Civil & Human Rights

(Update) Voter ID on trial in Pennsylvania

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The AP wraps up the first week of trial. Pennsylvania voter ID law trial wraps up first week:

A professor who specializes in political communication gave low
grades Friday to the 2012 multimedia campaign to educate Pennsylvania
voters about the state’s new voter-identification law as part of a court
trial on its constitutionality.

Diana Mutz, a faculty member at
the University of Pennsylvania and its Annenberg School for
Communication, said the centerpiece of the campaign — TV ads in which
people holding up photo ID cards urged voters to “show it” — seemed
confusing.

“It wasn’t always clear what ‘it’ was,” said Mutz, the
author of several books, who testified as an expert witness on behalf of
plaintiffs who sued the state in an attempt to overturn the
yet-to-be-enforced March 2012 law.

The “show it” slogan, which was
also incorporated in radio and print ads, also provided little guidance
to voters who lacked a Pennsylvania drivers’ license or other
acceptable IDs.

“To say ‘show it’ presumes you have it,” she said.

Her testimony wrapped up the first week of the trial in Commonwealth Court.

New study confirms the Supreme Court is wrong in Shelby County v. Holder

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

I previously posted about the richly detailed data analysis by Morgan Kousser at Reuters, Gutting the landmark civil rights legislation, which blows away the disingenuous sophistry of Chief Justice John Roberts in Shelby County v. Holder. Research data proves the Supreme Court is wrong.

Key takaeway: updating the data, as the court suggests in Shelby County, would produce nearly the identical coverage as the current formula that the court found "outdated" and thus "unconstitutional" under a previously heretofor unknown constitutional standard of review ("we don't like it"):

Congress did not update the formula because it knows it still works. The comprehensive database that I assembled proves this.
Consider, from 1957 through 2006, almost 94 percent of all voting
rights minority lawsuits, legal objections and out-of-court settlements
occurred in jurisdictions now subject to federal oversight under the
Section 4 formula.

* * *

My database, however, shows that Congress acted wisely because it knew
that the formula works. Of 3,874 voting rights actions from 1957 through
2006, 3,636 — or 93.9 percent — came from jurisdictions covered under
the Section 4 formula. Many depended on the coverage formula because
they were based on Justice Department objections, or drew “more
information requests” or lawsuits to enforce Section 5.

Suppose we look instead at cases and consent decrees filed under Section
2 — which can be filed anywhere in the country, in areas not subject to
federal jurisdiction as well as in covered jurisdictions. I have
identified 1,244 Section 2 actions from 1957 through 2006 — and fully
83.7 percent occurred in the jurisdictions subject to federal oversight.

90th Anniversary of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

You would never know it today by the religious zealots who have hijacked the GOP, but not that long ago the Republican Party had a very active Republican Women for Choice organization, and women for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which included First Lady Betty Ford. The ERA came up short of passage in 1982, under the deadline established by Congress.

BettyFord

First Ladies Rosalynn Carter and Betty Ford at a rally for ERA, 11/19/1977.

People have forgotten what was at stake in the fight over the ERA. Justice Antonin Scalia has a long history of expressing skepticism toward the
Constitution’s shield against laws that discriminate against women. He he has repeatedly claimed that the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” does not prevent gender discrimination:

“Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis
of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody
ever thought that that’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If
the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have
things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws.”

Justice Scalia is correct. The 14th Amendment was intended to eliminate the vestiges of slavery and racial discrimination in America (freed slaves and Chinese immigrants in California were the focus of the congressional debate). Equal rights for women was not debated by Congress.

President Obama asks the pertinent question

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

In all the media coverage of the George Zimmerman trial, I do not recall anyone posing the pertinent question: "What if Trayvon Martin had been carrying a firearm? Would he have been justified in using deadly force to 'stand his ground' when he was lawfully where he had a right to be and was accosted by George Zimmerman?"

In President Obama's remarks today on Trayvon Martin, he posed the pertinent question. Lawyers are like that.