Will Repug/VRWC SCOTUS kill VRA1965 = Section 5?

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Supreme Court Weighs Future Of Voting Rights Act

Once again, race is front and center at the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday. And once again, the bull's eye is the 1965 Voting Rights Act, widely viewed as the most effective and successful civil rights legislation in American history. Upheld five times by the court, the law now appears to be on life support.


The provision at issue in Wednesday's case applies only to specific parts of the country where discriminatory voting procedures were once rampant. It covers all of nine states, mainly in the South, plus parts of seven other states. To head off discriminatory voting procedures before they happen, the law requires covered areas to get approval from federal officials before changes can take place. So, for example, if an Alabama town wants to change polling places, or to change from an elected board to an appointed board, or to annex another part of the county, it has to first get permission from the Justice Department or a federal court in Washington, D.C.

Congress came up with the formula in 1965 to cover areas of the country that had a history of blatant, even violent discrimination in voting; but the formula has not been changed since 1975, and it still relies on election data from 1972. That's the crux of the issue before the court now: whether times have changed so much that Congress, in reauthorizing the law in 2006 without updating the formula, violated the Constitution.

http://www.npr.org/2013/02/27/173012038/supreme-court-weighs-future-of-voting-rights-act

Repug/VRWC SCOTUS, 5-4 along 1% vs 99% lines, just killed any future challenges to govt surveillance of citizens.

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Guess who makes a racist statement?

Scalia: Voting Rights Act Is ‘Perpetuation Of Racial Entitlement’ (http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/02/27/1646891/scalia-voting-rights-act-is-perpetuation-of-racial-entitlement/)

There were audible gasps in the Supreme Court’s lawyer’s lounge, where audio of the oral argument is pumped in for members of the Supreme Court bar, when Justice Antonin Scalia offered his assessment of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. He called it a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”

Scalia’s expansion on it today raises concerns that his suspicion of the Act is rooted much more in racial resentment than in a general distrust of unanimous votes. Scalia noted when the Voting Rights Act was first enacted in 1965, it passed over 19 dissenters. In subsequent reauthorizations, the number of dissenters diminished, until it passed the Senate without dissent seven years ago. Scalia’s comments suggested that this occurred, not because of a growing national consensus that racial disenfranchisement is unacceptable, but because lawmakers are too afraid to be tarred as racists. His inflammatory claim that the Voting Rights Act is a “perpetuation of racial entitlement” came close to the end of a long statement on why he found a landmark law preventing race discrimination in voting to be suspicious.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/02/27/1646891/scalia-voting-rights-act-is-perpetuation-of-racial-entitlement/

:lol just like clockwork. The ugly little troll's appearance depicts exactly the ugliness inside. He personifies the shit stains the Repugs have left all over the judiciary

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The Voting Rights Act did not have a very good day today. Chief Justice John Roberts suggested that a key provision of the law is rooted in the idea that “citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the North.” Justice Antonin Scalia accomplished the unusual task of making Roberts look like a moderate by labeling the law a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose undeserved reputation as a moderate leads Court-watchers to pay particularly close attention to his questions, compared a landmark voting rights provision to the Marshall Plan as an example of a good idea that has now run its course.

When individual voters bring lawsuits claiming disenfranchisement, the Roberts Court has wielded this distinction between facial and as-applied challenges to devastating effect. Most significantly, in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, a plurality of the Court established that challenges to voter ID, a common voter suppression law, can only be brought on an as-applied basis. The upside of this is that each voter who feels they may be disenfranchised by the law has to hire a lawyer, go to court, and sue for the right to vote. And if they win, their victory applies only to them, not to the potentially hundreds of thousands of other voters who could be disenfranchised by voter ID.

What’s good for the goose should be good for the gander. If a voter disenfranchisement scheme that is popular with conservatives can only be subject to narrow, plaintiff-specific challenges, than the same rule should apply when a landmark voting rights law is challenged by conservatives. There was little doubt after oral argument today, however, that at least four of the Court’s conservatives do not see it that way.

if Kennedy does not agree with Sotomayor — or at least to put off the fate of the law until a future date — it will mean that there is one rule that applies to individual voters, and another, more favorable rule that applies to people who oppose voting rights.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/02/27/1647811/the-double-standard-behind-the-roberts-courts-hostility-to-voting-rights/

Racist, Confederate AL and the Confederacy will always be so, and Repug.

So the extreme right-wing Repug SCOTUS killing VRA won't have any effect in gerrymandered red states.

The real objective is unopposable voter suppression of Dem voters in swing states.

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But it’s not Section 5 of the VRA we should be worried about. It’s Section 4. The Roberts court has an out that would have almost equally devastating consequences as striking the law entirely, but allow the Chief Justice to avoid having his legacy tied to killing off the VRA. One of the main critiques of the VRA is that Section 4 uses data from 1972 as its base to determine what jurisdictions are covered and subject to pre-clearance. In Northwest Austin v. Holder, (http://www.oyez.org/cases/2000-2009/2008/2008_08_322) the voting rights challenge from four years ago, Justice Roberts focused much of his ire with the coverage formula, suggesting that while the overall contours of the VRA may still have some relevance in combating racial discrimination in voting, the court was very skeptical of any conclusions that could be drawn from data that old. This time around the court could strike Section 4 and say that Section 5 can only be enforced if this coverage formula is updated. This would kick the issue back to Congress, and if the fight for the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act is any indication, we all know how that would turn out. Section 5 would stand, but it would be gutted, effectively unenforceable until Congress could agree on a new formula for which states need election monitoring.

The immediate effects alone would be disastrous. As Ari Berman breaks down (http://www.thenation.com/blog/173126/congress-honors-rosa-parks-while-supreme-court-targets-voting-rights-act#), six of the nine fully covered states under Section 5 have passed new voting restrictions, including Voter ID laws, limits on early voting and restrictions on voter registration since 2010. By comparison, non-covered jurisdictions passed only one-third of those kinds of restrictions. It also matters because many of these states, like Texas and Virginia in particular, are on the cusp of significant electoral change that could shift power away from conservatives—presuming no efforts to restrict voting are permanent of course.

During the argument Justice Elena Kagan observed that those challenging the VRA were asking a conservative court, not Congress who is charged with holding hearings and creating conclusions of fact, to decide that racial discrimination in voting had been solved—an extraordinarily undemocratic request in many ways. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted that while the South has come far from the early days of Jim Crow, as a country there was a lot of work that remained. But it was Justice Sonia Sotomayor (http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/02/sotomayor-liberal-justices-defend-voting-rights-act.php)who was the most vocal in defending not just the civil rights legislation generally, but the principles of racial equality supporting it, taking Justice Scalia’s racism head-on (http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/02/scalia-attacks-congress-for-renewing-voting-rights-act.php?ref=fpb).

http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2013/02/28/the-simple-and-insidious-way-john-roberts-could-gut-the-voting-rights-act/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-simple-and-insidious-way-john-roberts-could-gut-the-voting-rights-act

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The Neo-Confederate Supreme Court

The Right’s desperation over U.S. demographic changes has spread to the U.S. Supreme Court where its five Republican partisans appear ready to tear up the most important part of the Voting Rights Act and thus clear the way for suppressing the votes of minorities

If white rule in the United States is to be restored and sustained, then an important first step will be the decision of the five Neo-Confederate justices on the U.S. Supreme Court to gut the Voting Rights Act, a move that many court analysts now consider likely.

The Court’s striking down Section Five of the Voting Rights Act will mean that jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting – mostly in the Old Confederacy – will be free to impose new obstacles to voting by African-Americans, Hispanics and other minorities without first having to submit the changes to a federal court.

The three key right-wing justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, from left to right, Antonin Scalia, John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy. (From the official 2010 photo of the U.S. Supreme Court)

This green light to renew Jim Crow laws also would come at a time when Republican legislatures and governors across the country are devising new strategies for diluting the value of votes from minorities and urban dwellers in order to protect GOP power, especially within the federal government.

Already, the Republicans’ aggressive gerrymandering of congressional districts has ensured a continued GOP majority in the U.S. House of Representatives although Democrats outpolled Republicans nationwide in Election 2012.

Some GOP-controlled states, which also have tended to vote Democratic in presidential elections, are now considering apportioning presidential electors according to these gerrymandered districts to give Republican presidential candidates most of the electoral votes even if they lose the state. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Return of Three-Fifths of a Person."]

On Wednesday, the five partisan Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court showed that they wanted to do their part in devaluing the votes of blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and young urban whites. So the key GOP justices indicated during oral arguments that they are looking for excuses to strike down the heart of the Voting Rights Act.

http://consortiumnews.com/2013/02/28/the-neo-confederate-supreme-court/

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Answer to the Thread's title question?

Yes.


Sadly, unfortunately, etc. etc. etc, but yes.

Scalia made a complete ass of himself in the process of letting everyone know where he stands.

Turning over a congressional law and in so doing substituting their own cultural and demographic analyses for those of the Congress is what, in another day and time and with a differently constituted court, would be called 'judicial activism'.

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"substituting their own cultural and demographic analyses"

for which they will get $100K+ speaker deals when retired to preach to the VRWC choir

They don't analyze, they just activist-ly protect, enrich, enable the corps and 1% over the 99%, which is exactly why the Repugs stacked them in there.

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The Political Forces Behind the Attack on the Voting Rights Act

the “perpetuation of racial entitlement” in the law’s renewal.

We can thank Scalia for his candor, not just because his comment telegraphed his expected vote on the matter, but because the remark demonstrated how closely he and the four other Republican appointees to the high court have aligned themselves with the right-wing and libertarian interest groups behind the Shelby litigation.

Those organizations—whose ranks range from well-known right-wing think tanks such as the Federalist Society and the American Enterprise and Cato institutes to relatively obscure nonprofits such as the Virginia-based DonorsTrust foundation and the Project on Fair Representation—form a de facto alliance that aims at nothing less than a wholesale transformation of constitutional law to limit, if not altogether prohibit, the use of federal power on behalf of historically oppressed minorities. The Voting Rights Act is simply the target of the day.

Shelby County’s lawyer—the savvy and well-respected conservative Washington, D.C., litigator Bert Rein—told the court (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/28/us/politics/conservative-justices-voice-skepticism-on-voting-law.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0) that Section 5 was no longer needed because “the problem to which the Voting Rights Act was addressed is solved.”

Shelby County is nominally the plaintiff in the lawsuit, it is in reality a proxy for Shelby County is nominally the plaintiff in the lawsuit, it is in reality a proxy for the right-wing alliance that conceived, funded and initiated the lawsuit in the first place.


http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_political_forces_behind_the_attack_on_the_voti ng_rights_act_20130228/#sthash.vxREaIh8.dpuf