Voting Blogs: The Voting Rights Act Becomes More Vital By the Day | Andrew Cohen/Brennan Center for Justice

The law may sometimes lie in suspended animation — like it is now, today over voting rights — but politics always moves relentlessly ahead. So while the justices of the United States Supreme Court contemplate the fate of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires federal approval of election law changes in certain jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination, and the nation awaits the Court’s judgment in Shelby County v. Holder, lawmakers in dozens of states around the country have been moving forward with related legislation that would restrict the right to vote for millions of Americans. The results of a new Brennan Center survey released last week would be remarkable in any year — so much legislative effort designed to make it harder for citizens to vote! — but the statistics are particularly compelling this year because of the pendency of the strong constitutional challenge to the preclearance provision of the 1965 federal voting law. State lawmakers aren’t waiting to see how Shelby County turns out. And they aren’t chastened by their losses in federal court in 2012.

National: Justices wrestle with Arizona voter registration law | POLITICO.com

The Supreme Court took up its second voting rights case in less than a month on Monday, with the justices appearing narrowly divided on whether the National Voter Registration Act, or “Motor Voter” bill, trumps state registration requirements. At issue in the case is Arizona’s Proposition 200, which requires proof of citizenship, and whether or not the federal registration form under the NVRA preempts Arizona’s more stringent requirements. The liberal justices criticized Arizona’s eligibility requirements as overly restrictive and in direct conflict with the federal voter registration form, which requires people to attest to their citizenship via signature but does not require documentation of citizenship. Some of the Court’s conservative judges, however, parsed the wording of the NVRA and suggested the states do, in fact, have the ability to add requirements such as proof of citizenship.

National: Shelby County and Congressional Power: What Does the Supreme Court Review? | CLC Blog

After the recent Supreme Court argument in the Voting Rights Act case (Shelby County v. Holder), it appears the decision may well turn on the legal standards to be applied in deciding whether Section 5 of the Act, the preclearance section, has become unconstitutional with the passage of time. The constitutional questions in the case are fundamental:  how much authority does Congress possess to choose the legislative means to combat a national evil (in this case, racial discrimination in voting), and how much authority does the Supreme Court have to overrule Congress’ choice?  The answers to those questions involve interpretation of the words “necessary and proper” and “appropriate legislation,” which are in the Constitution, and “congruent and proportional,” which are not in the Constitution but which the Supreme Court has adopted in recent years as aids in interpreting the first group of words.

Arizona: The Voting Rights Case You Haven’t Heard Of | Constitutional Accountability Center

More than a week after oral argument in Shelby County v. Holder, the scorn expressed by Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Scalia and others towards the Voting Rights Act continues to dominate the news.  Whether it be Justice Scalia’s statement that the Voting Rights Act survives only because of the self-perpetuating power of “racial entitlements” or Chief Justice Roberts’ dubious claim that the state of voting discrimination may be worse in Massachusetts than Mississippi, there has been an outpouring of coverage highlighting just how the weak the arguments against the Voting Rights Act are.  As Linda Greenhouse put it, it would be “an error of historic proportions” – akin to Plessy and other travesties in Supreme Court history – to strike down the Voting Rights Act when the Constitution expressly gives to Congress the power to eradicate racial discrimination in voting.  With the focus on whether the Court will strike down our nation’s most iconic civil rights law, there has been virtually no attention to the fact that, when the Justices convene again on March 18th, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in a second major voting rights case, Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council.  But Inter Tribal Council is a very important case that will have huge implications for Congress’ power to protect the right to vote and to enact new, needed reforms in federal elections.

Editorials: Scalia scorns vote protections | Verna Williams /Cincinnati.com

On my constitutional law exam this year, I invited students to comment on a quote from a scholar – Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. What he said is worth considering in light of his gasp-inducing comment during the argument in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 case, Shelby County v. Holder: “Originalism seems to me more compatible with the nature and purpose of a Constitution in a democratic system. A democratic society does not, by and large, need constitutional guarantees to insure that its laws will reflect ‘current values.’ Elections take care of that quite well. The purpose of constitutional guarantees (especially those guaranteeing individual rights) is precisely to prevent the law from reflecting certain changes in original values that the society adopting the Constitution thinks fundamentally undesirable. Or, more precisely, to require the society to devote to the subject the long and hard consideration required for a constitutional amendment before those particular values can be cast aside.” This is Justice Scalia in his element. Originalism as protector of constitutional values against the vagaries of electoral politics. Requiring us to think “long and hard” before casting aside those foundational notions. And yet.

Editorials: ‘A Big New Power’ | Linda Greenhouse/NYTimes.com

Years from now, when the Supreme Court has come to its senses, justices then sitting will look back on the spring of 2013 in bewilderment. On what basis, they will wonder, did five conservative justices, professed believers in judicial restraint, reach out to grab the authority that the framers of the post-Civil War 14th and 15th Amendments had vested in Congress nearly a century and a half earlier “to enforce, by appropriate legislation” the right to equal protection and the right to vote. How on earth did it come to pass that the Supreme Court ruled a major provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 unconstitutional? You will have noticed that I’m making a premature assumption here about the outcome of a case, Shelby County v. Holder, that was argued just last week. Although I’m willing to bet that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has already drafted his 5-to-4 majority opinion, I’d be nothing but relieved if the court proves me wrong when it issues the decision sometime before the end of June. But except for a few wishful thinkers, everyone who witnessed the argument, read the transcript, or listened to the audio now expects the court to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act – and seriously harm itself in the process. As I made clear in my most recent column, I wasn’t expecting anything good to come out of this argument. But neither did I anticipate the ugliness that erupted from the bench. While Justice Antonin Scalia’s depiction of the Voting Rights Act as the “perpetuation of racial entitlement” quickly went viral (40 screens of Google hits, by the time I checked earlier this week), that was not even the half of it.

Editorials: Voting Rights in Massachusetts and Mississippi | Cato @ Liberty

During last week’s oral argument in Shelby County v. Holder – the challenge to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act – Chief Justice Roberts questioned the Solicitor General concerning the rationality of the VRA’s coverage formula (Section 4(b)) by comparing non-covered Massachusetts with Mississippi, which remains subject to federal preclearance based on registration and voting data from 1964.  As the Chief Justice pointed out (page 32 of the transcript), Massachusetts has the “worst ratio of white voter turnout to African American voter turnout” while Mississippi “has the best.”  Massachusetts likewise “has the greatest disparity in registration between white and African American” while Mississippi is third best in the nation, “where again the African American registration rate is higher than the white registration rate.” The Chief Justice’s remarks apparently angered the Massachusetts Secretary of State.  According to a Politico story, Secretary William Galvin found it “just disturbing that the chief justice of the United States would spew this kind of misinformation” and that the “2010 numbers don’t support what Roberts is saying.”  Galvin continued: “He’s wrong, and in fact what’s truly disturbing is not just the doctrinaire way he presented by the assertion, but when we went searching for an data that could substantiate what he was saying, the only thing we could find was a census survey pulled from 2010 … which speaks of noncitizen blacks … .  We reached out to academics at many institutions … and they could find no record either, they were puzzled by [Roberts’s] reference.” But it’s Secretary Galvin who has his facts wrong—a mistake he could have avoided simply by reviewing the lower court decision that the Supreme Court is considering.

Editorials: Voting Rights: Scalia v. minority protection | David Dante Troutt/The Great Debate (Reuters)

It’s rare to reach a point in our national sense of humor that a sitting Supreme Court justice emerges as the butt of popular jokes for comments he made during an oral argument. That’s what happened last week, however, after Justice Antonin Scalia asked lawyers defending Congress’s extension of Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act whether maintaining the pre-clearance formula for nine “covered” states, which are subject to federal oversight, was really just a “racial entitlement” program and not a constitutional necessity. The media filled with guffaws about the justice’s audacity. Cartoonists ridiculed his racial insensitivity. MSNBC talk show host Rachel Maddow, dismissing Scalia’s words as mere willful provocation, called him a “troll.” We’d be wise to watch the name-calling. Insulting as Scalia’s words sound, there’s more to the justice’s comments than political incorrectness. For those who care about more than full and fair voting rights for minorities, responding to the perceived slight with more name-calling misses the point. Scalia was talking about far more than the Voting Rights Act. He was talking about whether the Constitution affords minorities any real protection for a range of discrimination anymore.

Editorials: How a Supreme Court Defeat Could Save Voting Rights | Kiran Moodley/The Atlantic

George W. Bush said the first decision the president of the free world makes is which carpet to get in the Oval Office. When Barack Obama moved into Bush’s vacated space, the carpet he chose had five quotes running around its border. They came from Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. The latter’s chosen phrase was: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Although wrongly attributed to King (the quote was actually the work of Boston preacher Theodore Parker), the message was clear. The U.S. had been through a long struggle — from Civil War to Civil Rights, through Reconstruction and Segregation — and America had ended up with an African American in the Oval Office. What is appealing about the story of the Civil Rights movement is its simplicity: its arc, while long, bends into a neat narrative. It can be plotted through major events that are etched into our consciousness: Brown v. Board, 1954; the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955; Little Rock, 1957; the Sit-Ins, 1960; the Freedom Rides, 1961; Birmingham and the March on Washington, 1963; the Civil Rights Act, 1964; and finally, Selma and the Voting Rights Act, 1965. Remember those events, remember those dates, and you’re sure to pass your exam. Yet if, as widely predicted (by veteran reporter Lyle Denniston and Atlantic correspondent Andrew Cohen), the present Supreme Court strikes down section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, what does that mean for the civil rights narrative? Does 1965 lose its significance? Does the arc bend away from justice?

Editorials: Voting Rights Act still necessary | Kansas City Star

The U.S. views itself as a nation progressing ever toward the ideals of justice and liberty. In many ways it’s true. The egregious violations of civil rights that kept so many from voting are sins of another era. Long gone are poll taxes and forcing black people to recite the Declaration of Independence before being given a ballot. The bodies of those who dared register minorities to vote do not wind up in a burning car. Yet these horrors did happen, and in living memory. There is danger in congratulating ourselves too readily on the progress we have made since. It tempts us to overlook what is being done today to deny those same civil rights. In the case of certain members of the Supreme Court, the attitude has ossified into a brittle arrogance. Justice Antonin Scalia called the Voting Rights Act of 1965 a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” One can almost hear the sneer of one who believes that it is he who is the victim of discrimination.

Editorials: How to make the Voting Rights Act work better for everyone | Bangor Daily News

Forty-eight years ago, exasperated with the persistent abuse of black voters, Congress put most of the American South in a timeout. Now the Supreme Court appears poised to end those sanctions. It shouldn’t. But that doesn’t mean the selective scrutiny applied to Southern states is necessarily fair. As the justices consider the case of Shelby County v. Holder, which was argued before the court Wednesday, they should keep in mind one goal above all others: protecting the right to vote, regardless of region or other circumstances. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 bans discriminatory voting procedures nationwide, codifying the 15th Amendment’s guarantee of the right to vote regardless “of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The law has stricter requirements, however, for jurisdictions with a long history of disenfranchisement.

Editorials: Voting Rights Act: Conservatives trying to have it both ways | NewsObserver.com

It’s been a week of big events in the voting rights world, and I’ve been privileged enough to witness much of it first-hand. On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder, a case challenging the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Even Justice Samuel Alito has acknowledged that this law is “one of the most successful statutes that Congress passed in the 20th century and one could probably go farther than that.” And earlier in the week, a three-judge panel of North Carolina state judges heard oral arguments in the case challenging the constitutionality of the state legislative and congressional redistricting plans enacted by the General Assembly in 2011. Listening to discussion of the Voting Rights Act in both cases, I was struck by contrasts between the arguments advanced by lawyers for Republicans in the North Carolina case and what the conservative justices were concerned with the Shelby case.

Editorials: The threat from within — the ironic challenge to the Voting Rights Act | Rep. Terri A. Sewell/al.com

After almost 50 years of expanding and protecting voting rights, a new threat comes from an unlikely place – the U.S. Supreme Court. On Wednesday, the justices heard oral arguments in Shelby County, AL v. Holder, a case that will decide the survival of preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that require federal oversight of voting practices in 16 covered states including Alabama. The Voting Rights Act, which was passed as result of the Selma to Montgomery march, provides legal protections for individuals, primarily minorities, in states with histories of discriminatory voting practices. Since its passage in 1965, the act has been critical in ensuring that millions of our nation’s minority citizens are guaranteed the right to vote. I feel compelled to write this essay because I am deeply concerned about the erosion of voting rights that sadly still exist in our state and in this nation. Perhaps the biggest irony is that the current threat to this legislation comes from the very state (Alabama) that was the impetus for its passage almost 50 years ago.

Voting Blogs: Not Yet Section 5’s Time To Die | Andrew Cohen/Brennan Center for Justice

The need for the Voting Rights Act will die, and it should die, on the day when Americans can say to one another with a straight face that racial discrimination in voting no longer exists there. Sadly, that day has not come. Before the United States Supreme Court’s oral argument this week in Shelby County v. Holder,Professor Garrett Epps cut to the core of the conflict over Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. “On the one hand,” he wrote Sunday in The Atlantic, “there is the right to vote… the cornerstone of a democratic system.” On the other hand, he added, there is the “sovereign dignity” of the states, words and a principle that “are mentioned nowhere in the Constitution.” As we begin to contemplate a world without this vital provision of this venerable law, a world in which federal officials are deprived of one of the most successful tools they have ever had to root out racial discrimination in voting practices, it is worth noting today the relative values of these conflicting interests as they impact the everyday lives of the American people. There is simply no comparison– despite the tone and tenor of some of the questions posed Wednesday by some of the justices.

Voting Blogs: Why the Predictions Could be Wrong in Shelby County | Myrna Pérez/Brennan Center for Justice

If you listen to the court watchers reacting to Wednesday’s oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder, you might be bracing yourself for a roll back of voting rights. They are largely predicting the formula used to determine which states and localities are subject to or “covered” by the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) will be struck down by the Supreme Court. This isn’t the first time we’ve heard these prognostications. In 2009, similar predictions abounded in a similar case, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder (NAMUDNO), involving this key provision, called Section 5, of the VRA. They were wrong in NAMUDNO, and while only time will tell, I think they will be wrong in Shelby County.

Editorials: Congress’s Power to Protect the Vote | NYTimes.com

The voter ID laws and other tactics that sprang up in several states last year to prevent minorities from casting their ballots offer incontestable proof of the need for strict voting rights laws. Yet at the argument on Wednesday in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court’s conservative justices left the ominous impression that they were willing to deny this reality and repudiate Congress’s power to enforce the right to vote by striking down a central provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act requires nine states (seven of them in the South) and parts of seven others with records of extreme discrimination against minority voters to get approval from the Justice Department or a special court in Washington before they can make any changes in how they hold elections. Without this provision, there would be no way to prevent new and devious efforts by local officials to block blacks and Hispanics from voting or to reduce their electoral power. In 2006, Congress overwhelmingly reauthorized the statute. It found that these places should remain “covered” by this “preclearance” requirement because voting discrimination remained both tangible and more concentrated and persistent in them than in other parts of the country. House members from those places strongly supported the renewal: of 110 members from covered jurisdictions, 90 voted for reauthorization.

National: What’s at Stake in the Voting Rights Act Battle | The Atlantic

As the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments in a case challenging the Voting Rights Act of 1968, civil rights advocates are rising to support the anti-discriminatory law. But why? This hardly the first time that the 45-year-old law has been challenged. It’s been just four years since the country’s highest court stopped just short of striking down the Voting Rights Act altogether, choosing instead to make a decision on narrow grounds. On Wednesday, the justices will get a second chance in the case of Shelby County v. Holder — Shelby County is in Alabama — which seeks to determine if Congress overstepped its authority when it passed the 25-year-long renewal of the Voting Rights Act passed by Congress is 2006. In other words, the case should decide whether or not the Voting Rights Act is constitutional. This is a big deal for a lot of people.

Editorials: America Is One Step Closer to Neutering the Voting Rights Act | Andrew Cohen/The Atlantic

You could say that the call was made even before the polls closed. It was made with great clarity before the end of the scheduled hour of oral argument at the United States Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holderby the folks at Scotusblog, the most popular and prestigious website covering the Court. It was presented in 140 characters or less to the world in the form of a Tweet: “Update from argument: VRA Sec 5 almost sure to be invalidated 5-4. Congress will have to reconsider the preclearance formula.” There are some instances where oral argument is useless in determining how a case will turn out. This does not figure to be one of those times. There look to be five votes to strike down the section of the law that requires officials in some jurisdictions to prove to the satisfaction of federal officials that their voting laws and redistricting rules do not discriminate against minority voters. We can be reasonably certain about this not just because of the questions and the answers offered up Wednesday but also because of the history of the Roberts Court and the Voting Rights Act. Chief Justice John Roberts, who campaigned against the law 30 years ago as a young Justice Department official, isn’t going to save the statute the way he saved the Affordable Care Act last June. Justice Clarence Thomas declared four years ago that it had to go. Justice Antonin Scalia on Wednesday declared the most successful anti-discrimination law in American history the perpetuation of a “racial entitlement.” Justice Samuel Alito echoed on Wednesday many of the same concerns he expressed during argument four years ago in a Section 5 case out of Texas. That’s four votes. The fifth would be Justice Anthony Kennedy, the least conservative of the five Republican appointees. Lyle Denniston, a reporter who has daily covered the Supreme Court since before the passage of the 1965 law, wrote Wednesday of some wiggle room he perceived in a comment Justice Kennedy made about how the plaintiff in the case — Shelby County, Alabama — may not be in proper position to challenge Section 5 (or the preclearance coverage formula of Section 4) because of its past record of voting discrimination.

Editorials: Argument recap: Voting law in peril — maybe | SCOTUSblog

Sometimes, in a Supreme Court argument, a single phrase can speak volumes.  Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the one member of the Court who bore the most watching because the other eight seemed clearly to divide evenly, used the phrase “trusteeship of the United States government” as a shorthand way to describe how he views the regime set up by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 works.  Of course, he meant it as a denunciation. If Kennedy believes that there is no way to justify any longer that kind of oversight of nine states that have to do the most to obey the 1965 law, that law may well be doomed.   But it also was Kennedy who left the impression that he might be willing to go along with a potential way to short-circuit the case of Shelby County v. Holder, and allow the law to survive for some time more. The argument Wednesday in one of the most important cases of the Court’s current Term — a hearing that ran seventeen minutes longer than the allotted hour — left no doubt that four of the Justices (and maybe Kennedy with them) are just as troubled as they were four years ago when they last lambasted the selective enforcement approach mandated by history’s most successful civil rights law.  Equally, there was no doubt that four Justices — including the two newest members — were prepared to let Congress have its way with the twenty-five-year extension of the law.

Editorials: The Roberts Court vs. Voting Rights | David Cole/New York Review of Books

What happens when a Supreme Court ostensibly committed to judicial restraint confronts a long-standing civil rights statute that offends its conservative majority’s sense that law should be colorblind, even if the world is not? That question will be front and center when the Court hears arguments Wednesday in Shelby County v. Holder, a case challenging the constitutionality of a central provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The provision, known as Section 5, requires nine states, mostly in the South, and select jurisdictions in seven other states, to obtain federal approval for any change in their voting laws. Congress concluded that this was necessary to ensure equal opportunity in voting. But conservatives in some of the southern states have long complained that the law gives the federal government too much power, and now, Shelby County—a largely white suburb of Birmingham, Alabama found guilty of racial discrimination in voting as recently as 2008—has sued the US government to get it annulled. If the Supreme Court majority exercises restraint, it will acknowledge that Section 5 falls within Congress’s constitutionally assigned authority to enforce rights of equal protection and voting. But if the Court chooses to impose its own view of racial justice—according to which laws should be drafted without regard to race, even if race-conscious efforts are needed to forestall discrimination—it will invalidate a core part of one of the country’s signal civil rights laws. The Court has frequently reviewed the Voting Rights Act since its initial enactment, and has until now always upheld it. But this time around, the result could well be different. It shouldn’t be.

Editorials: Who controls Voting Rights? | Richard L. Hasen/The Great Debate (Reuters)

On Wednesday the Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder,challenging the constitutionality of a key part of the Voting Rights Act. But in the wide public debate about this case, we are getting to the point where — as election law scholar Pam Karlanhas noted — everything has been said, but not necessarily by everybody. In addition to this Reuters symposium on “If the Court Strikes Down Section 5,” other symposia, commentaries and op-edshave considered whether the act still serves a vital purpose; whether the court should strike it down; and what should replace it if the court rules that Congress went too far in requiring certain states to continue to get federal permission when making changes in any voting rules until 2031. Even President Barack Obama has weighed in, urging the court to keep the act in place. He said the best way to protect voting rights is by having the federal government review voting changes before they can be implemented, to ensure that changes don’t make protected minority groups worse off. So it is worth taking a step back to look at the larger question of why this is a decision for the Supreme Court to make and not the political branches. After all, even back in 1965, Section 5 was “strong medicine.”

National: Messaging Ramps Up Before Key Voting Rights Case | Roll Call

A steady drumbeat of press briefings and messaging events is reaching a crescendo as the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments Wednesday in a case that questions whether a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is still needed. Briefing breakfasts, afternoon seminars, information sessions on the Hill and a coordinated bus campaign that mimics the Freedom Rides of the 1960s all focus on influencing the outcome of Shelby County v. Holder. “While the justices play a distinct role in our society and in our country, they’re not divorced from society at large. I can’t see how they couldn’t be influenced by what people think about their actions,” said Ellen Buchman, vice president of field operations for the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which is planning a rally during Wednesday’s oral arguments.

National: Experts Debate Effects of Voting Rights Act Provision on Native Americans | The Blog of Legal Times

Days before the U.S. Supreme Court was set to hear arguments in Shelby County v. Holder, a case challenging the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, legal experts said they feared that striking it down would hurt Indian Country and Native American voters. Enacted in 1965 as a temporary provision, Section 5 freezes election practices or procedures in certain states and local governments, mostly in the south, until the new procedures have been subjected to review or “precleared” by the Justice Department or a federal court. Congress has since reauthorized Section 5 four times. Currently, it is set to expire in 2031. In order to make changes to their voting rules, the states in question must demonstrate that the rules do not have the purpose of discriminating — or that regardless of intent, that the new rules will not have a discriminatory effect — based on race or color, or against a “language minority group,” including persons who are American Indian, Asian American, Alaskan Natives, or of Spanish heritage.

Editorials: Voting Rights Act Case Pits the Rights of Humans Against the ‘Sovereignty’ of States | Garrett Epps/The Atlantic

Shelby County v. Holder,  the Voting Rights Act case the Supreme Court will hear Wednesday, is a peculiar case.  Its oddity is this: no one on either side contests that Congress has the power to enact a provision like § 5, the provision at issue here. And no one on either side questions that § 5 does what it was designed to do: keep the ballot box and the political process open to formerly excluded minority voters.  The Act, in other words, isn’t broken.  Nonetheless, argue the plaintiffs, this key provision must be scrapped. To understand why, consider this sentence from the Petitioners’ Brief filed on behalf of Shelby County, Alabama: “determining whether the formula is rational in practice is not a substitute for testing it in theory.” “The formula” is the heart of § 5, the so-called “preclearance” provision of the Act.  As devised by Congress in 1965, the Act imposes a special requirement on states or parts of states that met two conditions during the 1964 election cycle. First, those jurisdictions employed a “test or device” for voting that had been shown to lead to racial exclusion from the vote; and, second, less than 50 percent of the eligible voters actually voted that year.

Editorials: Push to overturn Voting Rights Act tied to GOP voter suppression efforts | MSNBC

The Washington D.C. lawyer representing the Alabama county that wants to strike down the heart of the most effective civil-rights law in historyspecialize in cases aimed at making voting harder for minorities. William Consovoy also last year argued on behalf of Republican officials in Florida and Ohio, who in both cases were seeking to significantly reduce the days allotted for early voting, which blacks take advantage of more than whites. Consovoy, a former clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, is a partner at Wiley Rein, a Washington, D.C., law firm that bills itself as the best in the country for election law. Bert Rein, one of the firm’s principals, also is listed on court documents as representing the plaintiffs. The Supreme Court will begin hearing arguments in Shelby County v. Holder Wednesday. And the involvement of Consovoy and Rein in the case, which challenges the constitutionality of a key part of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), underlines the extent to which it’s a product of the broader partisan voter suppression campaign pushed by Republicans last year in a failed attempt to defeat President Obama.

National: Supreme Court to weigh divisive voting rights case | CNN.com

Shelby County is booming. The Birmingham suburb is lined with strip malls, subdivisions, and small factories, in what was once sleepy farmland. The population has grown fivefold since 1970 to about 200,000. Change in this bedroom community is afoot, at least on the surface. But the federal government thinks an underlying threat of discrimination remains throughout Alabama and other parts of the country in perhaps the most hard-fought franchise in the Constitution: The right to vote. Competing voices in this county, echoes of decades-long debates over equal access to the polls, now spill out in a 21st century fight, one that has reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

National: Voting Rights Act faces Supreme Court challenge | CBS News

When he signed the federal Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson did not rely on understatement to express the significance of the legislation. “Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that ever been won a on any battlefield,” Johnson told members of Congress and dignitaries assembled in the Capitol’s rotunda. Standing beneath a large painting of the British surrender to George Washington at the Revolutionary War battle of Yorktown, and flanked by a statue of Abraham Lincoln, Johnson harkened back 350 years to the arrival of the first African-Americans at colonial Jamestown, Virginia, “in darkness and chains” as slaves. “Today, we strike away the last major shackle of those fierce and ancient bonds,” Johnson said. “Millions of Americans are denied the right to vote because of their color. This law will ensure them the right to vote.”

National: States Take Sides As Court Revisits Voting Rights Act | NPR

The U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments next week in a case that tests the constitutionality of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the law considered the most effective civil rights statute in American history. At issue is whether a key provision of the statute has outlived its usefulness. A staggering 49 friend of the court briefs have been filed, among them briefs from 11 states urging the court to either strike down or uphold the law. What is intriguing is that some of the states now arguing against the law were not troubled by its provisions just four years ago, the last time it was before the court. In 2009, a small Texas utility district challenged the so-called preclearance section of the law, which requires nine states, most of them in the South, and parts of other states like California and New York, to get advance approval from the Justice Department or a federal court in Washington before changing any voting laws or regulations. When the case got to the U.S. Supreme Court, only one state — Georgia — came out clearly against the law, claiming that the provision was unconstitutional. Alabama filed a brief echoing part but not all of Georgia’s arguments. Both emphasized that their respective states have changed dramatically since 1965, and asked the court to seriously consider the legality of the preclearance section, given its burden on covered states.

Editorials: Why we still need the Voting Rights Act | Rep. John Lewis/The Washington Post

On “Bloody Sunday,” nearly 50 years ago, Hosea Williams and I led 600 peaceful, nonviolent protesters attempting to march from Selma to Montgomery to dramatize the need for voting rights protection in Alabama. As we crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, we were attacked by state troopers who tear-gassed, clubbed and whipped us and trampled us with horses. I was hit in the head with a nightstick and suffered a concussion on the bridge. Seventeen marchers were hospitalized that day. In response, President Lyndon Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act and later signed it into law. We have come a great distance since then, in large part thanks to the act, but efforts to undermine the voting power of minorities did not end after 1965. They still persist today. This week the Supreme Court will hear one of the most important cases in our generation, Shelby County v. Holder. At issue is Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires all or parts of 16 “covered” states with long histories and contemporary records of voting discrimination to seek approval from the federal government for voting changes. The court is questioning whether Section 5 remains a necessary remedy for ongoing discrimination.

Editorials: Voting Rights Act Deserves More Judicial Deference than Indiana ID | Spencer Overton/ACS

Many who assert the U.S. Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder should uphold the preclearance and coverage provisions of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act disagree with the Court’s 2008 decision in Crawford v. Marion County Bd. of Elections that upheld Indiana’s photo identification requirement.  On the other hand, those who oppose Section 5 cite Crawford as a reason Section 5 is allegedly unconstitutional.  An honest reading of Crawford, however, provides five reasons the Court should now defer to Congress’s determinations regarding the coverage and preclearance provisions of Section 5. In Crawford, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Indiana ID requirement did not unconstitutionally burden the right to vote (the Court did not address whether ID discriminated on the basis of race).  The plaintiff in Shelby County seeks to undermine Congress’s authority under the 14th and 15th Amendments by making the novel claim that the coverage provision violates a “principle of state equality” — but the U.S. Constitution contains no such requirement.