme Court denial appeared on the court’s order listwhere the justices announce the latest action in pending appeals. Most petitions are denied without comment or any indication of which justices wanted to hear certain cases.
That made the denial in the Flores case noteworthy, because it offered some insight into the court’s thinking — even if it was only insight from one justice and an unexplained insight at that.
All the accompanying notation on the docket said was: “The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied. Justice Kavanaugh would grant the petition for a writ of certiorari.”
Again, that’s more than we usually see on the order list, which consists mostly of unexplained denials without any dissent notations. Sometimes, justices who disagree with the court’s refusal to take up a case will publish a dissent explaining their views — as Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, did that same day in a separate case.
Those sorts of explanations can be helpful not only for the general principle of knowing why the justices take the actions they do, but also for signaling what litigants might need to do to win review in a future appeal.
Of course, even a written explanation from Kavanaugh would have been the view of only one justice.
The Trump appointee has described himself as a “huge sports fan” and has gone out of his way to share his views in previous sports-related cases.
In a 2021 ruling involving NCAA athletics, Kavanaugh wrote a lone concurring opinion “to underscore that the NCAA’s remaining compensation rules also raise serious questions under the antitrust laws.” He concluded his solo concurrence by proclaiming: “The NCAA is not above the law.”
In a 2020 case involving the NFL, in which the justices declined to hear an appeal over the league’s contract with DirecTV for televising out-of-market games, Kavanaugh penned a solo statement to make clear that, even though the court denied review that day, he thought “the NFL, its teams, and DirecTV … have substantial arguments” in their favor.
Even if the court had granted review in the Flores case, that only would have meant that the justices agreed to consider the issue. It would not have guaranteed any particular outcome, though obviously the NFL and the teams in the suit wanted a chance at upending the federal appeals court ruling against them.
The appeals court said Flores submitting to an arbitration process controlled by the commissioner — who, the court noted, is the principal executive of one of the plaintiff’s adverse parties — would be arbitration “in name only.”
But that was overly protective of Flores, the league and the teams said in their failed Supreme Court petition. They said the appeals court violated the “fundamental principle” that federal law protects “not only the parties’ decision to arbitrate but also their chosen arbitration procedures, including their choice of arbitrator.”
Successfully opposing review, Flores’ lawyers cast the appellate ruling as unremarkable and therefore unworthy of Supreme Court review, writing that no appellate court in the country “has ever held that the chief executive of an employer may arbitrate statutory employment discrimination claims, whether in the context of professional sports leagues or otherwise.”
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
The U.S. military on Wednesday carried out new strikes in Iran, shooting down four attack drones and targeting a ground control station. The military stated both the drones and ground facility posed a threat to the Strait of Hormuz, a U.S. official said in a statement to MS NOW.
The official said the ceasefire agreement remains in effect and described the U.S. military actions as intended to maintain the ceasefire.
“Today, U.S. Central Command forces shot down four Iranian one-way attack drones that posed a threat around the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. forces also struck an Iranian ground control station in Bandar Abbas that was about to launch a fifth drone. These actions were measured, purely defensive, and intended to maintain the ceasefire,” the official said in the statement.
At least three explosions were heard east of Bandar Abbas, a port city in Iran along the Strait of Hormuz, The New York Times and CNN reported, both citing Iranian state media. The explosions briefly activated Bandar Abbas’ air defense systems, Fars News Agency, a media outlet affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, reported early Thursday local time.
The latest strikes come amid an unstable ceasefire agreement between the U.S. and Iran.
Speaking at a Cabinet meeting at the White House earlier Wednesday, President Donald Trump said Iran wants “very much to make a deal” but “they haven’t gotten there,” adding that Iran was “negotiating on fumes.”
“We’re not satisfied with it, but we will be,” Trump said. “Either that or we’ll have to just finish the job. Their navy is gone … their air force is gone, everything’s gone. And they’re negotiating on fumes. But we’ll see what happens. Maybe we have to go back and finish it, maybe we don’t.”
On MondayU.S. Central Command said in a statement that the U.S. carried out “self-defense” strikes on missile launch sites and boats in southern Iran in order “to protect our troops from threats posed by Iranian forces.” That same day, Trump said in a Truth Social post that negotiations with Iran were “proceeding nicely!”
Julia Jester covers politics for MS NOW and is based in Washington, D.C.
Carla Herreria is an editor for MS NOW’s breaking news and liveblog team. She was previously a senior assignment editor at HuffPost.
President Donald Trump’s racist policy of welcoming white South Africans while excluding refugees from other countries is back in the spotlight after his administration raised its refugee ceiling — to bring in more white people.
Trump increased the refugee admissions ceiling by 10,000 for this year to allow more white South Africans to come into the country, a signed presidential determination reviewed by Reuters showed.
The document, dated May 21, said white South Africans of Afrikaner ethnicity face an emergency situation due to the “incitement of racially motivated violence” by the government and political parties in the majority-Black country.
The document, found herecites an “unforeseen emergency refugee situation” that doesn’t actually exist. Trump and his allies have pushed false claims that a “white genocide” is occurring, but South Africa’s government — and even advocacy groups representing the country’s white Afrikaner minority — have rejected the claim.
Reuters reported that the increased refugee limit is now 17,500 — and that only three non-South African refugees have been admitted into the U.S. this fiscal year. Reuters previously reported that the administration wanted to bring in 4,500 white South Africans immigrants per montha number that I noted mirrors the number of white German refugees the Ku Klux Klan wanted to welcome to the United States a century ago — when its members were popularizing xenophobic slogans like “America First” and launching campaigns of racist terror against people of color.
It’s noteworthy here that white supremacists have latched on to racist conspiracy theories, such as the “replacement theory,” saying that there is some kind of plot to replace white Americans with nonwhite people, particularly foreigners. In reality, what’s actually underway is the exact opposite: a government effort to deport nonwhite people in America — including people who have lived in the U.S. for years — while Trump’s regime takes steps to import white people, and as some conservatives fret over white birth rates.
It’s hard to imagine the klan itself wouldn’t approve of this policy.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
Amid the Republican Party’s ongoing assault on Black peopleDemocrats are borrowing a tactic from 20th-century civil rights activists and putting corporate America on notice.
On Tuesday, the Congressional Black Caucus said it sent a letter to more than 200 companies and business organizations, urging them to oppose the GOP’s push to eliminate majority-Black districts after the Supreme Court’s Callais v. Louisiana decision, which effectively permitted racist gerrymandering.
In 2021, the companies sent a letter to Congress in support of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, saying the legislation was needed to guard against racial discrimination and voter suppression. Signees on that letter included AppleDell and Googlewhose executives have since aligned themselves with President Donald Trump’s regime.
“Many corporations spoke clearly during that moment about the importance of protecting democratic participation, defending civil rights, and advancing racial equity,” the CBC’s letter reads. “Today, those commitments are being tested.”
The letter presses the companies to issue statements condemning the GOP’s push to dilute Black voters’ power, as well as information on corporate political spending. The pressure campaign follows the CBC’s public call for student-athletes to boycott public universities in states where Republicans have taken action against majority-Black voting districts.
Meanwhile, 16 Democratic state attorneys general sent a letter last week to three donor-advised funds urging them to lift restrictions on donations to the Southern Poverty Law Centeran anti-racist organization known for helping law enforcement officials take down white supremacist extremist groups. The charity-based arms of Fidelity and Vanguard, as well as a company called Donor Advised Charitable Giving, imposed the restrictions after the Trump administration’s baseless indictment of the SPLC. I recently wrote about how Trump allies have used these charges to downplay and outright deny the existence of racist extremismas well as spread lies about liberals being responsible for groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
This scrutiny of corporate America and its acquiescence to the MAGA movement has me thinking of a conversation I had with the Rev. Al Sharpton and the “Morning Joe” crew last week. During our chat, Sharpton warned that companies that align themselves with Trump’s war on diversity do so at their own risk, because Democrats could take steps in the future to hold these companies to account.
These letters show a strong interest among Democrats in pressuring companies that appear to be propping up, or placating, the rise of what many people see as Jim Crow 2.0.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
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