Early word on what happened today during the U.S. Supreme Court’s hearing on the crucial Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County, AL v. Eric Holder is not encouraging. This could come to be seen as a very dark day for voting rights in this country, as a landmark provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act may be on the verge of being dismantled and, arguably, a half a decade of civil rights advancements along with it.
Late last night we detailed what’s at stake and how the activist Supremes are likely to intercede in what is clearly a Congressional duty, as specifically ascribed to them in the 15th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. That, despite a stunning 98 to 0 vote in the U.S. Senate to re-authorize the VRA for another 25 years as is, after 21 hearings and some 15,000 pages of documentation on the continuing blight of racial discrimination, as recently as 2006.
While it’s always a perilous exercise to try and read the tea leaves from a SCOTUS hearing, The Nation’s Ari Berman, who was present in the court room this morning, Tweets, disturbingly today: “In oral argument, Scalia likened Congressional support for Voting Rights Act to a ‘perpetuation of racial entitlement'”. He went on to indicate his “quick reaction” to the hearing was that, that while the five Republican Justices are “skeptical of Sec 5,” there is a “small chance Kennedy can still be persuaded.” He notes, that, incredibly, “Voter suppression attempts in [the] last election didn’t even come up during SCOTUS arguments about Voting Rights Act”.
Because the Supreme Court still operates in the 1800s, there was no live audio or video of today’s hearing. The transcript, however, should be made available later today [Update: transcript is now linked at the bottom of this article] and audio will be made available on Friday.
For now, NBC reports today’s hearings this way:
NBC’s Pete Williams reported after the oral argument, “I think it’s a safe prediction to say that the Voting Rights Act, as it now stands, is not going to survive. The question is: how far will the Supreme Court go in striking parts of it down?”
Williams said what seemed to concern a majority of the justices was “the fact that the law is too backward looking.”
…
Williams reported that during the one hour-and-15 minute oral argument, Justice Anthony Kennedy said that the post-World War II Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe “was a good thing at one time, but times change.”
New York Times’ Adam Liptak described today’s hearing in more, if similarly disturbing detail this way…
Justice Antonin Scalia called the provision, which requires nine states, mostly in the South, to get federal permission before changing voting procedures, a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. asked a skeptical question about whether people in the South are more racist than those in the North. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy asked how much longer Alabama must live “under the trusteeship of the United States government.”
The court’s more liberal members, citing data and history, said Congress remained entitled to make the judgment that the provision was still needed in the covered jurisdictions.
…
The law, a landmark achievement of the civil rights era was challenged by Shelby County, Ala., which said that the requirement had outlived its usefulness and that it imposed an unwarranted badge of shame on the affected jurisdictions.
The county’s lawyer, Bert W. Rein, said that the “problem to which the Voting Rights Act was addressed is solved.”
…
Congress renewed the act in 2006 after holding extensive hearings on the persistence of racial discrimination at the polls, again extending the preclearance requirement for 25 years.
We’ll update this item as needed throughout the day.
Also, please note that our friend and colleague, investigative reporter Greg Palast, has posted a petition calling for Section 5 of the Voting Rights to be extended, rather than killed, to require preclearance of new election laws in all states, rather than just the 16 covered jurisdictions currently specified in Section 5 of what he calls “Martin Luther King’s Dream Act”. You can sign that petition here.
UPDATE 11:32am PT: Lyle Denniston of SCOTUSblog sees a similar case made to those of the others reporting on the hearing, but finds a sliver of possible light in regard to Kennedy’s “swing” role on an otheriwse clearly 4 to 4 divided court…
Naturally, that meant the potential swing vote would be held by Justice Kennedy.
Denniston then goes on to describe how Kennedy seemed to “perk up” during arguments made by Justices Kagan and Sotomayor that, even if the formula used to determine which jurisdictions are covered by Section 5, that Alabama, and thus, Shelby County, would still be among those jurisdictions. If so, the argument that seemed to catch Kennedy’s interest went, Shelby was the wrong plaintiff to bring this case, since they can’t argue that they are being harmed by the current formula.
“If you would be covered under any formula, why are you injured under this one?,” Kennedy asked Shelby’s attorney who reportedly refused to agree with the premise of the question.
Denniston continues:
He wanted to be assured that the Voting Rights Act might not be enforceable at all, if Section 5 were to be nullified. He commented that the other enforcement provision — Section 2, which applies nationwide — was not an adequate substitute.
So, there’s a bit — a very small bit — of hope that Kennedy may end up siding with the court’s liberal wing on this one.
Tom Goldstein, however, also at SCOTUSblog, saw it this way:
UPDATE 11:55am PT: LA Times‘ David G. Savage and David Lauter describe Scalia’s controversial remark this way:
As we described in our coverage last night, this is exactly the “kind of question you can leave to Congress.” In fact, the 15th Amendment, which bars the denial of the vote “by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” specifically gives Congress the power to enforce that article of the Constitution as they have done (albeit 95 years later) with the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
Section 2 of the 15th Amendment reads plainly: “The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
So, which part of that two-sentence Constitutional Amendment does Scalia — who pretends to be a “strict constructionist” — seem to have trouble understanding?!
UPDATE 12:43pm PT: The complete transcript of today’s hearing is now posted here [PDF].
• See our earlier coverage of what’s at stake in today’s hearing right here…
I think the United States should just give up on pontificating to other nations about democracy. US moral authority is dead, no longer more credible than that of China. The entire world sees the rigging that is going on within the United States and only US citizenry and its corrupt mainstream media is blind to it.
As I stated in a comment to the previous article, I believe the critical vote in this case will come from Justice Kennedy.
Here’s the statement he made that suggests he may consider voting to uphold section 5 on the narrow grounds that the VRA, as noted during oral arguments by U.S. Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli, Jr., contains a “bailout mechanism” that permits jurisdictions that are “covered” by Section 5 to make the case that they should no longer be covered.
After Justices Sotomayor, Ginsberg and Kagan made the case that Alabama, which initiated this suit, has one of the worst records in terms of both section 2 and section 5 violations, Justice Kennedy added:
The intriguing aspect of this claim is that Shelby County, AL, which has one of the worst records of racial discrimination in voting, has challenged the statute on its face, because it cannot make the case that it should not be upheld as applied in Shelby County.
Then, again, Kennedy made this troubling statement:
If he follows that reasoning and goes along with Scalia’s effort to substitute the Court’s judgment for that expressed by Congress (98-0 in the Senate, which included votes by those Senators from “covered” jurisdictions), the decision will not only reflect a significant departure from long-standing legal doctrine that requires great deference towards legislative determinations, but will, as occurred in Citizens United, underscore the utter hypocrisy of previous claims made by the Right that they abhor judicial activism.
I say give these assholes those new hypocrisy suppositories you see advertised on late night TV for $19.95 plus shipping. As I understand it there are several varieties. The most popular models trigger instantaneous incontinence or somehow suck your head up your ass. The telltale effects are triggered by unspeakable hypocrisy.
The sort of ignorance on display here by the “highest court in the land” is a vector for evil.
Justice John Paul Stevens said, “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.â€
Source
“Supreme Court Decisionâ€
after Bush/Gore
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0877961.html
The Republican Justices have demonstrated over and over that they put party advantage over rule of law. From Bush v. Gore to Citizen’s United to this, their only concern is how their ruling will benefit the electoral chances of the Republican Party. They have seen that the Republicans cannot win in a fair election, so they need to legalize voter suppression.
This especially irks my ass as I just took a tour through Montgomery to Selma over the Edmond Pettus bridge, and also to Neshoba County Mississippi and Philadelphia where the horrible events of 1964 took place.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_civil_rights_workers%27_murders.
It was haunting to drive past the place where the young mens car was found and also the church that was burned only to see the freedom summer memorial plaque out in the middle of nowhere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mt._Zion_Methodist_Church_state_history_marker_in_Neshoba_County.JPG
tony and the rest of the “federalist” activist judges ‘int graduating from this spiritual school house. Me thinks they’re all going to have to come back as black folks to understand the consequences of their actions. My guess would be with the temperament’s they have, they will have a good chance of winding up in the prison system they have helped create and sustain.
I also think if their small and blind argument is that the act constitutes, “a perpetuation of a racial entitlement” then that is all the more reason to sign onto Palast’s petition to stop the other states from joining their wrognheaded attempt to suppress Democracy rather than extoll real Democracy. Common on folks, stand up for for humanity and make their argument moot!
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/659/726/862/
You don’t even have to go there to see either place thanks to google maps street view. I have the coordinates of both.
Car found here,
32.88144,-88.93790 (used the FBI photo in the wiki article to find this place, road ditch was widened since then so gate is about where car was found)
Mount Zion church,
32.78173,-88.99127
Wow Flo, that really brings home who the real heroes are!
And speaking of heroes check out these:
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/28/fascism_in_the_church_ex_priest
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/28/after_40_years_in_solitary_in
The most stunning part is that Barney Frank was in the area at the time as a young man registering voters… The murders didn’t stop him as far as I know. So he was one of those heroes…
And for anyone stupid enough to think “secrecy in government is okay and protects us” check out it’s logical conclusion, and think long and hard about what you are naively sanctioning.
http://www.linktv.org/programs/al-jazeera-english-life-in-san-salvador
I don’t know Flo…I have a hard time with Barney Frank. He was privy all those years on the banking committee to the growth of too big to fail. He strikes me as a good player in the good cop bad cop syndrome.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYZqp9Qt0KM
I guess Justice Kennedy is not fully aware of our current military presence around the world.
“Williams reported that during the one hour-and-15 minute oral argument, Justice Anthony Kennedy said that the post-World War II Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe “was a good thing at one time, but times change.”
Last time I knew we still have a military presence in Germany and Japan. It may not be the same presence that was needed in the late 40s and 50s, but they’re still there. If we still need our military in countries that are our allies and have no inclinations toward world domination again, then we still need VRA in full to make sure that states who have a (recent) history of voting rights abuses, be under constant supervision. Maybe they can have VRA removed but that’s after those states can show they can be grown ups and stop acting like children who have such inferiority complexes that they need to make laws to prevent themselves from falling behind the ones they claim to be superior to.
The SCOTUS is just a lapdog ala Fox ‘News’.
This will lead to a ruling enabling the Republicans to keep the House in 2014, since right now it is an extremely close matter.
Just as the Wisconsin State Supreme Court made itself a national joke with David Prosser violently assaulting a fellow Justice, in the process of debasing itself by immediately issuing a collective bargaining ruling weeks prematurely at the demands of the State Senate Leader 2 years ago, the SCOTUS is rapidly deteriorating into an Anti-Obama pro-Oligarchy joke. The Justices are even openly ‘influenced’, refusing vital cases just to leave time for paid speeches at luxury resorts, and Thomases wife is paid handsomely to lobby HIM!
Bridge Crossing Jubilee: February 28-March 3, 2013
Take the Annual Pilgrimage to Selma, Alabama and COMMEMORATE THE PASSING OF THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 1965.
Support Alabama’s Don Siegelman as well on March 3. Hounded into prison by Rove’s packed courts and DOJ BUSHRATS. Free Don Siegelman!
http://donsiegelman.org/