Absolutely right. Justices don’t (and shouldn’t) tailor their opinions to fit what a party wants to accomplish.
I just find it amusing that after multiple retreats and attempts to re-brand as a more minority-friendly party, one of the first news items of actual political significance (I consider the sequester a bit more of a warm-up to the real budget fights) will be the invalidation of one of the central achievements of the Civil Rights movement entirely at the hands of GOP-nominated justices. Irony.
Which is probably one of the reasons it was unanimously re-approved. And why Scalia has a bit of a point when he says it won’t be disapproved for a very long time. But that’s no reason to declare a law unconstitutional, IMO.
I agree with everything you said, with one nitpick. Some white people reneged, not all. As a white man i, along with many others, have not agreed to renege on any of that and I will keep speaking out and voting accordingly.
You realize, that even though that paper was written in '07, that they are using the 1960’s as a baseline for their documentation?
Or did I not read it all right?
As long as politicians have the right to gerrymander, or re-district the exact types of ‘discrimination’ will continue to happen. What I take issue with is the fact that it is labeled as racially motivated. I’m sure on board that it is politically motivated.
Given that the court hasn’t ruled on Shelby County v. Holder yet, it is a bit premature to assume that if Section 5 of the VRA is overturned, it’ll be entirely at the hands of the GOP-nominated judges. It could be 9-0, or 8-1, for all we know.
I’m not just talking about the past. I’m talking about the present and the future.
In the past, we tried leaving racism alone in hopes it would decline on its own. It didn’t work. Racism, left unchallenged, is self-perpetuating.
The reason racism is “getting smaller and less effective” is because most people have now decided to actively fight racism. We want racism to keep declining so we’re going to keep fighting it. The amount of racism we’re prepared to accept is zero.
I endorse your remarks, and will add that the VRA Section 5, with its focus on a few states and counties, perpetuates the idea that racism is a Southern problem, when in fact it’s a human problem. The convenient whipping-boy of the South distracts from this, and slows progress in confronting and overcoming racism.
See the Bakke and Bollinger cases as well as the upcoming Fisher case. In the Bollinger case, for example, one of the Justices flat-out said that in 25 years Affirmative Action would no longer be needed while, at the same time, striking down the law school admissions policy.
Which doesn’t do you a whole lot of good the day after the election.
Yeah, but it helps. We should probably stick any jurisdiction that violates section 2 into section 5 as well but I don’t think there is a mechanism to add jurisdictions to the list that requires pre-clearance.
So you are willing to entirely ignore the century of slavery between 1776 and emanicipation? You should be on the pre-clearance list.
I don’t see SCOTUS repealing section 5. No justice wants to be the one that writes the opinion for the next Dredd Scott case or Plessy v Ferguson.
I’ve known a number of people, two of whom are African-American, who lived in both and while none would disagree that racism is a problem in Boston as it is everywhere in the US, none would claim that North Carolina was less racist than the state with Deval Patrick as Governor.
Having just re-read the statute, I don’t think there is such a mechanism. Which is another problem, if Los Angeles County started up a vicious set of discriminatory voting laws tomorrow, they’d evade preclearance. Meanwhile, jurisdictions that have not done so for decades are still under preclearance orders.
I’m not a constitutional scholar, but hasn’t the VRA already been declared constitutional several times by the SCOTUS over the past several decades? What the fuck has changed in the law in the last 40 years that would somehow now make it an unconstitutional overreach?
Basically, invalidating the law would ONLY happen now because the clowns sitting on the Court do not like it. That’s well and good, but it isn’t their job to overturn legislation because they just aren’t happy with it; no, it’s their job to determine if the VRA is constitutional, and if they stick to precedent it should (presumably) be a done deal that it most assuredly is.
And seriously, how the FUCK is it the Court’s job to determine whether the VRA is even necessary anymore? That’s a job a for Congress, and they seemed pretty certain about it back in 2006.
Racism becomes one of those ephemeral Other People’s Problems when it becomes correlated with a specific geographical region. We’d be better served by a national dialogue that racism is part of the human condition, reinforced by biological factors, and requires will to confront and overcome. Instead, racism is equated to evil, and to the South. This is fruitless.
SCOTUS has determined that the Fourteenth Amendment allows Congress to infringe on state sovereignty to fix existing problems, but not to legislate to correct hypothetical ones. The latter form is called “prophylactic”. That means Congress has to have evidence before it when it legislates in this area.
For example, Congress could pass the Fair Housing Act because discrimination against minorities in sale and rental of homes was a known problem. Congress had huge volumes of testimony and documentation establishing that black people couldn’t buy or rent in numerous areas of the country, and that state authorities were subtly or openly complicit.
By the same token, Congress could pass the VRA in 1968 because it had a giant legislative record establishing that states and localities were limiting the voting rights of minorities. Thing is, the VRA as originally passed was a temporary measure; it was designed to sunset after 7 years. Each subsequent renewal is subject to the same limitations as the original legislation vis-a-vis the factual predicate, so for a challenge on those grounds it doesn’t matter if the legislation was previously upheld.
The current suit asserts that in 2005, Congress no longer had a sufficient factual predicate regarding minority voting infringements to support reauthorization of the Act.
With regard to the second part of your post quoted above, Congress probably was pretty certain about it in 2006, but that isn’t to say they were certain based on the evidence. In all probability, most congresscritters voted reflexively; after all, who would oppose voting rights? I’d have to go back and look at the legislative record to see how much actual floor debate and stuff there was, which I don’t have time for, though I imagine the SCOTUS briefs discuss it.
In regard to the above, and the question of existing vs. prophylactic problems, the latest U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report on the enforcement of the VRA found, in the period 1995-2004, that less than 0.1 percent of all election changes requiring preclearance were objected to by the DoJ. For comparison, the figure from 1969 was almost 10 percent.
I submit that this is strong evidence that the problem has passed from existing, to hypothetical.
Is this your opinion, or do you have some studies that indicate this to be true?
What biological factors are you talking about here?
Sorry, I’m not following you again. How do you get “racism = the South” from “racism is a problem, and has a pernicious history particularly in the South”? Because the VRA clearly espouses the latter view, yet you’re saying it somehow ultimately is perceived as the former. What evidence do you have that supports your view?
Opinion, though it is supportable. This Washington Post-ABC News poll concluded that the number of people who think racism is “a big problem” in the U.S. is dropping much faster than the number of people who claim to have experienced racial discrimination. It’s difficult to judge the impact of problems effecting others.
