“Preventing Access To The Ballot Box”: Polling Disenfranchisement Will Be More Difficult To Flag
Time for everyone to step away from their respective ledges.
A few days have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on one of the most effective pieces of civil rights legislation ever passed, the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Some of the kneejerk liberal oratory, the gnashing of teeth, is completely out of step with reality. The court’s decision does not signal a slippage to Jim Crow antics like poll taxes and hatred so violent that merely registering a black person to vote could lead to murder.
Likewise, conservatives would do well to cease gloating about the landmark ruling that nullified an important part of the Act. After all, it’s not like the court found that the nine states and portions of six others receiving extra scrutiny have become bastions of free and equal treatment for all voters.
In fact, records compiled for Congress the last time it renewed the Voting Rights Act in 2006 reflect many examples of disparate impacts for voters in recent years.
Clearly, a black man in the White House does not mean the nation has eradicated discriminatory problems in voting, intentional or not.
The problem now is Congress.
Congress needs to rewrite the guidelines nullified by the ruling to consider new situations across the United States. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts tried to nudge toward that goal in the ruling.
Dramatic demographic shifts necessitate it. New populations of voters not fully considered in 1965 such as Hispanics, Asians and increasing numbers of less mobile elderly are bringing new challenges to ensuring access to the polls.
The Court’s 5-4 ruling in Shelby v. Holder made irrelevant a portion of the law initially intended to halt the horrific abuses of the civil rights era.
Alabama’s Shelby County challenged a section of the Voting Rights Act that mandated so-called pre-clearance standards. Most of the states and some of jurisdictions covered are in the South. Under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, they must first receive the federal government’s permission before redrawing legislative maps, shifting polling places or enacting new rules on voter identification.
These jurisdictions must prove to the Justice Department or a panel of federal judges that planned changes will not have a discriminatory effect.
Problem was, the areas were chosen by past abuses. Too far in the past, the court decided, nullifying the formula used to determine who is covered.
The court wants Congress to readdress the formula, using more current voting patterns. Congress failed to do that the last time the Voting Rights Act was renewed.
The Justice Department can and will still pursue abuses. They’ll be busy.
Accessibility to the ballot box is under assault in America. Legislatures nationwide are passing changes to voting laws, often under the guise of stopping voter fraud.
Repeatedly, politicians pushing for the measures cannot prove fraud exists. Often, they are mislabeling database errors as fraud. Problems like two people with the same name, inaccurate data entry of addresses or birthdays. The glitches need to be eliminated; new technology can be employed.
But the goal should always be increasing access for eligible voters, not making reaching the ballot box unnecessarily more difficult — and often placing that burden on older, poorer and minority voters.
Here is the thing.
Areas affected by pre-clearance standards could have been exempted from scrutiny years ago. All they needed to do was keep a clean slate, not have any violations for 10 consecutive years. This process, called “bailout,” is included in the act.
But problems continued. Most of the jurisdictions never met that mark.
No, they had to wait until a conservative-leaning court cut them some slack.
And now an ineffective Congress will make it that much more difficult to flag modern-era abuses.
By: Mary Sanchez, The National Memo, July 1, 2013
“John Roberts, Pitcher And Batter”: The Voting-Rights Decision Spells The End Of Fair Elections
The Supreme Court delivered a sucker punch to fair elections today, striking down a key part of the Voting Rights Act. It is a ruling that will make it much easier for partisan election officials and legislators to rig the voting system — and a lot harder for ordinary voters to participate in democracy.
The ruling is also a huge Supreme Court power grab. How big? In 2006, Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act by a vote of 98-0 in the Senate and 390-33 in the House (and President George W. Bush signed it into law). Now, five Justices have swept away the decision of all those elected leaders — over the vociferous dissent of four other Justices.
At his confirmation hearing, Chief Justice John Roberts — who wrote today’s majority opinion — famously declared that as a Justice, “my job is to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.” But in nullifying one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation in U.S. history, he picked up a bat and swung for the bleachers.
The part of the Voting Rights Act that the court held unconstitutional (Section 4) was a critical one: the formula that specifies which particular states and localities must clear significant voting changes in advance with the Justice Department. That process — “preclearance” — ensures that unfair voting rules can be stopped before they are allowed to interfere with actual elections.
An example of why it’s needed: in 2001, the all-white leadership of Kilmichael, Miss., abruptly canceled the town election when it looked like voters might elect the first black mayor. Using the Voting Rights Act, the Justice Department required that the election go forward — and a black mayor was elected. That was only one of more than 700 discriminatory voting changes the Justice Department blocked from 1982 to 2006.
The Supreme Court’s majority was troubled by the specific states and localities that the Voting Rights Act’s “preclearance” rules apply to. Why Alabama and not Vermont? Why Brooklyn and the Bronx, but not Lincoln, Neb.? The simple answer is that these are the jurisdictions Congress chose after careful consideration. It held 21 hearings and heard from scores of witnesses — it produced a 15,000-page record — before reauthorizing the law in 2006. Without doing any of that work, five Justices have said they know better.
Now that the formula has been thrown out, the whole process of preclearance is effectively thrown out as well. In theory, Congress could come up with another formula — and a list of states and localities — that the Supreme Court would find constitutional. But it would be a legislative nightmare for Congress to try to do that — and no one expects that to happen anytime soon.
So what does the gutting of the Voting Rights Act mean for American democracy? It will be easier for bad-apple election officials to revive classic vote-suppression tactics — like moving polling places at the last minute, so voters cannot find them, or getting eligible voters off the rolls. And it will be easier for state legislatures to draw district lines to divide up minority voters and dilute their power at the polls.
The majority dismisses all these very real concerns, arguing that “things have changed” since the bad, pre-civil-rights-era days. Of course, even if that were so, it would not mean that we don’t need the Voting Rights Act. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the dissenters, that sort of logic is “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” Now that the Supreme Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act, we should get ready for an antidemocratic downpour.
By: Adam Cohen, Time, June 25, 2013
“The Arrogance Of The Third Political Branch”: The Supreme Court Uses Judicial Activism For Conservative Ends
We prefer to think of the Supreme Court as an institution apart from politics and above its struggles. In the wake of this week’s decision gutting the heart of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, its actions must now be viewed through the prism of the conservative movement’s five-decade-long quest for power.
Liberals will still win occasional and sometimes partial victories, as they did Wednesday on same-sex marriage. But on issues directly related to political and economic influence, the court’s conservative majority is operating as a political faction, determined to shape a future in which progressives will find themselves at a disadvantage.
It’s true that the rulings voiding the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8 show how the liberalizing trend on some social issues is hard for even a conservative court to resist.
The Defense of Marriage Act was invalidated because one of the conservatives, Justice Anthony Kennedy, has joined much of the American public in an admirable move toward greater sympathy for gay and lesbian rights.
And the decision on California’s anti-gay marriage law was reached by an ideologically eclectic majority on procedural grounds. Five justices held that the case had been improperly presented because the state of California declined to appeal a lower court’s ruling voiding the law.
This led to a middle-of-the-road outcome. The court declined to declare a national, Constitutional right to same-sex marriage, but did give gay-rights advocates a victory in California. By leaving the issue in the electoral sphere in most states, the court opened the way for further advances toward marriage equality, since public opinion is shifting steadily in its favor, fueled by strong support among younger Americans.
The marriage rulings, however, should not distract from the arrogance of power displayed in the voting rights decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts. His opinion involved little Constitutional analysis. He simply substituted the court’s judgment for Congress’ in deciding which states should be covered under the Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which required voting rules in states with a history of discrimination to be pre-cleared by the Justice Department.
The court instructed Congress to rewrite the law, even though these sophisticated conservatives certainly know how difficult this will be in the current political climate.
Whenever conservatives on the court have had the opportunity to tilt the playing field toward their own side, they have done so. And in other recent cases, the court has weakened the capacity of Americans to take on corporate power. The conservative majority seems determined to bring us back to the Gilded Age of the 1890s.
The voting rights decision should be seen as following a pattern set by the rulings in Bush v. Gore in 2000 and Citizens United in 2010.
Bush v. Gore had the effect of installing the conservatives’ choice in the White House and allowed him to influence the court’s subsequent direction with his appointments of Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito.
Citizens United swept aside a tradition going back to the Progressive Era — and to the Founders’ deep concern over political corruption — by vastly increasing the power of corporate and monied interests in the electoral sphere.
Tuesday’s Shelby County v. Holder ruling will make it far more difficult for African-Americans to challenge unfair electoral and districting practices. For many states, it will be a Magna Carta to make voting more difficult if they wish to.
The Constitution, through the 14th and 15th Amendments, gives Congress a strong mandate to offer federal redress against discriminatory and regressive actions by state and local governments. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted in her scalding but very precise dissent, “a governing political coalition has an incentive to prevent changes in the existing balance of voting power.”
In less diplomatic language, existing majorities may try to fix election laws to make it far more difficult for their opponents to toss them from power in later elections. Republican legislatures around the country passed a spate of voter suppression laws disguised as efforts to guarantee electoral “integrity” for just this purpose.
Recall that when conservatives did not have a clear court majority, they railed against “judicial activism.” Now that they have the capacity to impose their will, many of the same conservatives defend extreme acts of judicial activism by claiming they involve legitimate interpretations of the true meaning of the Constitution.
It is an inconsistency that tells us all we need to know. This is not an argument about what the Constitution says. It is a battle for power. And, despite scattered liberal triumphs, it is a battle that conservatives are winning.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 27, 2013
“John Roberts Gets His Trophy”: Inventing A Previously Unheard Of “New Constitutional Doctrine”
In my focus on the joyful and immediate exploitation of the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder by southern Republicans who behaved like they were in the midst of a jail break, I probably gave too little attention to the audacity of the decision itself. Ari Berman of The Nation offered some immediate observations, beginning with the stunning contrast between the Chief Justice’s solicitude for Congress is his dissent against the invalidation of the Defense of Marriage Act with his breezy contempt in Shelby County v. Holder:
In his dissent in the Defense of Marriage Act case today, Justice Scalia wrote: “We have no power to decide this case. And even if we did, we have no power under the Constitution to invalidate this democratically adopted legislation.”
Justice Roberts wrote in his concurrence: “I agree with Justice Scalia that this Court lacks jurisdiction to review the decisions of the courts below… I also agree with Justice Scalia that Congress acted constitutionally in passing the Defense of Marriage Act.”
Yet that reasoning didn’t stop Justices Roberts and Scalia from striking down the centerpiece of the Voting Rights Act yesterday, a hugely important civil rights law that has been passed by Congress five times with overwhelming bipartisan approval. Why didn’t the court defer to Congress on the VRA, which has a far more robust Congressional history/mandate than DOMA? And how did Roberts and Scalia reach such contradictory conclusions in the different cases?
But more fundamentally, as 7th Circuit Judge Richard Posner notes in a scathing review of Shelby County v. Holder for Slate, Roberts kind of made up the constitutional foundation for the decision: a previously unheard-of doctrine of the “equal sovereignty of the states.”
Roberts, of course, is rather famous for his specific hostility to the Voting Rights Act, as Adam Serwer pointed out at MoJo when this case was first argued:
Shelby County offers Roberts an opportunity to complete a mission he began three decades ago. When the chief justice was a young lawyer, in 1981, Southern legislators hoped an ascendant conservative movement could pressure Reagan into opposing an extension of the VRA. In June of that year, Reagan wrote a letter to Attorney General William French Smith requesting an “assessment” of the law. “I am sensitive to the controversy which has attached itself to some of the Act’s provisions, in particular those provisions which impose burdens unequally upon different parts of the nation,” Reagan wrote. “But I am sensitive also to the fact that the spirit of the Act marks this nation’s commitment to full equality for all Americans, regardless of race, color, or national origin.” Reagan didn’t go as far as former segregationist and then-Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) by opposing the Voting Rights Act in its entirety, but his administration fought efforts to strengthen the law.
Additionally, Roberts has been around the block enough times to know that a legislative “fix” to Section 4 either won’t happen (that’s my bet), or would take long enough that long-stalled voter suppression efforts in the Deep South will find their way into statute books and election procedures. Yes, the Justice Department and civil rights advocates will try to use Section 2 remedies in the absence of preclearance powers, but winning such cases typically requires after-the-fact demonstrations of harm to minority voting influence.
It took a while, and required looking far away from the congressional history of the Voting Rights Act, and inventing a new constitutional doctrine, but John Roberts got his trophy this week. He should have had the sense of decorum to assign the opinion to someone else.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 26, 2013
“A Conservative Dream Comes True”: The Supreme Court Dismisses History And The Lessons Of “Bloody Sunday”
In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court has thrown out Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, the historic law first passed in the days after 1965′s Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama.
The ruling voids the formula to determine which jurisdictions require “pre-clearance” from the federal government before they make any changes to their voting laws, effectively freeing officials to alter voting procedures at will until Congress authorizes a new formula.
The Voting Rights Act has been renewed by Congress several times. The last was in 2006, when a Republican House voted 390-33 and a Republican Senate voted 98-0 to send a renewal that authorized the law for 25 years to President George W. Bush for his signature. Despite Congress deciding that the Section 4 formula was still relevant seven years ago, conservatives on the Court disagreed.
“In assessing the ‘current need’ for a pre-clearance system treating States differently from one another today, history since 1965 cannot be ignored,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority decision for Shelby County v. Holder. After suggesting that the current formula is based on “40-year-old data,” he included a chart that demonstrated the success of the law when it comes to increasing registration among African-Americans.
However, just last year, courts based several decisions to block laws designed to suppress the minority vote in the 2012 general election on Section 5, which now holds no significance without Section 4. Despite the court’s intervention, voters in Florida had to wait as many as nine hours in line to vote.
Roberts wrote that Congress “may draft another formula based on current conditions,” which is highly unlikely given current partisan gridlock.
The Nation’s Ari Berman explains that the existing formula is extremely effective in determining jurisdictions that should require “pre-clearance”:
Six of the nine states fully covered by Section 5, all in the South, passed new voting restrictions after the 2010 election. “Section 5,” write law professors Christopher Elmendorf and Douglas Spencer, “is remarkably well tailored to the geography of anti-black prejudice.” Of the ten states where anti-black stereotypes are most common, based on data from the National Annenberg Election Survey, six in the South are subject to Section 5. Racially polarized voting and “explicit anti-black attitudes,” according to an AP survey, have increased since 2008. Arkansas and Virginia have passed strict new voter-ID laws this year, while North Carolina is considering a slew of draconian restrictions.
The states of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia are all covered under the current formula. It also covers some counties in California, Florida, New York, North Carolina and South Dakota, and local jurisdictions in Michigan, all areas that have demonstrated historic discrimination against African-Americans, American Indians, Asian-Americans, Alaska Natives or Latinos.
The case brought by Shelby County was backed by “leading operatives and funders in the conservative movement along with Republican attorneys general in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas.”
“Overturning Section 5 is in many respects the most important battle in the GOP’s war on voting,” according to Berman.
Think Progress‘ Josh Israel and Aviva Shen predict that the immediate impact of the demise of Section 4 will lead to stricter voter ID laws, racially gerrymandered legislative maps and blocking of grassroots get-out-the-vote efforts.
“All told, between 1982 and 2006, DOJ objections blocked over 700 voting changes based on a determination that the changes were discriminatory,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in her passionate dissent that explicated several instances where “pre-clearance” had prevented discriminatory laws from taking effect.
“That determination of the body empowered to enforce the Civil War Amendments ‘by appropriate legislation’ merits this Court’s utmost respect,” Ginsburg summarized. “In my judgment, the Court errs egregiously by overriding Congress’ decision.”
“I am deeply disappointed with the Supreme Court’s decision today,” President Obama said in a statement. “For nearly 50 years, the Voting Rights Act – enacted and repeatedly renewed by wide bipartisan majorities in Congress – has helped secure the right to vote for millions of Americans. Today’s decision invalidating one of its core provisions upsets decades of well-established practices that help make sure voting is fair, especially in places where voting discrimination has been historically prevalent.”
After calling the Voting Rights Act “the cornerstone of the American civil rights movement,” Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday,”“We’re going to work with Congress in this effort and the administration is going to do everything in our power to make sure that fair and equal voting processes are maintained.”
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, June 24, 2013
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