I've got just a couple of minutes for the Outrage of the Week.This week, the outrage - and it's a real one - is that in the wake of oral arguments, Supreme Court watchers are saying that there are five votes on the Court to strike down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, the one that requires areas with a history of racial discrimination in voting practices to pre-clear any changes with the Justice Department.
Most, but not all, of those areas are in the South. Right now, Section 5 covers all of Alaska, Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina; almost all of Alabama, Georgia, and Texas; a good hunk of Virginia; and parts of California, Florida, New York, North Carolina, South Dakota, and Michigan.
There is another section of the law which will probably survive: Cases under Section 2 of the law can be brought against any jurisdiction in the country - but they are much more expensive and they are after-the-fact; that is, the Justice Department has to wait until after the discrimination has already occurred and can prove an on-going pattern of discrimination before it can act.
The case at hand is Shelby County v. Holder. Shelby County, Alabama argues not only that it should no longer be considered under Section 5, which other jurisdictions have done before, sometimes successfully, but also that - and this is the crux of the matter - Congress’ 2006 renewal of the act was unconstitutional because it relied on outdated voting data to determine which jurisdictions should be covered by the provision. That is, Shelby County is not just arguing it should not have to pre-clear changes and not even that Section 5 should be struck down but that the entire law should be - which is why I say Section 2 will "probably" survive, but you never can tell with this Court.
The US Court of Appeals ruled against Shelby County after reexamining the evidence that Congress used in deciding to renew the act. In its decision, the court noted that 81% of the cases in the past 40 years where discrimination was found occurred in districts covered by Section 5.
But that, apparently, is of no concern to the reactionary buffoons who make up the majority of the Supreme Court, whose notion of how you deal with racism is to simply, essentially, declare it no longer exists.
Chief Justice John Roberts, whose picture is used in the dictionary to illustrate the word "smug," wanted to know if the Justice Department, in defending the law, was saying people who live in the South are more racist than those who live in the North - which is completely irrelevant because the issue is not who is or isn't more racist but of a history of actively preventing blacks from voting - and claimed that Massachusetts has "the worst ratio of white voter turnout to African-American voter turnout" - which, even if it's true, and he offered no basis for it, but even if it's true it is, again, completely irrelevant to the issue of deliberate attempts to suppress the votes of minorities. His point, as near as there was one, appears to have been that the improved voter turnout among minorities in a place like Mississippi proved that the Voting Rights Act was no longer necessary - which, as Nate Silver pointed out, is logically the same as arguing that the lack of terrorist hijacking of planes in the US since 9/11 proves the increased airport security is no longer necessary. In fact, it may not be and may never have been necessary, but the argument is still a non-sequitur: The conclusion simply does not follow from the premise. So Roberts' argument was both irrelevant and bogus. But I'm sure he still had his trademark smirk.Justice Anthony Kennedy echoed Roberts' "no longer needed" tack by treating Section 5 - and by extension, racism - as a relic of a time long gone. "The Marshall Plan was very good, too - the Northwest Ordinance, the Morrill Act - but times change," he said.
And then, of course, there was Antonin Scalia, who suggested that the continuation of Section 5 was a "perpetuation of racial entitlement" and Congress only renewed it because there was no political gain in voting no. The vote, by the way, was 390-33 in the House and 98-0 in the Senate.You likely already know that Scalia is a thoroughgoing scumbag; what you may not know is that he is ineligible for the Clown Award because I thought including him would be unfair to all the other potential clowns. I mean, really, have you actually read any of his decisions? I can't imagine how he got this reputation as a great legal mind. The guy is a dork! Sure, he can quote case law - which would seem to be a baseline requirement for competency for a Supreme Court justice - but his arguments often read like a concoction of sloganeering and non sequiturs.
In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, what a maroon.
The important point here, however, is that the right wing wackos on the Supreme Court have revealed in their questions their real concern, which is partisan or more exactly extremist ideological advantage. It's not about the law, it's not about the Constitution, and it sure as hell isn't about justice. It's about how they can turn back the clock, in this case on voting rights.
And that is an outrage.
Sources:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/government-elections-politics/supreme-court-may-put-voting-rights-act-on-trial/
http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/vot/sec_5/about.php
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/14059113/#.UTZL2FdWCsZ
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/01/rachel-maddow-scalia-jon-stewart_n_2789126.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/27/voting-rights-act-supreme-court_n_2768942.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/02/john-roberts-voting-rights-act_n_2797127.html
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/in-supreme-court-debate-on-voting-rights-act-a-dubious-use-of-statistics/
http://www.salon.com/2013/02/27/supreme_court_racism_deniers/
http://www.salon.com/2013/02/28/scalia%e2%80%99s_ugly_racial_cynicism/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_Kh7nLplWo
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