Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

After witnessing the most overt and blatant GOP voter suppression efforts in this election that we have seen in years, the "Felonious Five" of the U.S. Supreme Court today agreed to hear a legal challenge to Section 5 preclearance of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Lyle Denniston writes at SCOTUSblog.com, Court to rule on voting rights law:

Acting three days after the nation’s minority voters showed that they have increased and still growing power in U.S. elections, the Supreme Court agreed on Friday to rule on a challenge to Congress’s power to protect those groups’ rights at the polls.  The Court said it would hear claims that Congress went beyond its authority when it extended for another twenty-five years the nation’s most important civil rights law, the Voting Rights Act, originally passed in 1965 and renewed four times since then.

Specially at issue is the constitutionality of the law’s Section 5, the most important provision, under which nine states and parts of seven others with a past history of racial bias in voting must get official clearance in Washington before they may put into effect any change in election laws or procedures, no matter how small.   The Court came close to striking down that section three years ago, but instead sent Congress clear signals that it should update the law so that it reflects more recent conditions, especially in the South.  Congress did nothing in reaction.

That would be because the U.S. Supreme Court does not get to legislate policy. The Congress does. The Court only decides whether Congress acted within the scope of its constituional authority, which it clearly did in this case, as the Court has held many times since 1965. [Note: Congress reauthorized the VRA most recently in 2006, by a vote of 390 to 33 in the House and 98 to 0 in the Senate.]

The Court accepted the voting rights case from Shelby County, Ala.