Results 1 to 4 of 4

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

  1. #1
    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
    Join Date
    Aug 2008
    Location
    PARADISE (San Diego)
    Posts
    99,040

    Supreme Court limits federal oversight of Voting Rights Act

    Supreme Court limits federal oversight of Voting Rights Act

    By Bill Mears, CNN
    updated 10:41 AM EDT, Tue June 25, 2013



    Supreme Court limits Voting Rights Act

    Washington (CNN) -- A deeply divided Supreme Court has limited use of a key provision in the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, in effect invalidating the key enforcement provision that applies to all or parts of 15 states with past history of voter discrimination.
    The case involved Section 5, which gives federal authorities open-ended oversight of states and localities with a history of voter discrimination. Any changes in voting laws and procedures in the covered areas -- which include all or parts of 15 states -- must be "pre-cleared" with Washington.
    After the provision was reauthorized by Congress in 2006 for another 25 years, counties in Alabama and North Carolina filed suit, saying the monitoring was burdensome and unwarranted.


    Voices from the voting war
    Civil rights groups say Section 5 has proved to be an important tool in protecting minority voters from local governments that would set unfair, shifting barriers to the polls. If it is ruled unconstitutional, they warn, the very power and effect of the entire Voting Rights Act would crumble.
    But opponents of the provision counter that it should not be enforced in areas where it can be argued that racial discrimination no longer exists.
    Veterans of forgotten voting war count the cost
    Opinion: How segregation got busted

    http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/25/politics/scotus-voting-rights/index.html?hpt=hp_t1
    NO AMNESTY

    Don't reward the criminal actions of millions of illegal aliens by giving them citizenship.


    Sign in and post comments here.

    Please support our fight against illegal immigration by joining ALIPAC's email alerts here https://eepurl.com/cktGTn

  2. #2
    Super Moderator Newmexican's Avatar
    Join Date
    May 2005
    Location
    Heart of Dixie
    Posts
    36,012
    Supreme Court strikes down key part of Voting Rights Act: ‘Our country has changed’

    By Liz Goodwin,
    National Affairs Reporter


    By Liz Goodwin, Y




    Holding signs with images of murdered civil rights workers, demonstrators rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court …

    The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act, a cornerstone of the civil rights movement that helped dismantle decades of discriminatory voting restrictions in the South when it passed 60 years ago. The vote was 5-4, with the court's liberal justices dissenting.

    The decision drastically scales back the federal government's power to reject state laws it believes discriminate against minority voters, which include some efforts to tighten identification requirements and limit early voting hours at the ballot box. A wave of such laws swept 30 states over the past few years, and the Obama administration has aggressively fought them in court.

    Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, reauthorized by Congress for an additional 25 years in 2006, gives the federal government the ability to pre-emptively reject changes to election law in states and counties that have a history of discriminating against minority voters. The law covers nine states and portions of seven more, most of them in the South. The formula used to decide which states are subject to this special scrutiny (set out in Section 4 of the law) is based on decades-old voter turnout and registration data, the justices ruled, which is unfair to the states covered under it. States that had a discriminatory poll test in the 1960s and low turnout among minority voters must seek special permission from the federal government to change their election laws, even though many of these states now have near-equal voter turnout rates between minorities and whites.

    "The coverage formula that Congress reauthorized in 2006 ignores these developments, keeping the focus on decades-old data relevant to decades-old problems," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the opinion. "Our country has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions."

    The Justice Department used Section 5 of the law to block voter ID laws in Texas and South Carolina last year, and it also struck down early voting restrictions in five counties in Florida. (Minority voters are more likely than white voters to vote early in person, and they are less likely than whites to have a government-issued photo ID.) Some Democrats argued that these laws were intentionally trying to suppress minority turnout in order to benefit Republicans.

    The court has effectively now put the ball back in Congress' court, writing in its decision that it is up to Congress to write a new formula that is based on current data. Though it seems unlikely that Congress, which is now more partisanly divided than in 2006, would tackle the challenge of creating a new rubric to find and eradicate racial discrimination at the polls.

    In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg writes the "sad irony" of Roberts' decision is that it strikes down the key part of the Voting Rights Act because it has been so successful at preventing racial discrimination. "Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet," she writes. Ginsburg also slams the court's majority for relying on turnout and registration rates "as if that were the whole story" and ignoring so-called second-generation laws and regulations designed to make it harder for minorities to vote. (One such Mississippi regulation sought to cancel a local election in 2001 because a large number of black candidates announced their intention to run.)

    Civil rights groups warned that the decision will negatively affect minority voters who live in the covered jurisdictions. "This is a sad day for democracy," said Myrna Perez, deputy director of the Brennan Center for Justice advocacy center. "The Voting Rights Act is a needed and instrumental tool in our fight to eradicate racial discrimination, and the Supreme Court's decision today has made it much harder to utilize this tool effectively." Wade Henderson, the President of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said in a statement that Congress should act to draft another coverage formula. "We urge Congress to act with urgency and on a bipartisan basis to protect voting rights for minorities," Henderson said.

    Court watchers predicted the decision, given the conservative justices' comments on the law during oral arguments and in other cases. Justices in the conservative wing of the Supreme Court, including Roberts, expressed reservations that the nine Southern states covered by the law still required the same degree of federal oversight that they did 60 years ago. "Voter turnout and registration rates [between blacks and whites] now approach parity," Roberts wrote in a decision in 2009. "Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare. And minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels."

    Another argument against Section 4's constitutionality was that it's unclear whether minority voters in Southern states are more likely to face discrimination at the polls than they are in other states. Voter ID laws, for example, have passed in states such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Indiana. Because those states do not have a history of voter discrimination—and are not covered by the act—their voter ID laws did not have to first pass federal inspection. That said, Southern states covered under the act were much more likely to pass a voter ID law than other states. Seven of the nine states covered in full under the act adopted such a law, compared with 12 noncovered states.

    http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/news/sup...lRBigA5lzQtDMD

    Time to make cuts at DOJ. Eric Holder does need as many people to sue states as he has used in the past. Send them back to LaRaza and the ACLU where they came from JMO



    Last edited by Newmexican; 06-25-2013 at 12:09 PM.

  3. #3
    Super Moderator Newmexican's Avatar
    Join Date
    May 2005
    Location
    Heart of Dixie
    Posts
    36,012
    The Street rabble are already weighing in and the White House and the liberal media seem to have a twist in their knickers.

    Oops! not as easy to commit voter fraud.

    Congress not 'mature enough' to deal with Voting Rights Act decision

    Following the Supreme Court's ruling on the Voting Rights Act, NBC's Chuck Todd says he's a pessimist on Congress' ability to update the map that determines which states must get federal permission before they change their voting laws.

    By Matthew DeLuca, Staff Writer, NBC News

    Activists and organizers said that they would urge Congress and the president to act quickly after the Supreme Court struck down the formula in the Voting Rights Act that determined which jurisdictions were covered, presenting lawmakers with a challenge some watchers said they may not be ready for.

    The 5 to 4 vote struck down a section of the historic civil rights legislation that determined which states, many of them with histories of racial discrimination, needed approval from the Department of Justice before changing voting laws.

    NBC News Chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd said on MSNBC that Congress is not “mature enough” to reach a speedy political solution.

    “This is not a welcome decision, by any means,” a senior White House official said in reaction to the decision. “But there is a theoretical path for Congress to update the statute in ways that would make it constitutional.”

    “As a practical matter, that may be difficult to do given political dynamics,” the official told NBC News.

    The White House has not yet released an official comment on the decision, but activists said they would organize to reach a new way to apply the law that they said protect the voting rights of vulnerable Americans.

    “This is not an issue just for civil rights advocates, this is not an issue just for African Americans or Latinos, this is not just an issue for those in the South,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, director-counsel of theNAACPs legal defense and educational fund. “This is the American we have all come to expect and that we have all come to enjoy and be proud of, and the question for us is are we willing to fight for it.”

    Politico Playbook: "Not yet six months into his second term, Barack Obama's presidency is in a dead zone," Politico's John Harris, Jake Sherman and Elizabeth Titus write. Harris joins Morning Joe to explain exactly why Obama currently has "less influence over his circumstances."

    “We will not sit down, we will not be silent, we will not accept the evisceration of our rights, we will fight every step of the way to make sure that voting rights are available to every single American,” said Barbara Arbwine, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

    “This is devastating,” civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton said on MSNBC. “I think what we must do is really put pressure on Congress now to deal with this.”

    “This is a devastating blow to those of us that need that protection, especially given the voter suppression schemes that we saw in 2012,” Sharpton said.

    Sharpton said that voting rights were among the most important issues when Dr. Martin Luther King pushed for civil rights for black Americans in the 1960s.

    ”They just canceled the dream,” Sharpton said, “and the children of the dream are not going to sit by and allow that to happen.”

    Civil rights litigator Judith Browne Dianis said that while the face of racial discrimination in voting has changed over the years, there are still many states that have “tried to roll back voting rights by making it harder to vote for people of color.”

    “We know that discrimination still exists in those states. We know that discrimination also exists in other states,” Dianis said. “We’re going to have to set the record straight.”

    “We witnessed in the last election cycle numerous states, an orchestrated effort, forty states in fact, where legislation was introduced to suppress the vote,” said Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League.

    “I think this is another opportunity from both sides of the Congress to demonstrate that this is not going to get caught up in partisan wrangling, obfuscation, and obstruction,” Morial said.

    Rick Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University, said that politicians concerned about voting rights might see leadership from the White House in the aftermath of the landmark ruling.

    “I think there’s probably no body in political office today who understands these issues better than President Barack Obama,” Pildes said.
    NBC News’ Peter Alexander contributed to this report.


    http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news...-decision?lite


  4. #4
    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
    Join Date
    Aug 2008
    Location
    PARADISE (San Diego)
    Posts
    99,040
    Supreme Court guts key part of landmark Voting Rights Act
    Reuters
    27 minutes ago
    Written by
    Lawrence Hurley
    By Lawrence Hurley. WASHINGTON | Tue Jun 25, 2013 5:12pm EDT. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday gutted a core part of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act and challenged Congress to come up with a replacement plan to ...
    Georgians applaud, decry voting rights rulingAtlanta Journal Constitution

    A look at 48 years of the Voting Rights ActKnoxville News Sentinel

    Your preferred source:It's Not 1965, Says CourtWall Street Journal
    Opinion:After Supreme Court, Congress must move on Voting Rights ActChristian Science Monitor
    In Depth:On Voting Case, Reaction From 'Deeply Disappointed' to 'It's About Time'New York Times
    Wikipedia:Voting Rights Act of 1965
    NO AMNESTY

    Don't reward the criminal actions of millions of illegal aliens by giving them citizenship.


    Sign in and post comments here.

    Please support our fight against illegal immigration by joining ALIPAC's email alerts here https://eepurl.com/cktGTn

Tags for this Thread

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •