The idea that the protecting civil rights never allows the state to consider race is ahistorical and illogical
By 
Everything the Democratic nominees say about the the ongoing gutting of the Voting Rights Act is unanswerably true:
Justice Kagan runs through the Supreme Court’s recent assaults on the Voting Rights Act then asks the Alabama solicitor general: If you succeed in blowing up the VRA’s ban on dilution of minority votes, what’s left of the law? pic.twitter.com/jrc0FXPiwP— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) October 4, 2022
More KBJ: The 14th Amendment “was drafted to give a constitutional foundation for a piece of legislation” that used “race-conscious” remedies to make Freedman equal to white citizens. So how could the Voting Rights Act’s race-conscious remedies possibly be unconstitutional? pic.twitter.com/JWF4g0me0f— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) October 4, 2022
The relevant positions of Republican elites are that 1)the 14th Amendment was designed to make the Freedman’s Bureau unconstitutional, 2)Section 2 of the 15th Amendment was not designed to allow Congress to protect the voting rights of racial minorities, and 3)the history of voting rights tells us that no facially neutral measure could be discriminatory in practice. None of these propositions even really need to be refuted, although it’s nice to do so forcefully.
Of course, as long as the current majority is as it is, it doesn’t matter for anything but a distant posterity. Jackson’s performance today should, however, reveal how farcical the idea that Ginsburg and Breyer had to stay on because they were too Indispensable to be adequately replaced by another Democratic nominee always was.