Minorities and the Law by Merino Noël;

Author:Merino, Noël;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Greenhaven Publishing LLC
Published: 2018-06-26T00:00:00+00:00

10

The US Supreme Court Erred in Revising the Voting Rights Act

Andrew Cohen

Andrew Cohen is a contributing editor at The Atlantic, a legal analyst for 60 Minutes and CBS Radio News, and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

The US Supreme Court decision wrongly struck down several provisions of the Voting Rights Act that were meant to protect against racially discriminatory voting laws. The Court’s decision will allow jurisdictions to impose restrictive new voting rules on minority citizens without having to get approval for such changes. The winners of the ruling are those in favor of racial redistricting and voter identification laws, whereas the losers are minorities, the poor, and the elderly. America has not reached the point where protection from racially discriminatory voting laws is unnecessary.

Let’s be clear about what has just happened [June 25, 2013]. Five unelected, life-tenured men this morning declared that overt racial discrimination in the nation’s voting practices is over and no longer needs all of the special federal protections it once did. They did so, without a trace of irony, by striking down as unconstitutionally outdated a key provision of a federal law that this past election cycle alone protected the franchise for tens of millions of minority citizens. And they did so on behalf of an unrepentant county in the Deep South whose officials complained about the curse of federal over- sight even as they continued to this very day to enact and implement racially discriminatory voting laws.

The Voting Rights Act

In deciding Shelby County v. Holder, in striking down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, the five conservative justices of the United States Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, didn’t just rescue one recalcitrant Alabama jurisdiction from the clutches of racial justice and universal enfranchisement. By voiding the legislative formula that determines which jurisdictions must get federal “preclearance” for changes to voting laws, today’s ruling enables officials in virtually every Southern county, and in many other jurisdictions as well, to more conveniently impose restrictive new voting rules on minority citizens. And they will. That was the whole point of the lawsuit.…

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