Civil & Human Rights

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The New York Times editorial opinion today on the Voting Rights Act gets it exactly right. Congress’s Power to Protect the Vote:

The voter ID laws and other tactics that sprang up in several states last year to prevent minorities from casting their ballots offer incontestable proof of the need for strict voting rights laws.

Yet at the argument on Wednesday in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court’s conservative justices left the ominous impression that they were willing to deny this reality and repudiate Congress’s power to enforce the right to vote by striking down a central provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act requires nine states (seven of them in the South) and parts of seven others with records of extreme discrimination against minority voters to get approval from the Justice Department or a special court in Washington before they can make any changes in how they hold elections. Without this provision, there would be no way to prevent new and devious efforts by local officials to block blacks and Hispanics from voting or to reduce their electoral power. In 2006, Congress overwhelmingly reauthorized the statute. It found that these places should remain “covered” by this “preclearance” requirement because voting discrimination remained both tangible and more concentrated and persistent in them than in other parts of the country. House members from those places strongly supported the renewal: of 110 members from covered jurisdictions, 90 voted for reauthorization. 

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

In other U.S. Supreme Court news on Tuesday, 75 Republicans signed on to an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to make same-sex marriage constitutionally protected in Hollingsworth v. Perry. Republicans Sign Brief in Support of Gay Marriage:

Dozens of prominent Republicans — including top advisers to former President George W. Bush, four former governors and two members of Congress — have signed a legal brief arguing that gay people have a constitutional right to marry, a position that amounts to a direct challenge to Speaker John A. Boehner and reflects the civil war in the party since the November election.

The document will be submitted this week to the Supreme Court in support of a suit seeking to strike down Proposition 8, a California ballot initiative barring same-sex marriage, and all similar bans. The court will hear back-to-back arguments next month in that case and another pivotal gay rights case that challenges the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act.

The Proposition 8 case already has a powerful conservative supporter:
Theodore B. Olson, the former solicitor general under Mr. Bush and one
of the suit’s two lead lawyers. The amicus, or friend-of-the-court,
brief is being filed with Mr. Olson’s blessing. It argues, as he does,
that same-sex marriage promotes family values by allowing children of
gay couples to grow up in two-parent homes, and that it advances
conservative values of “limited government and maximizing individual
freedom.”

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

On the same day that a statue honoring Civil Rights icon Rosa Parks was unveiled in Statuary Hall at the Capitol, Rosa Parks statue unveiled at Capitol, paying tribute to a woman whose name became synonymous with the Civil Rights Movement, down the street the "Felonious Five" conservative activists of the U.S. Supreme Court were signaling their willingness to legislate their ideological views from the bench and to disregard the legislative judgment of the people's representatives in Congress by striking down the enforcement mechanisms of the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Movement, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, echoing the segregationists' battle cry of "states' rights." Supreme Court conservatives express skepticism over voting law provision:

The Supreme Court’s conservative justices strongly suggested
Wednesday that a key portion of the Voting Rights Act is no longer
justified, and that the time had come for Southern states to be freed
from special federal oversight.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. asked Solicitor General
Donald B. Verrilli Jr. whether it was the federal government’s
contention that “the citizens in the South are more racist than
citizens in the North.”

Verrilli said that was not the government’s argument, but that
Congress decided in 2006 that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was
still needed to protect the voting rights of minorities. The section
requires nine states, mostly in the South, and local governments in
other states to “pre-clear” any changes in voting laws with federal
authorities.