I went to the rally, camera in hand, expecting to see the joyous faces of those who had been so worried while the SCOTUS decisions were being awaited. What I saw and heard was not a photo op: men and women, cautiously joyful, wandering through occasional bursts of enthusiasm. There was introspection, wonder, maybe even shell-shock. I went to the rally with a need for solidarity, feeling relief more than anything but the mood at the New York “victory” rally was like the tenuous ripples of a child stepping into a still lake. The water feels good, but what lies beneath? Was it trepidation or the cynicism often attributed to New Yorkers? Realism or pessimism?

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As the Republican House leaders consider the way forward, they would do well to consider the decisions of the past two generations of top Republican legislators, without whom the Voting Rights Act would never have existed.

Most students of history know that President Lyndon Johnson’s mastery of the legislative process – and his huge Democratic majorities – were key to the bill’s original passage. But few know that the final bill was written in the office of the Republican minority leader, Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois.

President Lyndon Johnson feared a Southern filibuster might defeat the bill. To prevent a filibuster, two-thirds of the Senate would have to move to the bill to a final vote, and achieving this would require Republican votes. So Johnson turned to Dirksen. “…[ Y]ou come with me on this bill,” Johnson told him, “and two hundred years from now school children will know only two names: Abraham Lincoln and Everett Dirksen.”

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It was more than her food. It was her voice, with that easy Southern twang, her megawatt smile, her self-deprecating sense of humor, and her feistiness. She embodied the best of the White South. Her home base may have been Savannah, Georgia, a city with a history of discrimination, but I never saw any indication of the racism so stereotypical of Southerners. She often had black guests on her show, and she was on Oprah more times than I can remember. I cursed Anthony Bourdain when he attacked her fat-laden recipes -- calling her “the worst, most dangerous person to America” (a little extreme, no?). So last week, when I read that she admitted to using “the N-word,” I was more than a little disturbed.

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Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 imposed a special coverage formula on jurisdictions with particularly bad histories of racial discrimination in voting, including nine states—Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia—and dozens of county and municipal governments, including the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan. Section 5 authorized the Justice Department to require “pre-clearance” of proposed changes in electoral laws in these jurisdictions. The pre-clearance requirement has been used in recent years to thwart attempts by the ethnocentric non-Hispanic White Right to engage in voter ID laws or redistricting plans that were evidently motivated by the desire to indirectly eliminate or dilute the votes of nonwhite citizens or poor citizens.

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On Tuesday, a 5-4 decision struck down Section 4 of VRA, which determines which states are covered by Section 5, and which are not – meaning certain areas of the U.S. which previously had to submit changes to their voting rules to the Department of Justice for approval, now can pass laws without it. (However, that doesn't mean people won't be watching, so expect more lawsuits in the wake of new voter ID requirements, registration rules and reapportionment, among other voting issues.)

In writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts said, "[racial] conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions." The crux of his opinion was that the coverage formula used in Section 4 to identify these conditions was 50 years out of date. Therefore, Justice Roberts lobbed a pass to Congress to develop a coverage formula using contemporary data.

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“The Voting Rights Act is vital to America’s commitment to never again permit racial prejudices in the electoral process,” Sensenbrenner, of Wisconsin, said in a statement. He continued: “This is going to take time, and will require members from both sides of the aisle to put partisan politics aside and ensure Americans’ most sacred right is protected.”

“I am disappointed by the Court’s ruling,” Sensenbrenner said, “but my colleagues and I will work in a bipartisan fashion to update Section 4 to ensure Section 5 can be properly implemented to protect voting rights, especially for minorities.”

According to The Hill, Republican Reps. Steve Chabot of Ohio and Sean Duffy of Wisconsin also said they're in favor of congressional action on the law.

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As reported by Zachary Roth at MSNBC, Davis was one of many candidates -- and tens of thousands of Texas voters -- impacted by Republican redistricting efforts in 2011:

The GOP plan radically changed the demographic makeup of Davis’ district, among others, moving tens of thousands of black and Hispanic voters into neighboring districts. In fact, of the 94 precincts that were over 70% minority, Republicans cut out 48. In the new map, blacks and Hispanics were placed in separate districts from each other and were outnumbered by the white conservative majority, which tends to vote Republican.

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"Yes, for some reason, since the Voting Rights Act was passed, things have changed dramatically!" said Colbert. "Therefore, we can get rid of it now. It's like those outdated labor laws that prohibit children from threading bobbins and a loom. A kid hasn't been sucked into one of those machines in years!" he joked.

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"In fairness, I doubt that will ever happen," Corker told the Huffington Post. "I just cannot imagine -- I'm just being honest -- Congress ever coming to terms with what they could agree on."

"In essence, what I guess would be occurring ... [would be] one group of folks would have to be saying another group of folks have some tendencies in a direction that are not good," Corker continued. "I don't know that in 2013 I see that happening."

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled that Section 4 of the VRA is unconstitutional. This part of the law creates a formula to determine which areas of the country, with a history of racial discrimination at the polls, are subject to Section 5 of the law, which requires those areas to get pre-clearance from the Department of Justice before making changes to their voting laws. In its decision, the Supreme Court said that Congress could come up with a new formula to determine which areas need to get pre-clearance, but until then Section 5 is inoperable.

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Original post:

Later this morning, the Supreme Court is expected to hand down its decisions in the key marriage equality cases. After yesterday’s performance by the Court, we can no longer be surprised by historically bad jurisprudence.

The voting rights ruling it issued yesterday, Shelby County v. Holder, is one of the very worst Supreme Court decisions of all time. Leaving aside the practical effects of the Court’s holding, which are likely to be awful (Texas has already won the race for “first state to enact a change to its voting laws that wouldn’t have been approved by the federal government if the Voting Rights Act could still be enforced”), the opinion is a travesty as a matter of basic legal reasoning.

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Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott announced Tuesday that the state will now move ahead with a law requiring photo ID before voting, since it no longer has to get pre-clearance from the Department of Justice to implement it. “With today’s decision, the State’s voter ID law will take effect immediately,” Abbott said in a statement to the Dallas Morning News. “Redistricting maps passed by the Legislature may also take effect without approval from the federal government.”

The law will go into effect on Thursday. From the Morning News:

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Ironically, as anyone paying attention knows, that turnout surge was driven by anger over a wave of GOP efforts to suppress black votes in those and other states – and it was helped along by Section 5, which requires states with a history of voting rights suppression to pre-clear any voting changes with the Justice Department (Justice struck down 21 such proposals since 2006). Still, despite new voter identification laws, restrictions on early voting and Sunday voting and other barriers, African-Americans voted at unprecedented rates in 2012 – and that helped give Roberts an excuse to strike down a section key to enforcing the law.

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Like Lauren, most Americans just want to enjoy life and get ahead. But her reasonable and innocuous fears over her future are being hijacked by conservatives to stoke larger fears: that there is a finite ability for us all to thrive together. The George Zimmerman trial, the overturning of the Voting Rights Act, Paula Dean's flare up, angry debates over citizenship in immigration reform: This week, we’re seeing any idealist’s hope of a post-racial future disappear the way of the floppy disk.

The Supreme Court just punted a decision on affirmative action, but it cannot indefinitely forestall the bracing questions driving many people’s interest in the practice. By a 7 to 1 decision, the Court allowed affirmative action to survive in college admissions, but imposed a tough legal standard on schools—“strict scrutiny”—that the policy’s long-term viability has been neutered.

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The Voting Rights Act, which bans racial discrimination at the polls, requires in Section 5 that areas of the country with a history of racial discrimination obtain pre-clearance from the Department of Justice before making changes to voting regulations. Section 4 of the VRA establishes a formula for determining which areas are covered by Section 5. In a 5-4 decision, the Court found Section 4 unconstitutional, thus making Section 5 inoperable until Congress establishes a new formula for pre-clearance.

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Split along ideological and partisan lines, the justices voted 5-4 to strip the government of its most potent tool to stop voting bias — the requirement in the Voting Rights Act that all or parts of 15 states with a history of discrimination in voting, mainly in the South, get Washington's approval before changing the way they hold elections.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a majority of conservative, Republican-appointed justices, said the law's provision that determines which states are covered is unconstitutional because it relies on 40-year-old data and does not account for racial progress and other changes in U.S. society.

The decision effectively puts an end to the advance approval requirement that has been used to open up polling places to minority voters in the nearly half century since it was first enacted in 1965, unless Congress can come up with a new formula that Roberts said meets "current conditions" in the United States. That seems unlikely to happen any time soon.

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In the majority opinion for the case, called Shelby County v. Holder, Chief Justice John Roberts made it clear that the Court's ruling would not affect the nationwide ban on racial discrimination in voting laid out in Section 2 of the VRA, but only the VRA's preclearance requirement. He also specified that the court was not ruling on the constitutionality of Section 5, the part of the VRA that requires those parts of the country covered by Section 4's formula to get preclearance before making changes to their voting regulations. The ruling is limited to Section 4, which simply lays out the formula that determines which specific areas are required to get that preclearance. Of course, without the Section 4 formula, Section 5 is effectively inoperable for the time being, because it has no application to any particular state. As a remedy, the Court noted that Congress could "draft another formula based on current conditions," but there will likely be big political hurdles to overcome for that to happen.

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This raises a fascinating question. How would Cruz himself go about providing “documentary evidence” of his own citizenship?

As it happens, he was born in Canada, where his parents were working at the time. Thus, his birth certificate cannot provide any such proof. And because he claims citizenship by birth, he would never have had any reason to obtain a certificate of naturalization. According to Cruz’s official website, however, his mother was born and raised in Delaware, which is quite sufficient under the law to confer citizenship on Ted – if we take his word for it. On the other hand, what if we demanded the fabled documentary evidence?

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At least that’s the lesson of Edward Blum, a conservative legal activist who, despite lacking formal legal education, has successfully pushed 14 cases to the nation’s highest court. Of the nearly 9,000 cased filed with the court last year, just 79 got oral arguments. Blum got two of them, and they’re both among the most-watched cases currently before the justices.

One, Shelby County v. Holder, could gut the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The other, Fisher v. University of Texas, could outlaw affirmative action in college admissions and possibly elsewhere. Progressive legal activists and civil rights groups have sounded the alarm, putting both cases at the top of their agendas and warning that a bad decision could undermine decades of protections for minorities.

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In 2006, Congress voted to reauthorize the VRA by bipartisan votes of 98-0 in the Senate and 390-33 in the House. But the Supreme Court is currently considering a challenge to Section 5 of the VRA, which forces certain states and counties with a history of racial discrimination to get pre-clearance from the Department of Justice before changing their voting laws.

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There’s no shortage of badly behaving Republicans in Washington. There’s the take-or-leave-it congressional leadership, who constantly show they value rightwing ideology more than its impact on people. There are intransigent obstructionists, like the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, who believes the answer to gun violence is more guns. But Scalia isn’t simply another Republican bully; he may be the most venal and fascist Republican of all.

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