Here goes the Republican Party’s latest serious attempt to get rid of that troublesome Voting Rights Act that they’ve hated with a special vitriol ever since it was enacted: Voting Rights Act Takes a Beating in the Supreme Court.

The right wing justices are sounding a lot like right wing bloggers.

A question posed by Chief Justice John Roberts to the Obama administration’s lawyer defending the Voting Rights Act captured the tenor of the proceedings.

“Is it the government’s submission that citizens in the South are more racist than citizens not in the South?” Roberts asked.

Is he kidding?

I’ve spent a lot of time in the South, and while there are plenty of great non-racist people living there, to say that the South has no special problems with racism is absolutely beyond ludicrous.

This is what happens when conservatives get a chance to stack the Supreme Court with right wingers.

Antonin Scalia also got into the fray, sounding like a Free Republic commenter:

Justice Antonin Scalia attributed the continued congressional reauthorization to the “perpetuation of racial entitlement” and suggested that it will be renewed endlessly because members of Congress would never let it lapse for fear for political repercussions.

“I don’t think there is anything to be gained by any Senator to vote against continuation of this act,” Scalia said. “They are going to lose votes if they do not reenact the Voting Rights Act. Even the name of it is wonderful — the Voting Rights Act. Who is going to vote against that in the future?”

Missouri Republican Rep. Todd Akin, currently running for the US Senate, says it’s time to take a “second look” at the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Yes, this is how crazy the Republican Party has gotten.

Republican Congressman Todd Akin said Friday afternoon he thinks it’s time for a second look at federal “civil rights and voting rights” laws.

The republican U.S. senate candidate told FOX 2’s Charles Jaco states not the federal government should set voter rules.

Congressman Akin of course is trying to unseat democratic Senator Claire McCaskill. And Akin has always said the federal government’s role should be much smaller than it is.

But Akin says that federal voting rights laws may need to be looked at, changed or overturned is something new. Those laws were passed in 1964, 1965 and 1968. The voting rights act of 1965 prevented mostly southern states from using things like literacy tests to keep African-Americans from voting. The civil rights act of 1964 outlawed similar voting restrictions.

Next target on the Republican Party’s hit list: the Voting Rights Act that guarantees minorities access to the ballot box.

In a political system where even the most trivial issues trigger partisan rancor, the Voting Rights Act has stood for several decades as a rare point of bipartisan consensus.

Until now.

An intensifying conservative legal assault on the Voting Rights Act could precipitate what many civil rights advocates regard as the nuclear option: a court ruling striking down one of the core elements of the landmark 1965 law guaranteeing African Americans and other minorities access to the ballot box.

At the same time, the view that states should have free rein to change their election laws even in places with a history of Jim Crow seems to be gaining traction within the Republican Party.

“There certainly has been a major change,” said Rick Hasen, a professor of election law at the University of California at Irvine. “Now, you have a whole bunch of credible mainstream state attorneys general and governors taking this view. … That would have been unheard of even five years ago. You would have been accused of being a racist.”

Exactly.