Supreme Court conservatives shred a civil rights law

John Roberts is a very patient man. Thirty years ago, as a young lawyer in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, he wrote memos attacking a landmark civil rights law that was enacted to ensure that all Americans, regardless of color, had the right to vote. And this morning, as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, he wrote the ruling that shreds the law.

Conservatives today will praise the 5-4 decision to gut the core provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and they will conveniently ignore the irony that “unelected judges” have intrusively trumped the people’s elected representatives.

Both houses of Congress had renewed the law four times since ’65 – most recently in 2006 by a combined bipartisan vote of 488-22 – precisely because there was overwhelming documented evidence of ongoing voter discrimination in states and localities with long histories of bad behavior. But conservatives (like Roberts) have long been jonesing to weaken the Justice Department’s enforcement powers, and so, at least for today, the unelected judges will be hailed as heroes.

Sad, but no shock

It’s a sad day for civil rights – particularly because the Justice Department has lately been using that law to thwart various GOP attempts to reduce minority turnout via the enactment of state voter-ID laws — but the Roberts ruling doesn’t come as a surprise.

When Alabama’s legal challenge was aired in the high court back in February, Roberts and his allies suggested that the voting rights law was no longer necessary; and besides, in the immortal words of Antonin Scalia, the law was “a perpetuation of racial entitlement” – which was news to me, because I’d never realized that equal access to the ballot was a racial entitlement.

Plus, Roberts, in a ruling on an unrelated voting case back in 2009, had already signaled how he felt about the Voting Rights enforcement provision: “It represents an intrusion into areas of state and local responsibility,” and, besides, there was no longer a need for Justice to ride hard on the nine (mostly Southern) states that had a history of racism, because, as he put it, “Things have changed in the South.”

“Eradicated practices” (?!)

Roberts, in his opinion this morning, reiterated those arguments.

He basically said that the law is obsolete. He said that even though the law empowered the Justice Department to fight local racism, there’s no such need anymore because that behavior doesn’t exist anymore (he refers to “eradicated practices”). He did craft a fig leaf – he invited Congress to revise and update the enforcement formula at the core of the law – but that’s a howler, because (as he well knows) this Congress can’t even pass a farm bill, and is so dysfunctional that anything more complicated than a Boy Scout resolution strains its collective cognition.

As for his belief (and the conservative majority’s belief) that strong federal enforcement is no longer needed because things are hunky dory at the grassroots … that’s another howler.

Congress overwhelmingly renewed the law in 2006 because the factual evidence – 15,000 pages of it – demonstrated a still-ongoing pattern of ballot discrimination. A lower-court federal judge had previously looked at this same evidence, and had found what he called “overt hostility to black voting power by those who control the electoral process.”

And last year, a federal appeals court ruled that Congress had been right to renew the law: “Congress drew reasonable conclusions from the extensive evidence it gathered. [Civil rights laws] entrust Congress with ensuring that the right to vote – surely among the most important guarantees of political liberty in the Constitution — is not abridged on account of race. In this context, we owe much deference to the considered judgment of the people’s elected representatives.”

Thanks to the ’06 renewal of the law, which was supposed to extend until 2032, the Justice Department was able to thwart racism in 2012. Just two examples: When Texas Republicans enacted a voter-ID law that was crafted to disproportionately hurt minorities, Justice blocked it by invoking the law’s oversight powers. When Florida Republicans tweaked their state rules in an attempt to reduce early voting hours in ways that disproportionately hurt minorities, Justice blocked it by invoking the law’s oversight powers.

Turning back the clock

Now those powers are gone.

From now on, people who are turned away at the polls will have to file lawsuits at their own expense — and only after the voter-suppression schemes have already screwed them. That’s how the game worked before the Voting Rights Act went on the books in 1965. Roberts has turned back the clock.

And how ironic that he has done so by overriding the people’s elected representatives — specifically, the 2006 Republican House and 2006 Republican Senate, both of which concluded: “40 years has not been a sufficient amount of time to eliminate the vestiges of discrimination following nearly 100 years of disregard for the dictates of the 15th (right to vote) Amendment and to ensure that the right of all citizens to vote is protected as guaranteed by the Constitution.”

So much for that bipartisan legislative sentiment; Roberts and his court allies opted instead to “legislate from the bench.”

Conservatives typically use that phrase to complain about rulings they dislike — but not today. The Human Events website is already praising the Supreme Court for “taking away one of the clubs Attorney General Eric Holder has been using to beat common-sense voter identification laws into the dirt.”

See what I mean?

——-

Follow me on Twitter, @dickpolman1