Thread: Voting Rights Act gives the Obama Administration veto of SC law

goupstate.com
Editorial
Published: Friday, December 30, 2011 at 3:15 a.m.

Second-class state

Indiana requires its voters to show a photo ID. So do Rhode Island and several other states. So why is South Carolina not allowed to require voters to show a photo ID to provide additional reliability in our elections?

Because the federal government has a supervisory power over South Carolina that it doesn’t have over those other states. South Carolina falls under the Voting Rights Act. Indiana and Rhode Island do not.

When those states passed their laws, they didn’t have to send them to the U.S. Justice Department for approval. South Carolina did.

And the Justice Department rejected South Carolina’s law. It said it did so because the law would discriminate against the poor and minorities, both of whom may not have photo ID.

That’s nonsense. The state was offering a photo ID to people for free. Anyone could get one.

You need a photo ID to drive a car, cash a check or buy certain cold medicines. How is it unrealistic to expect people to produce a photo ID to vote? If the Justice Department truly believes this discriminates against poor people, then why does the federal government sometimes require the poor to produce a photo ID when obtaining government benefits?

This decision was political, pure and simple. South Carolina is a Republican-dominated state, which made the Obama Administration feel free to try to kill jobs here by suing Boeing for putting a plant here. It’s even more natural for the partisan White House to side with Democratic opposition to this bill.

Indiana’s law also faced opposition, but those opponents were forced to challenge the law in the courts. In the end, the courts upheld Indiana’s law. That should have ended the controversy about South Carolina’s similar law.

But opponents of this state’s law didn’t have to go to the courts. They could approach their political allies in the White House and get them to reject the law.

There is simply no reason South Carolina’s laws should be subject to a political veto by the White House. This represents an abuse of federal power.

The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 to address racial discrimination in voting procedures. The states covered by the act, including South Carolina, had a history of enacting voting policies that discriminated against minority voters. Congress stepped in to make sure that all Americans had an equal right to vote.

Congress was justified in passing the act in 1965, but it had no legitimate reason to reauthorize the act in 2006. The discriminatory practices of 44 years earlier were gone. The states covered by the act have no more election problems than states not covered by the act. Congress should have instituted national reforms at that time or let the act expire.

Instead, it decided to continue the law for 25 years. That means that until 2031, there will be two classes of states. One class will have its sovereignty and the ability to make its own laws. The other class, which includes South Carolina, has less sovereignty and is subject to more federal oversight.

This is not only unjustifiable, it is unconstitutional.

South Carolina officials who say they will appeal the Justice Department decision on the voter ID bill should also contest the constitutional basis for the Voting Rights Act at this point in time. South Carolina deserves as much right as Indiana, Rhode Island, Kansas or Wisconsin to require its voters to present photo IDs.

http://www.goupstate.com/article/201...1130?p=2&tc=pg

heraldonline.com
Opinion
Published: Tuesday, Jan. 03, 2012

Judge says S.C. law would interfere with federal efforts to enforce national immigration laws.

The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately will decide whether new state immigration laws are constitutional. Until then, a federal judge was right to block some of the more egregious parts of South Carolina's law.U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel blocked the portions of the state law that allowed state and local police to ask people stopped for minor crimes to produce immigration papers. The judge also suspended the section of the law that would require immigrants to carry their registration documents.

Gergel blocked another section that could make it a crime to harbor or transport an illegal immigrant, meaning people could be arrested for renting a room to an illegal immigrant or driving one to church. Other parts of the law took effect on schedule with the beginning of the new year. Under the law, businesses will be required to use a federal electronic database to verify workers' eligibility.

The S.C. Department of Public Safety also will form a 10-officer Immigration Enforcement Unit. And state and local officers will be permitted to arrest any illegal immigrants who sell fake IDs.

In his opinion, Gergel said that "dragnets" allowing police to check for immigration documents after being stopped for minor infractions such as jaywalking would interfere with and overburden federal efforts to enforce immigration laws.

He added that the state efforts also could interfere with foreign relations, agreeing with the U.S. Department of Justice, which sued, along with a coalition of civil rights groups, to block the law.

Gergel noted that federal immigration officials have finite resources and must set priorities for enforcement operations. If state and local officers are detaining hundreds or thousands of low-level offenders, federal authorities would be obligated to decide how to process them.

The judge also did not buy the statement from the state's attorneys that South Carolina was trying to cooperate with the federal government in the common goal of immigration enforcement. Gergel noted that it was the federal government that had sued the state to block the law, which, he said, "begs the question of the meaning of the word 'cooperate.

'"While the judge did not specifically address the constitutionality of the issue of allowing local and state officers to check immigration documents at will, that, we think, remains the most troubling aspect of the law. It almost certainly would result in racial profiling, and legal immigrants and American citizens of various ethnic backgrounds would be subjected to police scrutiny and, in some cases, illegally detained.

While state officials argue that people would be asked to produce their papers only after they are stopped for another infraction, coming up with a pretext to stop people would not be difficult. This amounts to giving officers license to randomly stop and search people.

We don't use the analogy lightly, but forcing people to carry and produce proof of legal residency is reminiscent of the Nazis' occupation of Europe.

The state law also is impractical on a fundamental level. The state does not have the resources to arrest and process illegal immigrants.

State officials complain that if the federal government were effectively enforcing immigration laws, the states would not be compelled to. But the federal government has played a significant role in reducing illegal immigration.For example, more people have been deported during President Barack Obama's first term than during both terms of President George W. Bush. The number of people detained while trying to cross the border illegally also has dropped substantially.

While economic factors - a U.S. recession and improving economic conditions in Mexico - may be the largest factor in that decline, more comprehensive U.S. enforcement also has helped.As Gergel noted, "the federal government's regulation of immigration enforcement is so pervasive and comprehensive that it has not left any room for the state to supplant it.

"Immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility. It should stay that way.

Read more here: http://www.heraldonline.com/2012/01/...#storylink=cpy