good news on the voting rights act!

i’m a bit late with this, but i’ve had a bunch of stuff going on lately, so…

previously, i posted about a supreme court case that could again limit provisions of the voting rights act, which were meant to protect the voting rights of minorities and end racial inequality in government representation.

there is good news...

The court, with only one justice in dissent, avoided the major questions raised over the federal government’s most powerful tool to prevent discriminatory voting changes since the mid-1960s.

The law requires all or parts of 16 states, mainly in the South, with a history of discrimination in voting to get approval in advance of making changes in the way elections are conducted.

The court said that the Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 in Austin, Texas, can apply to opt out of the advance approval requirement, reversing a lower federal court that found it could not. The district would appear to meet the requirements to bail out, although the court did not pass judgment today on that point.

the lone dissenter, one does wonder what planet clarence thomas lives on…

Justice Clarence Thomas, alone among his colleagues, said he would have resolved the case and held that the provision, known as Section 5, is unconstitutional.

“The violence, intimidation and subterfuge that led Congress to pass Section 5 and this court to uphold it no longer remains,” Thomas said.

right.  DO NOT LOOK AT THE INTIMIDATION OR SUPPRESSION!! IT DOESN’T EXIST.  srsly.  nothing to see, move along.

in further good news:

Matt Angle, founder of the Lone Star Project, a Democratic group, and a redistricting expert, said the decision ensures that any redistricting plan adopted by the Texas Legislature will have to win advance approval from a Justice Department administered by the Obama administration.

In contrast, Republican political appointees in George W. Bush’s Justice Department in 2003 overruled career staffers who believed that the Republican-drawn Texas redistricting plan discriminated against minorities.

“This is the first time since the Voting Rights Act passed that you have a Justice Department administered by a Democrat reviewing redistricting plans,” Angle said.

perhaps texas can finally fix the fiasco of the republican-drawn redistricting lines.  yeehaw :D

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Tagged as: texas,politics,voting July 07, 2009 @ 09:35 am

dismantling voting rights, one case at a time

in a previous decision this year, the supreme court chose to limit the voting rights act, “ruling that provisions aimed at maintaining black and Hispanic influence at the polling place don’t apply in districts that are less than half minority.”

just a couple of months later, the supreme court could again limit provisions of the act, which was meant to protect the voting rights of minorities and end racial inequality in government representation.

Will the Supreme Court kill the Voting Rights Act?:

The case is Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District #1 v. Holder—shortened to NAMUDNO—and represents the most serious challenge to the act to date, and has become a lightning rod for debate over the role of race and racism in U.S. politics today.

The case started in 2006, when a largely white and wealthy utility district in Travis County, Texas argued that it should be excepted from Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires that a handful of states and counties—mostly in the South—must “preclear” any changes to voting procedures with the Department of Justice before they’re implemented.

Section 5 has been battled by conservatives, especially in the South, ever since. The 1966 case South Carolina v. Katzenbach went all the way to the Supreme Court, which affirmed that, while certainly a heavy-handed approach, Congressional action was needed to enforce the Constitution’s 15th Amendment protections against racially-biased voting laws.

The original NAMUDNO complaint made two distinct legal arguments: First, that the Texas district should have the right to “bail out” from the Section 5’s preclearance provision; and second, failing that, the entirety of Section 5 should be struck down as unconstitutional.

It was an odd place for Section 5’s biggest threat to originate. For example, the utility districts’ central claim is that complying with Section 5 is too “burdensome”—even though it has only cost the district about $233 a year. In contrast, last month the attorney generals of six states which face far greater “burdens” in complying with the Act—Arizona, California, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York and North Carolina—filed an amicus brief arguing that “the burdens imposed by Section 5 on covered jurisdictions are not onerous.”

But whatever its strange origins, NAMUDNO could be fatal to Section 5. The case is structured as an all-or-nothing—as election law guru Richard Hasen points out in Slate:

What’s especially worrying about NAMUDNO is that the case does not provide the court with an easy incremental way out: If a majority of the justices want to side with the challengers to the Voting Rights Act, there’s not much they can do short of holding the act as broadly unconstitutional.

And given the inclinations of the current Supreme Court, a complete take-down of Section 5 is a distinct possibility. As a Reagan lawyer in 1982, now-Chief Justice John Roberts spearheaded an effort to prevent expansion of the Voting Rights Act.

The Supreme Court’s Hostility to the Voting Rights Act:

Continue Reading...

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Tagged as: politics,racism,conservatives,voting May 14, 2009 @ 11:44 am

the more things change, the more they revert back

this is a few days old, but worth noting.

March 9 (Bloomberg)—The U.S. Supreme Court limited the Voting Rights Act, ruling that provisions aimed at maintaining black and Hispanic influence at the polling place don’t apply in districts that are less than half minority.

The justices, voting 5-4, struck down a North Carolina redistricting plan that sought to preserve minority voting power in a state legislative district that is 39 percent black. The high court said that district wasn’t covered by the “vote dilution” protections in Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act because minority voters could elect their preferred candidate only with the help of whites.

“Nothing in Section 2 grants special protection to a minority group’s right to form political coalitions,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for three justices in the court’s controlling opinion.

The ruling, which will affect the way voting lines are redrawn after the 2010 census, may make it harder for minority candidates to win election in some voting districts.

Justices David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens dissented. Souter said the ruling will lead to districts that are more racially concentrated.

The decision will have the effect of “contracting the number of districts where racial minorities are having success in transcending racial divisions in securing their preferred representation,” he said.

Kennedy said that dipping below the 50-percent threshold “would place courts in the untenable position of predicting many political variables and tying them to race-based assumptions.” He said that approach would raise “serious constitutional questions.”

Critics of the ruling questioned that reasoning, saying the upshot will be more racial polarization in voting.

The decision “seems to open the door to still more packing of minority voters into fewer districts so as to minimize the number of political races their votes will impact and thus diluting their political voice,” said J. Gerald Hebert, executive director of the Campaign Legal Center, which filed a brief backing the North Carolina plan.

Defenders of the ruling disagreed. “The practical effect of this decision is to make it harder for politicians to gerrymander electoral districts by race,” said Pacific Legal Foundation attorney Ralph Kasarda, who filed a brief opposing the plan.

and, of course, that’s exactly what the decision would mean.  section 2 of the voting rights act sought to end vote dilution.  there is absolutely no “equal opportunity to participate in the political process”, if districts are redrawn to make it impossible for a minority to be elected.  after this last election, it should come as no surprise that conservatives have tried to find a way around that.

from an article entitled “Voting Rights in Jeopardy”, which discusses what was then an up and coming revisitation of the voting rights act:

Prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, barriers to black registration and voting were massive and crude. The entire white southern way of life was at stake. It was voting rights, more than anything else, that stimulated the 1964 Freedom Summer, voting rights that split the 1964 Democratic National Convention, and voting rights for which young activists gave their lives. In 1964, Mississippi had only about 7 percent of its black voting-age population registered to vote, with a voting-age population that was 36 percent black, Alabama, with a voting-age population that was 26 percent black, registered less than one eligible black voter in four, and Louisiana, with a voting-age population that was 28 percent black, registered less than one in three. In 1964, out of about 29,000 local, state, and national elected officials in the entire ex-Confederacy of 11 states, just 16 such officials were black, 3 of these state legislators and 13 local officials.

The 1965 act focussed entirely on the franchise. The act contained two sets of provisions, permanent sections that prohibited discrimination in voting, and temporary elements for enforcement, subject to renewal. The most important of these temporary features was Section 5 pre-clearance, which empowers the Justice Department to pre-clear any proposed changes in local registration and voting procedures. But there were also other temporary sections that barred specific impediments to voting and that provided for direct federal observation or examination of electoral processes as they occurred. This was the most basic takeover by Washington of local civic functions since Reconstruction; it was richly deserved and roundly resented.

No sooner was the law enacted than several southern state legislatures adopted programs of massive resistance to voting rights, much like the earlier massive resistance to school desegregation. States recast entire systems of representation in order to dilute black influence. They permitted or required county and municipal governments to create at-large voting for public offices, which submerged geographic black voting strength within a larger white majority. They changed balloting systems so that black voters were forced to vote for entire tickets, thus blocking any “single-shot” or “bullet-voting” by blacks for a liberal or minority candidate, which had been permitted previously in some jurisdictions. They pushed local governments to establish absolute majority vote requirements for winners, thus preventing plurality victory by a black candidate over a split field of whites. They converted elective offices to offices appointed by officials likely to have exclusively white support. Finally, states reapportioned legislative and congressional district lines to submerge black voting strength in white majorities.

yet, the supporters of this recent ruling, illogical asshats that they are (woo!  check out my non-ableist language!), would have us believe that would *never* happen.  yeah.  right.  and that civil war?  had *nothing* to do with slavery. 

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Tagged as: politics,racism,conservatives,voting March 23, 2009 @ 03:11 pm