US Supreme Court gelds Voting Rights Act

[Dinner]

Actually, I think it has everything to do with the SCOTUS decision and so did 4 of the 9 justices. It means there will be real concrete harm done to real people by this extremely partisan and politically motivated decision and the partisan Republican majority couldn't even come up with a clear constitutional justification or even any simple guidelines to follow. It was simply we don't like the way the congress did it in 2006 even though they concede that Congress has the power to do it and they completely ignored the millions of people who will be harmed because of it. All because a group of partisan political actors who actively take part in political events and political party strategy meetings can advance their political agenda.

And if you doubt that most justices, especially Republican justices, have been specifically picked to be political stooges instead of impartial judges may I refer you to the nonsense which occurred during Bush v Gore?

[Imran Siddiqui]

Actually, I think it has everything to do with the SCOTUS decision and so did 4 of the 9 justices. It means there will be real concrete harm done to real people by this extremely partisan and politically motivated decision and the partisan Republican majority couldn't even come up with a clear constitutional justification or even any simple guidelines to follow. It was simply we don't like the way the congress did it in 2006 even though they concede that Congress has the power to do it and they completely ignored the millions of people who will be harmed because of it. All because a group of partisan political actors who actively take part in political events and political party strategy meetings can advance their political agenda

So SCOTUS should have allowed an unconstitutional law to survive (and yes, basing it on 1972 stats makes the VRA as applied to go beyond the narrow limits it was allowed to transgress the Constitution because it was necessary and proper at that time) because Congress can't get its **** together... interesting to note that you don't really believe in separation of powers.

[Dinner]

Four justices disagreed with the claim that it unconstitutional and I happen to agree with them.

[Hauldren Collider]

Those justices are still living in 1965. Ginsburg is paranoid when it comes to seeing racism and sexism everywhere she looks. Honestly, this is like the Citizens United ruling. Liberals are screaming about it because it hurts them politically despite it being the obviously correct decision.

This is in addition to the fact that for the last couple years the justice dept has been completely out of control in applying restrictions to jurisdictions, preventing totally sane voter ID laws and redistricting with an obvious democratic agenda.

[Patroklos]

And that's the problem. It's pretty telling that this was a strict party line vote because Congress has repeatedly updated the voting rights act, last time in 2006, and they spent 15 months documenting thousands of cases of voter suppression efforts as well as out right discrimination so it is extremely clear voting rights are still threatened. Hell, the reauthorization in 2006 got 98 votes in the senate and 2/3rds in even the house. Give how just last election Republicans went to extraordinary lengths in their attempts to prevent non-whites from voting this is just ****ing criminal. The right wing majority couldn't even name the constitutional grounds for invalidating section 4 of the voting rights act and instead just whined that they didn't like the formula congress came up with which the four liberal justices correctly pointed out is not a legal justification for throwing out a law especially when it is clear that to this day conservatives continue to attempt to systematically deny people the right to vote simply because of their race.

Still a lying asshat.

The formula for preclearance was last modified in 1975 to update the determining year to 1972. It was extended in 1982 and 2006 without any changes.

http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/vot/misc/sec_4.php#formula

[DinoDoc]

Four justices disagreed with the claim that it unconstitutional and I happen to agree with them.

I had similar feelings after the Obamacare decision. It'll be about as effective.

[H Tower]

Well that didn't take long....

http://www.star-telegram.com/2013/06/25/4963135/texas-to-immediately-enact-voter.html

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court’s decision on the Voting Rights Act had an instant impact in Texas, where Attorney General Greg Abbott announced that the state’s photo Voter ID bill, blocked by federal judges last year, would “take effect immediately.”

“Today’s ruling ensures that Texas is no longer one of just a few states that must seek approval from the federal government before its election laws can take effect,” said Abbott in a statement.

“With today’s decision, the state’s voter ID law will take effect immediately. Redistricting maps passed by the Legislature may also take effect without approval from the federal government.”

A three-judge panel had prevented the law from taking effect before the November 2012 elections, ruling that the photo ID requirement disproportionately affected minorities.

Texas Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio, chairman of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, told reporters Tuesday that the section of the VRA law used to block Texas’ voter ID law and the Legislature’s once-a decade redistricting of federal and state district lines was now effectively “in limbo.”

“All is not lost,” he said, struggling to look for a positive spin on the decision. “It certainly is disappointing.”

He and caucus attorney Jose Garza said they did not know if groups representing minorities would challenge the Voter ID law going into effect.

Although the Supreme Court did not overturn the voting law’s Section 5 – which requires states and localities in all or parts of nine states, including Texas, to get pre-approval of voting plans – the formula to implement it, dating back to the 1960s, was found unconstitutional, leaving it up to Congress to devise a new one.
“We urge Congress to develop a new coverage formula that complies with the Supreme Court’s ruling in order to place states with a history of discrimination towards minorities under preclearance protections,” said Fischer. “One needs only to look at the D.C. District Court’s opinion in the Texas redistricting and the photo identification cases to see that discrete protections for minority voters in Texas are still critically necessary.”

Reaction on Capitol Hill fell along partisan lines.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and other Texas Republicans praised the ruling. “Today, the Supreme Court recognized the enormous progress made toward voting equality in the United States since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965,” Cruz said. “The court rightly decided that the statutory standards used decades ago to subject democratically elected state legislatures to second-guessing by unelected federal bureaucrats no longer survives constitutional scrutiny.”

But Democrats blasted the ruling and vowed to work quickly in Congress to restore what they consider vital protections for voters.

“I will work with my colleagues to act quickly to create a new formula by which to determine which jurisdictions should be subject to the preclearance provisions of Section 5,” said U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey, D-Fort Worth.

“As my home state of Texas proved in the redistricting process in 2011, many of our elected officials unfortunately still cannot be trusted to protect minority voting rights. We need Section 5 of the VRA to ensure that minorities continue to have the right to elect the candidate of their choice,” Veasey said.

Democratic Latino members of the delegation agreed with President Obama – who issued a rare statement reacting to the court – that the decision is a “setback.”

“Today's decision is a travesty for the democratic process,” said freshman U.S. Rep. Pete Gallego, D-Alpine. In an interview, he likened the loss of the Justice Department’s pre-approval of changes to voter laws to losing officials to enforce the rules in sports.

“We’ve lost our umpire. We’ve lost our referee,” he said. The implementation of Texas’ Voter ID law “makes it harder for people to participate in the democratic process.”

U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, another freshman Latino, said: “This decision is a major setback for Texans and all Americans whose most fundamental voting rights are being trampled in right-wing state legislatures.

“In Texas, following today’s decision, the attorney general is already calling on the most extreme voting ID laws to be implemented in our state. I am committed to working with my colleagues in Congress to act swiftly to ensure that all Americans have the freedom to be full participants of our democracy by protecting every American’s right to vote.”
It didn’t take long for the Texas Department of Public Safety to announce that it it will begin processing applications for free voter ID cards this week.

The IDs are free and will be available to voters who do not yet have a viable form of ID, such as a driver’s license, a concealed handgun license, a passport or military ID.

This report contains material from The Texas Tribune.

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2013/06...#storylink=cpy

[Imran Siddiqui]

Interestingly enough, Photo IDs are required to vote in Arkansas (starting in 2014), Indiana, Kansas, and Florida as none of them were in the preclearance list. Somehow, Georgia was also able to get preclearance and has photo ID law as well. So let's not think that photo ID requirements were denied in the US (edit: meaning the entirety of the US, not in the individual states) due to the VRA (or that preclearance states were the only ones wanting voter ID laws).

[Hauldren Collider]

Interestingly enough, Photo IDs are required to vote in Arkansas (starting in 2014), Indiana, Kansas, and Florida as none of them were in the preclearance list. Somehow, Georgia was also able to get preclearance and has photo ID law as well. So let's not think that photo ID requirements were denied in the US due to the VRA (or that preclearance states were the only ones wanting voter ID laws).

They were denied in states with preclearance requirements though.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Well, except GA.

The point is, however, that you would have to argue that Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, and Florida shouldn't be suspected of using voter ID laws for minority suppression (since preclearance states were denied it for that), and that their racial history is substantially better than preclearance states (because nothing happened in Little Rock during the Civil Rights era, or Florida, etc) - ie, it's show how dumb it was for preclearance to be set in 1972 criteria.

[Hauldren Collider]

Yes.

Also, I'm not upset at all that this effectively means the end of preclearance. I think it's actually time for preclearance to end. Maybe racism isn't done. Maybe people will still try to disenfranchise blacks. But it's gotten to the point where it's better to have the courts deal with it after the fact (which works because jurisdictions will know they can't get away with it) rather than write off counties and states wholesale as Racistland. Take Virginia for instance. We're on the preclearance list that was just struck down. We've elected a black governor once and a black president twice. Our (Republican!) attorney general has spent a good part of his career exonerating wrongly convicted blacks from the Jim Crow era. We have a black Republican running for Lt. Governor this year (although he probably won't win because he's an idiot). I think we're pretty well past it at this point.

[Felch]

Are you seriously trying to make the argument that the South isn't still more racist than the rest of the country?

If you don't think that there are plenty of racists in Idaho, you're misguided. The South isn't exceptionally racist anymore, it's just that Americans are generally a racist lot.

[rah]

Mmmm, that's like saying since America has elected a black president twice, that America is pretty well past racism.
I don't think so. While there has been considerable improvements in that area, to assume it's been eradicated is quite foolish.

[PLATO]

Mmmm, that's like saying since America has elected a black president twice, that America is pretty well past racism.
I don't think so. While there has been considerable improvements in that area, to assume it's been eradicated is quite foolish.

Racism exists everywhere in the U.S. I think it would be better to say that maybe we have achieved a level of success in combating racism that it has now fallen below the "extraordinary measures" of the VRA.

Only Congress' new formula (if they do one) will tell us for sure. (legally speaking of course)

[Dr Strangelove]

Consider what happened when Reconstruction was lifted in 1877 - Segregation, the American Apartheid. Do we want to risk it again?