Today Among People Who Wear Robes
Leave it to this Supreme Court to find an even more interesting way to gut the Voting Rights Act than I thought it would.
Ever since the Court agreed to hear the case, most of the speculation about what it would do centered on Section V of the VRA which mandated that certain states with a clear history of discrimination in their voting laws have to submit any changes in those laws to the Justice Department for “pre-clearance.” What the court did today, in Shelby County v. Holder, was demolish Section V while still leaving it nominally intact. It declared that Section IV of the Act, which sets out which jurisdictions will be covered by Section V, is unconstitutional, and the Court threw the issue of which jurisdictions should be covered today back to the Congress. Without Section IV, Section V cannot function. Cute.
(Also, in a neat trick, the decision transfer the burden of a voter-suppression law from the state to the person whose vote is being suppressed. It used to be that the jurisdiction had to prove it was not being discriminatory. Now, the voter must prove individual discrimination, which the voter cannot usually do until his or her vote already has been suppressed. Nifty!)
In the real world, of course, Congress will do nothing of the sort, and states are now free to pass whatever voter-suppression laws they want to pass, which many of them already have done, and the federal government will have nothing at all to say about them. As became obvious during oral arguments, Chief Justice John Roberts believes that Dr. King’s dream has been fulfilled, and that the country has now attained the day of jubilee as regards to race relations.
“Our country has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.”
(For what it’s worth, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his opinion that he would have struck down Section V, too. Swell. Which way would he have voted on Plessy, do you figure?)
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