Danger Zone by Linda Greenhouse
A Supreme Court Misstep On Voting Rights
Two articles about young people in search of an education caught my attention last week. Both appeared in The Times on the same day. One celebrated the improbable journey of a young man “from a Rwandan dump to the halls of Harvard.” Justus Uwayesu, photographed in front of the iconic John Harvard statue in Harvard Yard, didn’t run as the other children did when a American charity worker approached them more than a decade ago as they scavenged for food. “I want to go to school,” the boy told his American rescuer. This fall, he enrolled as a freshman at Harvard.
The other story reported the intervention of New York State officials in a scandalous situation in suburban school districts in the New York City area. Faced with an influx of undocumented Central American children whom immigration authorities have released to live with relatives or other sponsors, school districts in the region seem to be doing their best to keep these kids out of school.
School officials know they can’t demand proof of legal immigration status, thanks to Plyler v. Doe, a 1982 decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that states can’t exclude undocumented children from the free public education provided to all other children. So school systems have been demanding proof of residency in the district, which families who are trying to make the best of patchwork and last-minute arrangements often can’t provide. The bureaucratic impasse has left these children, finally safe from the gang violence that led to their long journeys north, languishing in their new homes. The state is investigating. “The students have a constitutional right to be educated,” John B. King Jr., New York’s education commissioner, said last week. . .
This wasn’t poetry and it wasn’t elaborate constitutional doctrine. It was common sense. Justice Powell argued not from the vantage point of the children so much as from that of American society as a whole. The Supreme Court, in his view, was appropriately intervening to save the country from a policy demonstrably destructive of the social fabric.
That brings me, as promised, to the Roberts court. Late on a Friday night earlier this month, the Supreme Court voted in another case from Texas to permit the state’s voter ID law, the strictest in the country, to take effect. A federal district judge in Corpus Christi found after a nine-day trial that the law’s stringent requirements for particular forms of identification would prevent as many as 600,000 Texans, 4.5 percent of all those registered, from voting next month. The impact, Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos found, would fall disproportionately on black and Latino Texans. She ruled that the law violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the section that remains functional after the Supreme Court cut the heart out of that law last year — and that it operated as an unconstitutional poll tax. Judge Ramos issued a permanent injunction to bar the state from applying the law. . .
“There is no right more basic in our democracy than the right to participate in electing our political leaders,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the court in April of this year. His subject then was the right to spend money in politics, not the right to vote. If people conclude that the current Supreme Court majority cares more about the first than the second — surely a logical inference — the court will have entered a dangerous place. And so — as a conservative justice once realized in another context — will the country.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/30/opinion/a-supreme-court-misstep-on-voting-rights.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region®ion=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region&_r=0
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Some members might not like that she's studied so much about them! 
