What the Supreme Court Doesn’t Understand About the Voting Rights Act Ari Berman
Ari Berman on June 25, 2013
Women vote in the US presidential election in Los Angeles, November 4, 2008. (Reuters/Lucy Nicholson)
No sooner had the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, after two hundred years of slavery and nearly 100 years of Jim Crow, than Southern conservatives, who failed to stop the law, began to attack it. South Carolina mounted the first constitutional challenge to the law only a month after it was enacted. President Nixon tried to weaken the law take the monkey
off the backs off the South, as did Presidents Ford in 1975 and Reagan in 1982. Every effort to gut the VRA failed. Each time the laws constitutionality was challenged, in 1966, 1973, 1980 and 1999, the Supreme Court upheld the act. Every congressional reauthorization, in 1970, 1975, 1982 and 2006, made the law stronger, not weaker, in protecting voting rights. Each Congressional reauthorization was signed by a Republican president, cementing the bipartisan consensus supporting the VRA. The Voting Rights Act became one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nations history, Justice Ginsburg wrote in her dissent today.
That consensus held until now, with the Roberts Court finding that Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional. Section 4 is how states are covered under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, the provision which requires states with the worst history of voting discriminationthose who had a discriminatory voting device on the books and voter turnout of less than 50 percent in the 1964 electionto preclear their voting changes with the federal government. Without Section 4, theres no Section 5. The most effective provision of the countrys most effective civil rights law is now dead until and unless Congress figures out a new way to cover states where voting discrimination is most prevalent that satisfies the Roberts Court.
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Read more:
http://www.thenation.com/blog/174973/what-supreme-court-doesnt-understand-about-voting-rights-act#ixzz2XKQAjAe7
demwing
(16,916 posts)Does it matter whether Berman thinks the SCOTUS got it wrong? It's done. We can't even vote the fuckers out. They have jobs for life.
Unless the Furious 5 suddenly get Avian Flu^2 and keel over, the best we can hope for is that the Dems use this as a rallying cry, and turnout voters in all 50 states to decimate the GOP control of the house.
happyslug
(14,779 posts)Last edited Wed Jun 26, 2013, 12:00 PM - Edit history (2)
n/t