National: Supreme Court decision on voting rights may leave law in limbo | The Washington Post

In calling for a rewrite of one of the nation’s most significant civil rights laws , the Supreme Court has demanded that the other two branches of government design a guarantee of racial equality that reflects the realities of the 21st century. But the real question is whether the political system, broken and polarized as it is, still has the capacity to take on such a challenge. The ruling, which said Congress must update the Voting Rights Act of 1965, noted that much has changed for the better since the original formulas were written requiring federal approval of even minor ­changes in election procedure for some states and jurisdictions. But the court also acknowledged that discrimination still exists and that rectifying it demands vigilance from Washington. Traditionally, voting rights is an area where presidents and lawmakers, mindful of history’s judgment, have proven capable of working together across party lines. The most recent reauthorizations of the Voting Rights Act were signed by Republican presidents, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. In 2006, not a single senator voted against the current version, while fewer than three dozen members of the House did.

National: States promise quick action after court voting ruling | ABC

Across the South, Republicans are working to take advantage of a new political landscape after a divided U.S. Supreme Court freed all or part of 15 states, many of them in the old Confederacy, from having to ask Washington’s permission before changing election procedures in jurisdictions with histories of discrimination. After the high court announced its momentous ruling Tuesday, officials in Texas and Mississippi pledged to immediately implement laws requiring voters to show photo identification before getting a ballot. North Carolina Republicans promised they would quickly try to adopt a similar law. Florida now appears free to set its early voting hours however Gov. Rick Scott and the GOP Legislature please. And Georgia’s most populous county likely will use county commission districts that Republican state legislators drew over the objections of local Democrats.

National: Rep. Jackson Lee looks to limit state redistricting after voting rights ruling | The Hill

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) is introducing legislation that would block states from rearranging their congressional districts until after a 10-year Census takes place, a reaction to the Supreme Court ruling striking down a key portion of the Voting Rights Act. “We cannot afford to sit back and watch our country move backwards — as legislators we must act,” Jackson Lee said Wednesday. “[B]ased on the Shelby case and its rationale, it is clear that Voting Rights Act is needed more than ever.” The high court on Tuesday struck down language in the act that establishes the criteria for determining which state and local governments must clear voting rules changes with the federal government, based on their history of having an under-representation of minority voters.

National: Lawmakers likely to push voting rights | The Hill

A House Republican who led the last push to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act exhorted lawmakers Wednesday to join him in bringing the law back to life. The day after the Supreme Court quashed the anti-discrimination statute, Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) urged lawmakers to cast aside their differences and restore the rejected provisions for the sake of voter protection. “The Voting Rights Act is vital to America’s commitment to never again permit racial prejudices in the electoral process,” Sensenbrenner, the second-ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said Wednesday in a statement.  “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.” Republican Reps. Steve Chabot (Ohio) and Sean Duffy (Wis.) also expressed support Wednesday for congressional action in response to the high court’s ruling.

National: Supreme Court ruling sets stage for voter ID battle | Politico.com

The Supreme Court decision Tuesday striking down a key plank of the Voting Rights Act dramatically eases the way for states to push through stricter voting laws — and the flurry of action could reverberate into 2014 and beyond. Some states such as Texas moved within hours of the landmark ruling to implement so-called voter ID laws — requiring voters to show valid identification before they can cast ballots — that had been on hold. Others, such as swing state North Carolina, are expected to pass legislation this year that could complicate Democrats’ chances in 2014 midterm elections. Democrats hope to use the issue to galvanize minority voters by accusing the conservative-leaning Supreme Court and Republican statehouses of turning back the clock on hard-won voting rights. But the effect of the actual statutes, in terms of preventing people from voting who show up to the polls without proper ID, could be “devastating and immediate,” said Penda Hair, co-director of the voting rights group Advancement Project.

National: Congress unlikely to act on voting rights ruling | USAToday

A divided Congress has no clear path to heed the call of Chief Justice John Roberts and President Obama to legislate in response to Tuesday’s 5-4 Supreme Court decision that invalidated a portion of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act. Reaction on Capitol Hill largely mirrored the court’s ideological divide: Democrats called for legislation to establish new formulas to determine whether states must get federal permission before instituting changes in voting practices, while Republicans were more reticent on the necessity to pass a new law. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said he would convene hearings next month to see what legislative recourse Congress can take. Leahy made clear his displeasure with the Supreme Court’s action to invalidate a law most recently reauthorized in 2006 with broad bipartisan support.

National: Court ruling clears way for election changes in South | USAToday

Mississippi’s top election official outlined plans on Tuesday to implement the state’s voter ID law, just hours after the Supreme Court struck down a Voting Rights Act provision that might have blocked the law. Until Tuesday’s court ruling, officials in Mississippi and other states with a history of discrimination were required under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to get “pre-clearance” from the Justice Department or a federal court before making any change to their voting procedures. But that ended when the court ruled that Section 4 of the 1965 law, which consisted of the formula used to determine which states and other jurisdictions should be subject to Section 5, is outdated and therefore unconstitutional. The 5-4 decision clears the way for more than a dozen states and jurisdictions to move ahead with tougher voter ID laws and other changes that before Tuesday would have been subject to the pre-clearance requirement.

Editorials: Current Conditions | Linda Greenhouse/New York Times

“While any racial discrimination in voting is too much,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. told us in Tuesday’s decision gutting the Voting Rights Act, “Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.” Well, here’s a current condition: the ink was barely dry on the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder when Attorney General Greg Abbott of Texas announced that his state’s voter-ID law, blocked by a federal court last summer, “will take effect immediately.” The Texas statute has the most stringent requirements of any voter-ID law in the country. The three-judge federal panel, pointing out in a 56-page opinion the several less onerous versions that the Legislature had rejected, found that the state had failed to meet its burden under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to show that the law wouldn’t have the effect of suppressing the minority vote. With his precipitous in-your-face move, the Texas attorney general may be doing us a favor, making clear that the court’s decision has real and immediate consequences. Welcome to the Roberts court’s brave new post-Voting Rights Act world.

Editorials: The Voting Rights Act: An End to Racism by Judicial Order | The New Yorker

Among the many things that can be gleaned from Tuesday’s Supreme Court decision eviscerating the Voting Rights Act is this: we live in an era of American history which is, if not actually post-racial, then officially post-racism. Race may still exist as a social reality—and so may racism—but no amalgamation of facts, studies, or disparities is sufficient to the cause of proving that there exists a system which produces inequality. In short: we have overcome whether the data agrees with us or not. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion:

In 1965, the States could be divided into those with a recent history of voting tests and low voter registration and turnout and those without those characteristics. Congress based its coverage formula on that distinction. Today the Nation is no longer divided along those lines, yet the Voting Rights Act continues to treat it as if it were.

Americans tend to imagine that the racial history of their nation is a steady line sloping upward; in truth, it looks more like an EKG. In that context, it’s unsurprising that a decision hobbling the Voting Rights Act could come in such close proximity to the first Presidential election in which the percentage of eligible voters who went to the polls was higher among blacks than among whites. Peaks in racial progress tend to come in concert with valleys of backlash.

Editorials: The Supreme Court’s Constitutional Hypocrisy | Ari Berman/The Nation

In his dissent in the Defense of Marriage Act case today, Justice Scalia wrote: “We have no power to decide this case. And even if we did, we have no power under the Constitution to invalidate this democratically adopted legislation.” Justice Roberts wrote in his concurrence: “I agree with Justice Scalia that this Court lacks jurisdiction to review the decisions of the courts below… I also agree with Justice Scalia that Congress acted constitutionally in passing the Defense of Marriage Act.” Yet that reasoning didn’t stop Justices Roberts and Scalia from striking down the centerpiece of the Voting Rights Act yesterday, a hugely important civil rights law that has been passed by Congress five times with overwhelming bipartisan approval. Why didn’t the court defer to Congress on the VRA, which has a far more robust Congressional history/mandate than DOMA? And how did Roberts and Scalia reach such contradictory conclusions in the different cases?

Editorials: Justice Scalia Hates Judicial Review, Except When He Doesn’t | Dashiell Bennett/The Atlantic

Earlier today, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a scathing dissent to the decision to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act, saying “we have no power under the Constitution to invalidate this democratically adopted legislation.” So why was it okay to take apart the democratically adopted Voting Rights Act just one day earlier? Scalia’s DOMA dissent was a blistering and angry on most of his fellow justices and their “legalistic argle-bargle.” He even went after Samuel Alito, who voted on his side. The crux of his argument was that the law — which passed in 1996 — was a legitimate act of Congress, and it’s not the job of the Supreme Court to tell everyone what every single law means. That’s a mistake that “spring[s] forth from the same diseased root: an exalted conception of the role of this institution in America.”

Editorials: Voting Rights Act Decision Poses a Crucial Test for Republicans | The Daily Beast

If you’ve read a magazine at any point in the last decade, then you’ve probably heard of the Stanford marshmallow test. A young child is placed at a table with a marshmallow and told that she can eat it now or wait a while and get an even better treat. The experiment is supposed to measure a child’s capacity for delayed gratification. The longer she can wait, the more likely it is she has good impulse control, and that is associated with better life outcomes, as measured by health and educational attainment. In overturning Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act—which sets down a formula for identifying which state and local governments have to preclear changes to voting law with the federal government—the Supreme Court has all but placed a huge marshmallow in front of the Republican Party. But instead of a sugary treat, it’s an opportunity to pursue harsh new restrictions on voting—the kinds of policies that would have been blocked under the Voting Rights Act before the court’s ruling.

Mississippi: Supreme Court decision gives Mississippi voter ID go-ahead | The Clarion-Ledger

A Supreme Court ruling Tuesday strips power over voting and election rules from the federal government and returns it to states such as Mississippi with discriminatory pasts. The court, in a 5-4 ruling, effectively eliminated the federal advanced-approval power over voting laws from the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Justice Department had used this “preclearance” power to shoot down the literacy tests, poll taxes, gerrymandering and more subtle measures that were used to inhibit minority voting. Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann said the ruling will allow him to “start today” on implementing a state voter ID law that had been awaiting federal approval. He said the new requirements should be in place for the June 2014 primaries.

South Carolina: Voting laws no longer require federal approval | The Island Packet

South Carolina and other areas with histories of discriminatory voting practices no longer need federal approval to change their voting laws — at least for now. That oversight ended Tuesday as the U.S. Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, ruling in the case of an Alabama county that sued the U.S. attorney general in 2010, arguing voting laws meant to prevent discrimination are outdated. In its 5-4 decision, the court struck down a formula that determined whether states or other jurisdictions should be required to get federal approval before making changes to their voting laws — based, in part, on their discrimination in the 1960s and ’70s.

Texas: Supreme Court ruling on Voting Rights Act could renew battle over Texas redistricting | Dallas Morning News

The Supreme Court decision striking down elements of the Voting Rights Act could lead to the Legislature implementing a 2011 redistricting plan that was deemed by federal judges to be discriminatory to Texas minority voters. Soon after Tuesday’s decision, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said that the state’s voter identification plan would immediately take effect, requiring voters to show a photo ID at the polls. “Redistricting maps passed by the Legislature may also take effect without approval from the federal government,” he said. A spokesman for Abbott, a Republican, confirmed he was talking about the 2011 redistricting plan, which is under appeal before the Supreme Court. That plan would give Republicans even more strength in the U.S. House and the Legislature.

Virginia: Governor: State in limbo on voting-law changes | The Washington Post

Gov. Robert F. McDonnell called Tuesday’s ruling on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 “a potentially monumental decision” with implications for Virginia, and he called on Congress to come up with a new formula to identify which states should now be covered. The commonwealth is one of nine states — mostly in the South with a history of discriminatory voting practices — subject to a key provision of the federal act. Under that section, states must obtain federal approval before changes are made to their voting laws. The court’s decision means Congress must issue new guidelines to decide which jurisdictions need pre-clearance before changing laws, and it’s unclear how the ruling would affect a Virginia measure requiring voters to present photo IDs to cast ballots. The law, which McDonnell signed in March, is scheduled to take effect for the 2014 elections and was subject to pre-clearance before Tuesday’s decision.

National: High court voids key part of Voting Rights Act | Associated Press

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that a key provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act cannot be enforced unless Congress comes up with a new way of determining which states and localities require federal monitoring of elections. The justices said in 5-4 vote that the law Congress most recently renewed in 2006 relies on 40-year-old data that does not reflect racial progress and changes in U.S. society. The court did not strike down the advance approval requirement of the law that has been used, mainly in the South, to open up polling places to minority voters in the nearly half century since it was first enacted in 1965. But the justices did say lawmakers must update the formula for determining which parts of the country must seek Washington’s approval, in advance, for election changes. Chief Justice John Roberts said for the conservative majority that Congress “may draft another formula based on current conditions.”

National: Supreme Court strikes down part of Voting Rights Act | NBC

The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the map that determines which states must get federal permission before they change their voting laws. Civil rights activists called the decision devastating, and a dissenting justice said it amounted to the “demolition” of the law, widely considered the most important piece of civil rights legislation in American history. The ruling, a 5-4 decision by Chief Justice John Roberts, leaves the future of the law deeply uncertain because it will be up to a sharply divided Congress to redraw the map, if it can agree on one at all. “In practice, in reality, it’s probably the death knell of this provision,” said Tom Goldstein, the publisher of SCOTUSblog and a Supreme Court analyst for NBC News. … Roberts cited census data showing that black voter turnout now exceeds white turnout in five of the six states originally covered by the law. “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,” Roberts wrote for the court.

National: After Supreme Court ruling, states see green light for voter ID laws | CNN

With the Supreme Court’s ruling Tuesday on the Voting Rights Act, Mississippi and Texas announced they’re ready to move forward with their controversial voter identification laws. Eleven states in the past two years have approved laws that would require voters to show identification at voting booths. But Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act required some of those states with a history of voter discrimination to get “precleared” by the federal government before making any changes to voting laws. A separate part of the law known as Section 4 relies on a federal formula to determine which states would be covered under that “preclearance” regime. Requests by Texas and Mississippi for clearance in their voter ID laws were pending with the federal government when the high court struck down the constitutionality of the act’s Section 4 on Tuesday, which also appears to have nullified Section 5.

National: Minority lawmakers call Voting Rights Act ruling a huge setback | Politico.com

Black and Hispanic lawmakers are infuriated by Tuesday’s Supreme Court decision striking down a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, calling it a huge setback for the political rights — and influence — of minority voters. These minority lawmakers believe there eventually could be an effort by Republican-controlled legislatures in some Southern states to challenge majority-minority congressional districts, threatening the power of African-Americans, Hispanic and minority lawmakers. Democratic leaders and rank-and-file members also see little chance that the current Congress — with its deep partisan divisions and GOP-controlled House — will do anything to address the high court’s ruling or the concerns of minority groups nationwide. “Today, an activist Supreme Court cynically legislating from the bench in Jim Crow style, engaged in an historic overreach, ignoring their own precedents and disregarding clear and convincing evidence of ongoing discrimination at the polls,” declared Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.).

Editorials: The Chief Justice’s Long Game | Rick Hasen/New York Times

In an opinion brimming with a self-confidence that he hides behind a cloak of judicial minimalism, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for a conservative Supreme Court majority in Shelby County v. Holder, cripples Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The court pretends it is not striking down the act but merely sending the law back to Congress for tweaking; it imagines that Congress forced its hand; and it fantasizes that voting discrimination in the South is a thing of the past. None of this is true. In the Shelby decision, we see a somewhat more open version of a pattern that is characteristic of the Roberts court, in which the conservative justices tee up major constitutional issues for dramatic reversal. First the court wrecked campaign finance law in Citizens United. On Tuesday it took away a crown jewel of the civil rights movement. And as we saw in Monday’s Fisher case, affirmative action is next in line, even if the court wants to wait another year or two to pull the trigger. Imagine striking down affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act in the same week!

Editorials: Supreme Court and the Voting Rights Act: Goodbye to Section 5 | Heather Gerken/Slate Magazine

The Supreme Court struck down the crown jewel of the Civil Rights movement today. Section 5 was the most powerful tool in the movement’s arsenal. Although I’m a law professor and thus supposed to be opining on the court’s decision and Congress’ potential response, I want to spend a little time mourning Section 5’s passing before hashing out the consequences. To understand why Section 5 was special, you have to know a bit about its history. The brutal attacks on civil rights marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge provided the push needed to pass the Voting Rights Act. When the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, almost no African-Americans were registered to vote in the Deep South due to brutal repression and sickening legal chicanery.  Civil rights litigators and the Department of Justice were doing their best to help. They filed lawsuit after lawsuit to make it possible for blacks to register. But every time a court deemed one discriminatory practice illegal, local officials would switch to another. Literacy tests, poll taxes, burdensome registration requirements—these techniques were all used to prevent African-Americans from voting. Southern voting registrars would even resign from their positions as soon as a lawsuit was on the cusp of succeeding, thereby sending the case back to square one. The Voting Rights Act aimed to change all of this.

Editorials: Shelby Commentary: What does the Court’s decision mean? | Richard Pildes/SCOTUSblog

I have called the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) a “sacred symbol” of American democracy.  For that reason, the Supreme Court’s momentous decision holding unconstitutional a part of the Act – Section 4, for short — that had continued to apply, nearly fifty years later, uniquely to the South, is itself laden with deep symbolic meaning.  But what is that meaning? In truth, the decision will express such radically different meanings to different people that we will not be able to forge common ground regarding even the threshold question of what the decision is “about.”  Starting from such irreconcilable symbolic places, any discussion of the actual opinions themselves will be almost beside the point.

Voting Blogs: My Initial Thoughts on the Shelby County Voting Rights Act Case | SpencerOverton.com

The preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act required that all or part of 15 states submit their election changes to federal officials for approval.  Today, five members of the Court ruled that the Section 4 coverage formula of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional and can no longer be used to require that areas preclear their election rules with federal officials.  The Court invalidated the coverage formula because the Justices believed the formula was based on outdated election data from the 1960s and 1970s. Today’s Supreme Court decision is a setback for democracy. Unfortunately, today’s decision gives politicians even more power to unfairly manipulate election rules and target Americans based on how they look or talk.  There is overwhelming evidence that unfair voting rules remain a very real threat—too many political operatives currently manipulate rules to diminish the voices of growing minority communities.

Mississippi: Voter ID law expected to be used by 2014 | The Sun Herald

Mississippi voters could have to start showing photo identification at the polls by the June 2014 federal primaries, Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann said Tuesday after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled certain state and local governments no longer need federal approval to change their own election laws or procedures. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 has required Mississippi and other areas with a history of racial discrimination, mainly in the South, to get clearance for changes as large as implementing a voter ID law to as small as relocating a precinct. Justices said the Voting Rights Act does not reflect racial progress made in the United States over the past 48 years, even after it was last renewed in 2006. They said the preclearance portion of the law can’t be enforced unless Congress comes up with a new formula to determine which state or local governments should be covered, based on what Chief Justice John Roberts called “current conditions” in the United States.

North Carolina: State Senator: Voter ID bill moving ahead with ruling | News Observer

Voter identification legislation in North Carolina will pick up steam again now that the U.S. Supreme Court has struck down part of the Voting Rights Act, a key General Assembly leader said Tuesday. A bill requiring voters to present one of several forms of state-issued photo ID starting in 2016 cleared the House two months ago, but it’s been sitting since in the Senate Rules Committee to wait for a ruling by the justices in an Alabama case, according to Sen. Tom Apodaca, R-Henderson, the committee chairman. He said a bill will now be rolled out in the Senate next week. The ruling essentially means a voter ID or other election legislation approved in this year’s session probably won’t have to receive advance approval by U.S. Justice Department attorneys or a federal court before such measures can be carried out. “I guess we’re safe in saying this decision was what we were expecting,” Apodaca said in an interview.

Texas: Texas rushes ahead with voter ID law after supreme court decision | guardian.co.uk

Officials in Texas said they would rush ahead with a controversial voter ID law that critics say will make it more difficult for ethnic minority citizens to vote, hours after the US supreme court released them from anti-discrimination constraints that have been in place for almost half a century. The Texas attorney general, Greg Abbott, declared that in the light of the supreme court’s judgment striking down a key element of the 1965 Voting Rights Act he was implementing instantly the voter ID law that had previously blocked by the Obama administration. “With today’s decision, the state’s voter ID law will take effect immediately. Photo identification will now be required when voting in elections in Texas.” The provocative speed with which Texas has raced to embrace its new freedoms underlines the high-stakes nature of the supreme court ruling. Civil rights leaders declared the judgment to be a major setback to the fight against race discrimination in the south that has been a running sore in the US since the civil war. “This is devastating,” the reverend Al Sharpton told MSNBC. Benjamin Todd Jealous, president of the NAACP, called the outcome “outrageous. The court’s majority put politics over decades of precedent and the rights of voters. We are more vulnerable to the flood of attacks we have seen in recent years.”

National: Justices to rule soon on 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 is afoot in this bedroom community, 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: Anticipation builds for Supreme Court ruling on Voting Rights Act | The Post and Courier

Joyce Ladner was a senior at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Miss., in the early 1960s when she failed the voter registration literacy test for the third time. But she said she already knew the registrar would not pass her because she was black. And aside from questions like, “How many grains of salt are in a quart jar,” one stood out to her and she knew her answer would not sit well with the registrar. “What are the characteristics of a good citizen?” she read. Her response: “One who follows just laws and disobeys unjust laws.”  Ladner later registered under a court order and helped others exercise that same right by working as a field organizer with her sister Dorrie Ladner and South Carolina native Cleveland Sellers in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). On Aug. 6, 1965, after years of tumultuous violence and lives lost, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act.

National: Eliminating problems at polls goal of presidential commission | The Clarion-Ledger

A presidential commission set up to address long lines and other problems at the polls will turn to voters, local officials and researchers in crafting a plan to improve election systems. The Presidential Commission on Election Administration, created by President Barack Obama early this year, will hold a public hearing Friday in Miami followed by hearings in Denver on Aug. 8, Philadelphia, Pa., on Sept. 4 and an unspecified city in Ohio on Sept. 20. The commission held its first public meeting Friday in Washington. “Our goal… is to keep attention very active on this issue,” said Robert Bauer, co-chairman of the commission and general counsel to Obama’s 2012 campaign. “Please help us ferret out the information that we need.” The hearings come as public attention turns to major voting issues.