http://truth-out.org/news/item/17204-ku-klux-kourt-kills-kings-dream-law-replaces-voting-rights-act-with-katherine-harris-acts

By Greg Palast

Dream Law, Replaces Voting Rights Act With Katherine Harris Acts
Protestors gather outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in support of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, in Washington, Feb. 27, 2013. The Supreme Court on Tuesday morning, June 25, 2013, announced a vote of 5 to 4 in the Shelby County, Ala. v. Holder case, striking down part of the act. (Photo: Christopher Gregory / The New York Times)

They might as well have burned a cross on Dr. King’s grave. The Jim Crow majority on the Supreme Court just took away the vote of millions of Hispanic and African-American voters by wiping away Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

When I say "millions" of voters of color will lose their ballots, I’m not kidding. Let’s add it up.

Last year, the GOP Secretary of State of Florida Ken Detzner tried to purge 180,000 Americans, mostly Hispanic Democrats, from the voter rolls. He was attempting to break Katherine Harris’ record.

Detzner claimed that all these brown folk were illegal "aliens."

But Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act requires that 16 states with a bad history of blocking black and brown voters must "pre-clear" with the US Justice Department any messing around with voter rolls or voting rules. And so Section 4 stopped Detzner from the racist brown-out.

I’ll admit there were illegal aliens on Florida voter rolls – two of them. Let me repeat that: TWO aliens – one a US Marine serving in Iraq (not yet a citizen); the other an Austrian who registered as a Republican.

We can go from state to state in Dixie and see variations of the Florida purge game.

Yet the 5-to-4 Supreme Court majority ruled, against all evidence, that, "Blatantly discriminatory evasions [of minority voting rights] are rare." As there’s no more racially bent voting games played in states including Florida, Georgia, Arizona and Alaska (yes, pre-clearance goes WAY north of the Confederacy), then, the justices said, there’s no more reason for pre-clearance.

Truthout needs your support to publish grassroots journalism and share new visions for a just and sustainable future. Contribute now by clicking here!

Whom do they think they’re fooling? The court itself, just last week, ruled that Arizona’s law requiring the showing of citizenship papers was an unconstitutional attack on Hispanic voters. Well, Arizona’s a Section 4 state.

You’ll love this line from the Ku Klux Kourt majority. They wrote that the "coverage" of Section 4 applies to states where racially bent voting systems are now "eradicated practices."

"Eradicated?" I assume they didn’t see the lines of black folk in Florida last November. That was the result of the deliberate reduction in the number of polling places and early voting hours in minority areas. Indeed, if the Justice Department, wielding Section 4, didn’t block Florida from half its ballot-box trickery, Obama would have lost that state’s electoral votes.

And that’s really what’s going on here: the problem is not that the court majority is racist. They’re worse: they’re Republicans.

We’ve had Republicans, like the great Earl Warren, who put on the robes and take off their party buttons.

But this crew, beginning with Bush v. Gore, is viciously partisan. They note that "minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels." And the Republican Supremes mean to put an end to that. See "Obama" and "Florida" above.

And when they say "minority," they mean "Democrat."

Because that’s the difference between 1965 and today. When the law was first enacted – based on the personal pleas of Martin Luther King – African-Americans were blocked by politicians who did not like the color of their skin.

But today, it’s the color of minority voters’ ballots – overwhelmingly Democratic blue – which is the issue.

In California – one of the "Old South" states that is singled out for pre-clearance – an astonishing 40 percent of voter registration forms were rejected by the Republican Secretary of State on cockamamie clerical grounds. When civil rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy and I investigated, we learned that the reject pile was overwhelmingly Chicano and Asian – and overwhelmingly Democratic.

How? Jim Crow ain’t gone; he’s moved into cyberspace. The new trick is lynching by laptop: removing voters, as was done in Florida and Arizona (and a dozen other states) by using poisoned databases to pick out "illegal" and "felon" and "inactive" voters – who all happen to be of the Hispanic or African-American persuasion. The GOP, for all the tears of its consultants, knows it can’t rock these votes, so they block these votes.

Despite the racial stench of today’s viciously antidemocratic ruling, the GOP majority knew they were handicapping the next presidential run by a good 6 million votes. (That’s the calculation that RFK and I came up with for racially bent vote loss in 2004 – and the GOP will pick up at least that in the next run.)

And the court knew full well that their ruling today was the same as stuffing several hundred thousand GOP red votes into the ballot boxes for the 2014 Congressional races.

The races have not yet started, but the "Katherine count" has already begun.

***

It was investigative reporter Greg Palast, for The Guardian and BBC Television who uncovered Katherine Harris’ purge of black voters in 2000. He is also the author of the recent New York Times bestseller, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal and Election in 9 Easy Steps. His film, Election Files, may be downloaded without charge at www.GregPalast.com.

http://bostonreview.tumblr.com/post/53872992792

Just hours after the Supreme Court handed down a ruling that guts parts of the Voting Rights Act, Texas is moving forward with a controversial voter ID law that state Attorney General Greg Abbott hopes to implement right away.

“With today’s decision, the state’s voter ID law will take effect immediately,” Abbott said in a statement to the Dallas Morning News. “Redistricting maps passed by the Legislature may also take effect without approval from the federal government.”

The Texas law requires voters to show photo identification to vote — a measure that was blocked by the Justice Department, arguing the law could discriminate against racial minorities […]

Well, that was quick.

This is Christmas morning to the Republicans. They’ve been waiting 50 years to open this racist present.

Justice Roberts is officially Santa.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~3/TZt0realhsk/story01.htm

By Molly Ball (June 24, 2013)

Pleasant Surprise for Affirmative-Action Advocates
by Molly Ball
Atlantic MagYesterday, 15:09

Mark Wilson/Getty Images
The Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action Monday wasn’t much of a decision. In a 7-1 vote, the justices sent the case, Fisher v. University of Texas, back to a lower court for reexamination (Justice Kagan recused herself).

Yet civil-rights advocates celebrated the result as a huge win for their side. "Today’s decision is an important victory for our nation as we strive to build a more inclusive, diverse America," said Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. "The educational benefits of diversity are clear, and the Court’s decision reaffirms that it is in our national interest to expand opportunities for everyone." Henderson spoke on a conference call with reporters, where he was joined by representatives of the NAACP, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), and other civil-rights advocacy groups.

Why were they so happy? In short, because the court’s decision could have been much worse for their side — and many feared it would be. Given the Court’s conservative tilt, advocates have been on tenterhooks about this case and the other major civil-rights case still pending, which challenges the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

The fear was that the court might broadly declare any consideration of race in college admissions unconstitutional. The Court didn’t do that, and its decision allows the University of Texas’s race-based admissions process to continue, at least for now.

"Those on the other side who predicted a major defeat for affirmative action were clearly wrong," said Damon Hewitt of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund. Henderson added that the ruling showed that "the court is not ready yet to overturn" the precedent set by the last affirmative action case it decided, 2003’s Grutter v. Bollinger.

David Hinojosa of MALDEF provided this helpful analogy to understand the court’s action: "This is basically like a check-engine light has come on and without looking under the hood you said, ‘Throw away the car,’" he said. "The court said, ‘No, let’s look under the hood.’ It might be a faulty light or it might just need a tuneup, but you definitely don’t need to just discard the car altogether."

The advocates acknowledge the situation has not been totally resolved in their favor. "If you just read the Scalia and Thomas opinions, they’re concurring in the judgment but they would still overturn Grutter," pointed out Sherrilyn Ifill of the NAACP. "I’m not sure you can see that as a great thing …. But it’s important that the court exercised restraint today."

Does that mean we can expect similar restraint from the court on the voting rights case, Shelby County v. Holder? I put this question to the advocates, but they demurred. "You can’t really read any tea leaves," Hewitt said.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~3/BNfZMkGDQxw/story01.gym
by Garrett Epps (June 25, 2013)
"Hubris is a fit word for today’s demolition of the [Voting Rights Act]," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in her dissent from the 5-4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, announced Monday.

She nailed it.

The decision invalidated the requirement of "preclearance" of voting changes by states and jurisdictions with particularly bad records of racial discrimination. (My colleague Andrew Cohen looks at the practical effect of this decision on voting rights.) But beyond that, it illustrates the absolute contempt that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority harbors toward what is, after all, the central branch of our federal government: Congress, elected by the people and charged with exercising "all legislative powers" granted by the Constitution.

A brief reading of the Constitution reveals how seriously the Framers took the idea of congressional centrality. An even briefer glance at the Fifteenth Amendment shows that the Framers of that measure trusted Congress, not courts, with setting national policy against racial discrimination in voting.

Not this Court, which Monday invalidated Section Four of the Voting Rights Act — not on the grounds that it hasn’t worked; not even on the grounds that it won’t work; but on the grounds that the Court didn’t think Congress did as good a job as it could have.

In an opinion by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, the five conservatives (Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel A. Alito) brushed aside a measure they explicitly agreed was (1) needed when originally enacted (2) dramatically successful since enacted and (3) reauthorized by Congress four times over 40 years, each time with a detailed legislative process and with careful adjustment to its terms.

To understand the success of the VRA, we must briefly review how it works. The act as a whole forbids certain kinds of manipulation of voting laws to exclude or dilute minority votes. The "coverage formula" provision in sections 4 designate certain sections of the country, on the basis of history, as being the most flagrant offenders of the Fifteenth Amendment’s command that "[t]he right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Under Section 5, those jurisdictions had to get preapproval from the Justice Department or from a federal court before they could change their voting procedures at all. The reason was that previous voting-rights laws had been neutralized when the Deep South jurisdictions invented new ways not covered by the laws of blocking black voters. This time, the state would have to justify its restrictions, rather than forcing the government and citizens to go to court each time a new stratagem appeared.

Each of the first three times the act was reauthorized, Congress changed slightly the Section Four formula for determining "covered jurisdictions." It also included new procedures to allow jurisdictions to get out of preclearance by proving they had cleaned up their act. The most recent reauthorization, in 2006, kept the "coverage formula" the same, but adjusted the law carefully to cover new forms of racial discrimination not apparent in 1965.

After that change, the vote to approve was almost unanimous in a Republican-led House and entirely unanimous in a Democratic-led Senate, and the bill was signed into law with great flourish by a Republican President, who hailed it, correctly, as "an example of our continued commitment to a united America where every person is valued and treated with dignity and respect." It was, by any sane model of self-government, an American success story, of a flexible, successful law, adjusted for changing conditions, achieving a significant national goal.

On Tuesday, at the Court, this entire successful 45-year bipartisan effort was brushed aside as farce. The factual record amassed in 2006 was extensive, the majority concedes; but it is also irrelevant. "Congress did not use the record it compiled to shape a coverage formula grounded in current conditions … we are not ignoring the record; we are simply recognizing that it played no role in shaping the statutory formula before us today."

The evidence for this startling assertion was … well, there was no real "evidence," if by that you mean proof. What there was instead was a simple declaration that Congress must not have used the record because it didn’t change the Voting Rights Act enough. The Court could have done a better job, and the Court didn’t think the problem was such a big deal any more after all.

The idea that the Court should approach congressional statutes with a presumption of contempt has few grounds in the Constitution or history generally.
As Andrew points out, in practical terms this result is bad enough. But beyond the question of voting rights lies this underlying contempt for Congress. Stanford Law Professor Pamela Karlan described the emerging attitude brilliantly in her recent essay, "Democracy and Disdain." We saw it displayed during oral argument in the health-care cases, when, for example, Justice Scalia suggested striking down the whole law if any part of it was unconstitutional, on the grounds that Congress couldn’t be trusted to fix it to the Court’s satisfaction. It has been apparent in the campaign-finance cases, which dismiss the judgments of legislators on the role of money in politics on the grounds that, in essence, they must be rigging the system to get themselves re-elected. It also glimmers as the substrate of decisions restricting anti-discrimination laws, reading broad language more and more narrowly on the cynical grounds that Congress could not have meant what the statutes seem to say.

The idea that the Court should approach congressional statutes with a presumption of contempt has few grounds in the Constitution or history generally; it has even fewer in the specific area of voting rights. The preclearance requirement, the majority says, "imposes substantial federalism costs’ and ‘differentiates between the States, despite our historical tradition that all the States enjoy equal sovereignty.’" In addition, it suggests that preclearance violates the Tenth Amendment’s rule that "all powers not specifically granted to the Federal government are reserved to the States or citizens." But it makes no attempt to apply these quasi-constitutional platitudes to the text of the provisions at hand. That’s because they don’t apply. The Fifteenth Amendment makes clear that states have no "reserved power" over violations of the right to vote "by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." These are transferred from state authority to federal prohibition. And Congress, not the courts, is to enforce that prohibition "by appropriate legislation."

In other words, the majority’s limits on Congress’s power do not flow from the text, history, or structure of the Constitution; as Ginsburg’s dissent persuasively shows, they do not flow from the Court’s earlier precedent either. They flow from a sense by five justices (none of whom has ever served a day in legislative office) that Congress, on the whole, can’t do as good a job at anything as they can.

This is hubris indeed. Today it has damaged the ability of citizens to use the ballot to call their rulers to account. But that damage is only a part of a hole slowly widening in the fabric of constitutional congressional authority. There’s no reason to believe that this majority does not intend further unraveling in the near future.

http://m.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/on-voting-rights-a-decision-as-lamentable-as-plessy-or-dred-scott/276455/
By Andrew Cohen (June 25, 2013)

Let’s be clear about what has just happened. Five unelected, life-tenured men this morning declared that overt racial discrimination in the nation’s voting practices is over and no longer needs all of the special federal protections it once did. They did so, without a trace of irony, by striking down as unconstitutionally outdated a key provision of a federal law that this past election cycle alone protected the franchise for tens of millions of minority citizens. And they did so on behalf of an unrepentant county in the Deep South whose officials complained about the curse of federal oversight even as they continued to this very day to enact and implement racially discriminatory voting laws.

In deciding Shelby County v. Holder, in striking down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, the five conservative justices of the United States Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, didn’t just rescue one recalcitrant Alabama jurisdiction from the clutches of racial justice and universal enfranchisement. By voiding the legislative formula that determines which jurisdictions must get federal "preclearance" for changes to voting laws, today’s ruling enables officials in virtually every Southern county, and in many other jurisdictions as well, to more conveniently impose restrictive new voting rules on minority citizens. And they will. That was the whole point of the lawsuit. Here is the link to the ruling.

In a 5-4 ruling over liberal dissent, the Supreme Court today declared "accomplished" a "mission" that has become more, not less, dire in the four years since the justices last revisited the subject. They have done so by focusing on voter turnout, which surely has changed for the better in the past fifty years, and by ignoring the other ruses now widely employed to suppress minority votes. In so doing, the five federal judges responsible for this result, all appointed by Republican presidents, have made it materially easier for Republican lawmakers to hassle and harry and disenfranchise likely Democratic voters. And they have done so by claiming that the Congress didn’t mean what it said when it renewed the act by landslide votes in 2006.

No statute is ever perfect. Perhaps Congress should indeed have updated the "coverage formula" of Section 4 when it last revisited the law. But there are plenty of imperfect laws kept afloat by courts, including this Court. What happened here is that the Court’s conservatives were no longer willing to countenance the intrusion upon "state sovereignty" that Section 4 represented in the absence of what they considered to be "updated" justifications for federal oversight. To the majority, the fact that "minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels," was more important than the fact that Section 4 was invoked more than 700 times between 1982 and 2006 to block racially discrimination voting measures.

The Decision

The opinion itself is as accessible as any you are likely to read. Writing for the Court, the Chief Justice declared that Congress simply failed to update the "coverage formula" of Section 4 to address the very successes that the Voting Rights Act has brought to minority voting rights over the past 50 years. If Congress is to divide the states between "covered" and uncovered jurisdictions, the Chief Justice wrote, it bears a heavy burden under the Tenth Amendment and "must identify those jurisdictions to be singled out on a basis that makes sense in light of current conditions. It simply cannot rely on the past."

"The sad irony of today’s decision," Justice Ginsburg wrote, "lies in its utter failure to grasp why the VRA has proven effective." It has been effective, of course, because it has made it harder to suppress the votes of minority citizens.
The Fifteenth Amendment, which decrees "that the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of race or color," the Chief Justice wrote in a remarkable passage, "is not designed to punish for the past; its purpose is to ensure a better future." Yet the Court’s ruling today directly contradicts that lofty premise. A black voter in Shelby County today, as a result of this ruling, has a much grimmer "future" when it comes to voting rights than she did yesterday. Without Section 4’s formula, Section 5 is neutered, and without Section 5 that black voter in Shelby County will have to litigate for her rights herself after the discriminatory law has come into effect.

In a passionate dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg immediately homed in on the extraordinarily aggressive nature of what the Court has just done. "The question this case presents," she wrote, "is who decides whether, as currently operative, Section 5 remains justifiable, this Court, or a Congress charged with the obligation to enforce the post-Civil War amendments ‘by appropriate legislation.’" Until today, Justice Ginsburg wrote, the Court "had accorded Congress the full measure of respect its judgments should garner" in implementing that anti-discriminatory intent of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Until today.

"The Court," Justice Ginsburg wrote, "makes no genuine attempt to engage with the massive legislative record that Congress assembled. Instead, it relies on increases in voter registration and turnout as if that were the whole story." And then she proceeded to outline the countless ways in which racial discrimination in voting practices is alive and well in Alabama and other jurisdictions covered by the law. "The sad irony of today’s decision," she wrote, "lies in its utter failure to grasp why the VRA has proven effective." It has been effective, of course, because it has made it harder for vote suppressors to suppress the votes of minority citizens. No more and no less.

The Winners

We should also be clear today about who the winners and the losers are in the wake of this opinion. The primary winners are vote suppressors in those many jurisdictions covered by Section 5, the politicians, lobbyists and activists who have in the past few years endorsed and enacted restrictive new voting laws in dozens of states. The legal burden now will be shifted from these partisans to the people whose votes they seek to suppress. This will mean that discriminatory practices will occur with greater frequency than they have before. The Constitution, the Court declared, must be color-blind and may not discriminate between states even if it means being blind to the political realities of a nation still riven by racial divides.

Even in those jurisdictions not covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, lawmakers will cite today’s ruling to justify future restrictions on voting — and in that sense this is a national disaster and not just a regional one. Proponents of racial redistricting, or voter identification laws that are really a poll tax, will find succor in today’s ruling. And that means we will see more of these measures and, as we do, the people most directly impacted by them will have fewer ways in which to fend them off. The deterrent effect of Section 4, alone, was enormous. As U.S. District Judge John Bates remarked last year in a case out of South Carolina, its mere presence has stopped lawmakers from pitching hundreds more dubious laws.

So the winners today are officials like Rep. Darryl Metcalfe, the Republican state senator from Pennsylvania, who defended his state’s statutory effort to suppress votes in the 2012 election by dog-whistling that those registered voters too "lazy" to get new identification cards didn’t merit a ballot. Rep. Alan Clemmons, a Republican state representative from South Carolina, also wins today. He’s a politician from a Section 5 state that sought to restrict voting rights. He answered "Amen" to a constituent who had written that encouraging black voters to get voter identification cards would "be like a swarm of bees going after a watermelon." Also winning big as a result of Shelby County? The grandees of the current iteration of the "voter fraud" myth.

The Losers

Who loses today? Not just the tens of millions of minority voters whose ability to cast a ballot now may be more easily restricted by new voting laws. Not just the millions who now will be more vulnerable to redistricting plans that are patently discriminatory. But the poor, the elderly, and the ill of all races, men and women who have voted lawfully for years but who will not be able to find the money to pay for new identification cards, or take the time out of work to travel to state offices to get one, or have the health to make the journey to obtain identification they otherwise do not need. These people, everywhere, were the indirect beneficiaries of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. And today their right to vote is far less secure.*

So the losers today are registered voters like Craig Debose, a Vietnam veteran and longtime resident of South Carolina. Last year, he traveled 11 hours by train to Washington to testify in a Section 5 lawsuit. He doesn’t have a car, which is why he didn’t have photo identification, which is why he was going to be disenfranchised by state lawmakers until the Voting Rights Act saved him (for at least the last election cycle, the South Carolina law is still on the books). Losing today, too, is Jacqueline Kane, an elderly woman in Pennsylvania who had voted lawfully without incident for decades but who would have been forced from her nursing home to get an identification card. All to prevent "voter fraud" no one can prove.

The America described by the Chief Justice, the one in which "blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare," is an America which has never once existed and which obviously does not exist today.
Losing today also are citizens of all races in Texas who work for a living but cannot afford to travel hundreds of miles to state licensing offices. They were spared last year by Section 5 when a federal court declared, among other things, that officials intentionally limited the hours of operation for offices available to issue new identification cards so as to preclude the working poor from getting there. "A law that forces poorer citizens to choose between their wages and their franchise unquestionable denies or abridges their right to vote," declared a federal court last year. Today’s ruling in Washington stands for precisely the opposite proposition.

Postscript

The Court’s majority is wrong. Terribly wrong. The Voting Rights Act isn’t outdated. Its vitality was amply demonstrated in the years before the 2006 renewal, and in the years since. What has become outdated is the patience of a certain political and legal constituency in this country that has decided for itself over the past few years that there now has been enough progress toward minority voting to justify the law’s demise. To this constituency, it is enough that more blacks and Hispanics now vote or are elected to office. To them, Section 4’s actual burdens on officials — petty little bureaucratic burdens when compared to the burden of losing one’s right to vote — suddenly are burdens so unreasonable they cannot be constitutionally borne.

Today’s decision is the legal sanctification of an ugly movement that has brought America a new generation of voter suppression laws. It is the culmination of an ideological dream of a young Reagan Administration official named John Roberts, who sought 30 years ago to block an earlier renewal of the law. It is the latest manifestation of America’s unfortunate eagerness to declare itself the grand victor even when a fight is clearly not won. Indeed, as today’s setback demonstrates, the nation’s fight for voting rights will never be over because the effort to undermine these rights is ceaseless. Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act was so strong that it took 48 years and this dubious ruling to bring it down. But down it has come.

For these reasons and many more, the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County is one of the worst in the history of the institution. As a matter of fact, and of law, it is indefensible. It will be viewed by future scholars on a par with the Court’s odious Dred Scott and Plessy decisions and other utterly lamentable expressions of judicial indifference to the ugly realities of racial life in America. And to those tens of millions of Americans whose voting rights were protected last year by Section 4, it is a direct slap in the face rendered by judges who today used the banner of "states rights" to undermine the most basic right any individual can have in a free society — the right to be able to vote free from racial discrimination employed by public officials.

The America described by the Chief Justice, the one in which "blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare," is an America which has never once existed and which obviously does not exist today. The America the rest of us see so clearly with our own eyes, the America in which officials all over are actively seeking to suppress black and Hispanic votes, is the one that tens of millions of the rest of us have to live with, at least for now, without the protections of Section 4 of the venerable law. When rights are weakened for some, they are weakened for all. We all are much weaker today in the wake of this ruling.

*Update: For example, to get a sense of how swift will be the descent into unequal justice, just hours after the Court struck down Section 4, Texas declared that it would immediately move to implement its restrictive voter identification law, the one that a federal panel of judges declared last year to be discriminatory and violative of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Meanwhile, in North Carolina, a voter identification law that had been stalled out of concerns that it is racially discriminatory will also now move forward. These laws will ultimately be challenged in court–at great expense to minority citizens, who now have the burden of demonstrating that that they violate the Constitution.