Charles Pierce: "There is a long, blue river of sadness running through the words of that dissent" [View all]

[kpete]

Charlie Pierce re:

Justice Ginsberg's dissent from the Supreme Court decision upholding North Carolina's restrictive voting laws:

Only two justices dissented, Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Sonia Sotomayor. Justice Ginsberg wrote the dissent for both of them, and she said pretty much what I just said, except somewhat more formally than anatomically. She is not fooled by what's been going on here for the last two years, when the Republicans saw the demographic freight train bearing down on them. She sees the historic sweep of the backlash:

For decades, §5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965,through its preclearance requirement, worked to safe-guard long obstructed access to the ballot by African-American citizens. In Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U. S. (2013), this Court found the Act's §4 coverage formula obsolete, a ruling that effectively nullified §5's preclear-ance requirement. Immediately after the Shelby Countydecision, North Carolina enacted omnibus House Bill 589, which imposed voter identification early voting by a week, prohibited local election boards from keeping the polls open on the final Saturday afternoon before elections, eliminated same-day voter registration, terminated preregistration of 16- and 17-year olds in high schools, authorized any registered voter to challenge ballots cast early or on Election Day, and barred votes cast in the wrong precinct from being counted at all. These measures likely would not have survived federal preclearance.

................

There is a long, blue river of sadness running through the words of that dissent. It runs under the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama. It pools into a lagoon of sadness behind an earthen dam in Mississippi. The survivors of the generation that fought and bled for the right to vote are getting old and dying off right now. John Lewis is 74. Soon, there won't be any of them left. But it always was thought that the victories they won would survive them. That the real monument to their cause would be lines of the historically disenfranchised suddenly empowered, swamping the system, and realizing that elections in this country are meant to be the most powerful form of civil disobedience there is. And now, it looks very much as though powerful interests are in combination to make sure their victories die with them, here as we celebrate John Roberts's Day of Jubilee. There is a long blue river of sadness running through those words, and a darkness spreading across its surface, and a long night is falling on the face of the water.


http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Supreme_Court_Means_Business