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Jeff Jacoby starts our look at the Supreme’s voting rights decision.
Like everything else in our polarized age, reaction to the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in ShelbyCounty v. Holder divided sharply along political lines. The court held Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional, effectively lifting the burden on certain states to get federal approval before making any change to their election procedures. Predictably, conservatives and liberals clashed over whether the majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts got the constitutional law right.
But I was struck less by the legal arguments than by the angry denial on the left, especially among minorities, that the ingrained racial disenfranchisement the Voting Rights Act was enacted to eradicate is dead and buried. The defeat of Jim Crow is one of the great progressive triumphs of American history. But to hear the outraged critics, you’d think the court had just thrown the door open to a revival of poll taxes and literacy tests. Worse, you’d think white Americans were eager to revive them.
It saddened me to hear an emotional John Lewis, who was on the front lines of the civil rights struggle in the 1960s and is now a congressman from Georgia, blast the court for plunging “a dagger” into black political emancipation. “Voting rights have been given in this country and they have been taken away,” he said. The gains made by freed slaves during Reconstruction “were erased in a few short years.” Lewis is sure it could happen again.
Other civil-rights advocates strike the same foreboding tone. Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree insists that black voting rights are “being threatened at a level we haven’t witnessed . . . since before the Voting Rights Act was passed.” A spokeswoman for MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, says the court’s ruling “tries to disenfranchise Latinos and minorities from voting.” The NAACP’s Sherrilyn Ifill expresses alarm at a decision that “leaves virtually unprotected minority voters in communities all over this country.”
I realize that part of this is posturing for effect by those with a vested interest in provoking racial anxieties. …
Jennifer Rubin has more.
… The decision is typical in some ways of the Roberts court. It is cautious, and in this case chose to leave open the possibility that Congress could craft some formula that would still allow for pre-clearance. But in practice this may be harder than it seems. If the baseline becomes, for example, 1980, how many jurisdictions would still be subject to pre-clearance? In sum, although the court’s ruling is technically limited in practice, conservatives who find the Voting Richts Act entirely out of date and an unfair burden on states that have long since departed from their past history of discrimination may find Voting Rights Act pre-clearance severely limited.
George Will says the Court paid a complement to the Voting rights act.
… Tuesday’s decision came eight months after a presidential election in which African Americans voted at a higher rate than whites. It came when in a majority of the nine states covered by the preclearance requirements, blacks are registered at a higher rate than whites. It came when Mississippi has more black elected officials — not more per capita; more — than any other state. …
… Section 5 is now a nullity because it lacks force absent a Section 4 formula for identifying covered jurisdictions, and today’s Congress will properly refuse to enact another stigmatizing formula. On Tuesday, however, the court paid the VRA the highest possible tribute by saying the act’s key provision is no longer constitutional because the act has changed pertinent facts that once made it so.
Jonathan Tobin tells us why the decision has the left in high dungeon.
… Why then are political liberals and the so-called civil rights community so riled up about the decision? Some are merely offended by the symbolism of any alteration in a sacred piece of legislation. But the reason why the left is howling about this isn’t so much about symbolism as it is about their ability to manipulate the law to their political advantage. Under the status quo, enforcement of the Voting Rights Act isn’t about reversing discrimination so much as it is in applying the political agenda of the left to hamper the ability of some states to enact commonsense laws, such as the requirement for photo ID when voting or to create districts that are not gerrymandered to the advantage of liberals. By ending pre-clearance until Congress puts forward a new scheme rooted in evidence of systematic discrimination going on today, it has placed all states on an equal footing and made it harder for the Obama Justice Department to play politics with the law. It has also given racial hucksters that continue to speak as if a nation that has just re-elected an African-American president of the United States was little different from the one where blacks couldn’t vote in much of the country. …
It must have pained them to say so, but WaPo had to admit the scary sequester stories were not true.
Before “sequestration” took effect, the Obama administration issued specific — and alarming — predictions about what it would bring. There would be one-hour waits at airport security. Four-hour waits at border crossings. Prison guards would be furloughed for 12 days. FBI agents, up to 14.
At the Pentagon, the military health program would be unable to pay its bills for service members. The mayhem would extend even into the pantries of the neediest Americans: Around the country, 600,000 low-income women and children would be denied federal food aid.
But none of those things happened.
Sequestration did hit, on March 1. And since then, the $85 billion budget cut has caused real reductions in many federal programs that people depend on. But it has not produced what the Obama administration predicted: widespread breakdowns in crucial government services. …
The Post also had to admit Bush has helped Africa more. Power Line has the story.
George W. Bush isn’t a man to gloat. If we were, his message to Africans, as he visits the continent at the same time as President Obama, would be: “Miss me yet?”
The answer, according to the Washington Post, is a resounding “yes.” Consider this passage from the Post’s story “Bush AIDS policies shadow Obama in Africa”:
[A]cross this continent, many Africans wish Obama was more like Bush in his social and health policies, particularly in the fight against HIV/AIDS — one of the former president’s signature foreign policy aid programs. Bush poured billions of dollars into the effort to combat the spread of the disease that once threatened to consume a generation of young Africans, and as Obama has spent two days touring South Africa, the shadow of his predecessor has trailed him.
For once, Obama even felt compelled to praise Bush. And, reportedly, he’s considering a joint appearance in Tanzania with his predecessor.
Obama’s words have carried him far in America. But on matters of life and death, actions speak much louder than even Obama’s words. In South Africa, Bush’s actions helped reduce the HIV infection rate by 30 percent and put nearly 2 million people are on antiretroviral drugs.
Obama, by contrast, produced a budget last year that reduces AIDS funding globally by roughly $214 million, the first time an American president has reduced the U.S. commitment to fighting the epidemic. He has proposed additional cuts for 2014. …