Stripping Section Five from the Voting Rights Act will never look as brutal in retrospect as the Dred Scott decision, but it will be a black mark that this Court will never recover from.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
It’s of a piece with Republicans’ turning good to evil.
The Special Prosecutor Law: from checking the Imperial Presidency to going on a witch hunt over blow jobs.
Impeachment: see previous entry.
The Filibuster: from requiring broad consensus to enabling unfettered obstructionism.
Judicial Review: from protecting constitutional guarantees to weakening them.
I’ve seen it written in some quarters that Roberts cares about the Court and its history. I never understood how someone thought that. Torpedoing Section Five will prove that Roberts doesn’t care, and never did.
These confident predictions that the Court will rule against Section Five remind me of the commentary just before the Affordable Care Act decision.
Yes, by their behaviors during the ACA oral discussion many of us did believe that the Court majority was headed in a bad direction. To the degree that the pre-SCOTUS ACA decision public commentary was meaningful in helping create that final Court majority’s decision, I’m happy the commentary took place.
In their statements during the VRA Section 5 oral arguments, this Court showed that they need to hear from the horrified public. Perhaps our concerns will make a difference. My worry is that I don’t think Roberts is going to be moved on this one, no matter how shameful his philisophical ally Scalia was during oral, no matter how many people tell Roberts how bad this decision would be for the Court’s legitimacy. Section 5 has been Roberts’ Great White Whale for over thirty years now.
No, I believe it comes down to Kennedy. I hope the Court can be persuaded to surprise us again.
Yes, you’ll recall Roberts had wanted to strike down the act then changed his mind.
Roberts didn’t rule in unconstitutional, but he did hobble it quite a bit. Just like the Chamber of Commerce undoubtedly wanted.
Er, the Chamber of Commerce, which was being funded by AHIP, wanted the act struck down as a whole, just like they lobbied against its enactment.
This seems driven by Texas – the looming flip of that state to the dem column is very much on the minds of conservatives everywhere, despite what any of them admit publicly.
But I noticed on this page that not all the jurisdictions are in the South. So that whole “it’s mean to the South” argument isn’t entirely correct, even if the majority are there.
http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/vot/sec_5/covered.php
It may not be all in south, but it is certainly all racist. Which means they are all republican ‘base’ voters that are being ‘protected’.
One thing the base wants is the freak flag to fly proud.
.
I basically want to apply it to the entire country, every jurisdiction equally. That’s what I would have answered Roberts question with.
I disagree with you, BooMan.
Because Dred Scott was so obviously a horrible moment for this country, very little could look worse compared to it.
Section 5 was a remedy. For deliberate, structural inequality in this country. Very few times in this country’s history has STRUCTUAL INEQUALITY been so deliberately addressed.
Black people have been in this country since the 1600’s. We were slaves until 1865. And then spent another 100 years under American Apartheid. The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act must be seen in conjunction with one another. If my father had remained in the state of his birth, he would have been FORTY-TWO YEARS OLD before he would have been able to cast a ballot in the country of his birth, and this is after he had put on the uniform and placed his life on the line for this country. Until the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, in the laws of this land, Black people weren’t even second class citizens. It was worse than that.
Striking down section 5, which is the instrument by which the federal government can keep the confederate evil down, would be a slap to all of my ancestors, who toiled in this country. Then after `freedom’, lived in a legalized second class apartheid for 100 years. To listen to that fat racist fuck on the Supreme Court call THE RIGHT TO VOTE
A fucking `RACIAL ENTITLEMENT’
Is enough to make the blood boil.
These muthafuckas truly believe somebody is playing with them. NOBODY is playing with them.
Please don’t forget those us who are a different color. They had separate bathrooms and water fountains for Hispanics too.
Our Appalling Supreme Court is a national embarrassment and disgrace and has been for quite some time. Its “conservative” majority opinions are intellectually dishonest, tendentious and thoroughly unpersuasive. Roberts’ lying misuse of the Mass. voting statistics has already been called out, not that this will have any effect upon him as a professional conservative male liar.
As for any long term “damage” to an already ruined reputation, I’d be pretty doubtful about that, as it would indicate some sort of national “health” which we simply don’t possess. Bush v. Gore was supposed to have “permanently” wrecked the Court’s rep, and it recovered fairly quickly from the 5 conservative members’ decision to select Bush as our first electoral college prez in 113 years. And there have already been scads of unpopular Roberts Court rulings, many folks are even aware of Citizens United. Most folks don’t know and don’t care. And if they do, what’s to be done about it? When the 5 conservative activists issue a lying, false and unprecedented Supreme Court opinion that nakedly abuses their judicial power, the country is effectively stuck with it.
There is no long term effect on the five “conservative” justices because the executive and the national Dems refuse to make the fact that our Supreme Court is a national disgrace an actual issue to the nation. No one connects the dots even to indicate who is behind these disgusting legally specious rulings, and how they got on the Court. No one points out that this is the kind of “court” you get when you elect “conservative” presidents and that we now are stuck with the Cheney Court.
It goes without saying that none of this would ever become sustained reporting by the national corporate media—for goodness sake, the principal beneficiaries of the Roberts Court are plutocrats and CEOs! In short, there’s no national discussion about our completely failed Supreme Court. Indeed, Congressional Repubs who voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act won’t even express an opinion on whether the law is valid and act like they know nothing about the Court’s doings, buffoonery which the corporate media happily enables and permits.
In any event, after 30+ years of living in the Conservative Era, I should think it quite clear that “conservatives” have no shame and don’t care about how “brutal” their policies look or how many “black marks” have been assessed against them by history. Failure, intellectual dishonesty and injustice are meaningless to them, they care only that their tribe remain in the socially superior position.
This naturally meant that at some point “conservatives” phony love of American democracy would have to be dropped, so it has been. Repubs are delighted that the 5 conservative male activists masquerading as “justices” are so willing to do the heavy lifting in this area, making sure that our corrupt election “system” always favors the “conservative” party. Which is what all these bogus Supreme Court rulings are all about.
President Obama called out the Justices to their faces over the Citizens United case at a State of the Union address. It’s hard to make the case that “our Supreme Court is a national disgrace” as “an actual issue to the nation” in a more high profile way than that. Barack even specified the destructive effects to democracy that decision would bring, and his predictions have proven to be accurate.
The President has since made public statements IN ADVANCE of the Court’s decisions on the ACA, Section 5 of the VRA, and other Court cases.
I believe the President has to be very careful in using his bully pulpit to step on the Judiciary, particularly before their judgements have been formed. He has been careful, but he has commented in support of justice in the highest-profile cases. And any politician who ran a primary part of their campaign on the Supreme Court issue would be guilty of political malpractice. I can agree with you on the importance of the SCOTUS in affecting policy, but that doesn’t translate into it being effective as a campaign issue in today’s United States. Someday, perhaps.
While sharing your outrage and disgust over the most frequent Court majority’s arrogance of power, I think it’s overstating by quite a bit that “no one connects the dots” in explaining recent Court decisions. Are there enough persuasive people connecting the dots? Quite apparently not.
Yes, Obama has not been absolutely silent about the Roberts Court outrages.
But he hasn’t been any FDR against the Four Horsemen, either. And perhaps the only person who can mount a sustained argument and explanation of what the Court has morphed into via “conservatism” is a second term prez.
And it’ll take a lot more than saying once or twice he “regrets” that an appalling level of judicial activism is now occurring or that these catastrophic 5-4 “conservative” decisions are “unfortunate”. He (and many DC Dems) need to actually identify WHO are the offenders—the five conservative males and their brazen 5-4 decisions. And WHO are the beneficiaries—the Repub party, and giant corporate/plutocrat interests.
Tie the “conservative” movement to these horse shit 5-4 opinions and denounce them as Dred Scott decisions. It has the advantage of being the truth. And it’s how the “conservative” movement wrecked the Court over the past 20 years. Fight fire with fire.
No need to use kid gloves on another branch of gub’mint, they’re big boys, and they know exactly what they are doing–remaking the country after losing at the ballot box. The Roberts Boyz (and their “conservative” defenders) rely on historic reticence to criticize the Court, that’s a big part of their strategy, immediately cryin’ the blues whenever the Court (actually its five conservative male majority) is publicly criticized, such as at the State of the Union. But “conservatives” ruined the rule of law in America, not us, and the days of hiding behind it should be over.
So denounce the Scalian turds, frequently. Predict and publicize what outrages they are thinking of pulling. They are a slow moving target. Have a whole speech explaining how dishonest and radical some of their opinions are, and who they benefit. Make the “conservative” majority an issue. After 5 years, we might then have 25% of the population who knows the membership of the Court is an issue…and that Repub prezes give us Scalia “justices”.
And what do you imagine the outcome of that would be?
“Oh, OK, Mister About-to-Leave-Office, whatever you say!”
It’s like once Lord Voldemort split his soul four or five ways to make the horcruxes, what’s the downside to making the next one? Or the one after that? The Court has totally damned itself in recent years; what’s another horrible decision, more or less?
It will take decades, if not a century or more, for the United States to recover from the Rehnquist/Roberts years. If recovery is even possible.
Wow, so they really are just ignoring the 15th Amendment. I was assuming that somebody, somewhere was making an argument against Section 5 that was based on some other part of the Constitution, but I guess not.
Yes, they are making up, out of whole cloth, their own “limitation” on Congress’s broad and exclusive power under the 15th Amendment to curb state voting abuses based on race. Apparently under some “dignity of the states” theory, presumably arising out of their beloved 10th Amendment (which the 15th Amendment post-dated and obviously amended).
And yes, there is no established legal basis for what the 5 conservative male activists are planning to pull.
Corporations have rights. States have rights.
People? Well, that depends.
I’m a bit surprised that I don’t see some prominent conservative arguing that Section 5 is some sort of bill of attainder.
If they strike down Section 5, especially with some witches’ brew, wing-of-bat 10th Amendment reasoning, I don’t see how it can be viewed as anything other than the worst kind of judicial legislation, especially BECAUSE the law has been re-enacted with such heavy congressional majorities.
It will put this S. Ct. in the same league as that FDR faced in his first term, perhaps even worse since that Court was infamous for its retrograde economic philosophy rather than its stance on civil rights.
Scalia is the most egregious of the bunch in my book. He’s an antagonistic, right-wing buffoon whose half-assed comments on and off the bench indelibly mark him as a power-mad ideologue. He doesn’t know the first thing about “judicial restraint” and its role in US constitutional law. His presence on the Court is a national judicial embarrassment.
Very well put.
But I seem to remember the horse’s ass Scalia stating (perhaps jokingly) that Clarence is an even greater extremist than he is. And Alito has already had some dissents so far right that no one will join them.
But neither can hold a candle to Scalia for juvenile public bomb throwing….