C*******r
发帖数: 10345 | 1 The U.S. has a long and difficult history with racial discrimination, but on
Tuesday the Supreme Court marked a milestone worth celebrating when it
ruled that a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act has outlived its
usefulness. The political left is reacting as if this means a return to Jim
Crow, but the ruling is best understood as a sign of the racial progress
that progressives claim to believe in.
In a 5-4 decision, the Justices said that the law's Section 4b coverage
formula—which requires that nine states and parts of seven others get
federal preclearance of changes to their voting laws—can no longer be
constitutionally justified.
"Our country has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is
too much," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority in Shelby
County, Ala. v. Holder, "Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes
to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions." The Constitution
requires that the federal government treat states equally, and the Voting
Rights Act's selective restrictions were only warranted under extraordinary
circumstances. "Current burdens," Justice Roberts wrote, quoting a previous
case, must be justified by "current needs."
Those needs certainly existed in 1965, when Southern states used poll taxes,
literacy tests and other schemes to discourage minority voting. In 1966,
the Supreme Court upheld the law's disparate treatment of some states in
South Carolina v. Katzenbach, but even then it made clear that the remedies
were constitutional only because of blatant discrimination and historic
circumstances.
The law "may have been an uncommon exercise of congressional power," the
Court wrote, but "legislative measures not otherwise appropriate" were
justified by "exceptional conditions."
Yet as Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the Court, "history did not end in
1965." In the 48 years since, those Southern barriers to voting have
disappeared. The proof is that black and white voter registration and
turnout are nearly even in the "covered" states and districts. By 2009, the
racial voting gap was lower in preclearance states than in the rest of the
country. As Chief Justice Roberts noted, Census data show that black voter
turnout is now higher than white turnout in five of the covered states.
The High Court previously described all of this progress in a 2009 case, but
in the habit of this restrained Roberts Court stopped short of overturning
Section 4 and invited Congress to revise its formula. Congress ignored that
warning, and this time the Court followed through on its constitutional
logic and ordered Congress to rewrite its preclearance formula to reflect
current reality.
In practical terms, this will be very hard for Congress to do without
including the entire country in its map of voting discrimination. As the
Chief Justice noted in oral argument in Shelby County, the state with the
largest gap between white and black voter turnout is Massachusetts. Congress
will have to explain why the Bay State deserves to be treated better than
Mississippi, where black turnout exceeds white turnout.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg issued a passionate dissent for the four
liberals, but her arguments did more to help the majority. Even she had to
concede that great racial progress has been made. So her opinion amounted to
an argument that covered states might return to the bad old days, with
little evidence of current anti-minority practices.
She dismissed the fact that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act continues to
bar discriminatory voting practices, and that the Justice Department can sue
to stop them. She even claimed that Section 4 is needed to reduce racially
gerrymandered legislative districts, yet Section 4 is now used by Members of
Congress to justify racial gerrymandering.
This latter reality helps to explain the over-the-top reaction to Tuesday's
ruling among Democrats, who exhumed their "roll the clock back" metaphors.
They still can't let go of the politics of racial polarization that gets
them re-elected in gerrymandered majority-minority districts. If Democrats
were smart, they'd realize that racial gerrymandering helps House
Republicans by making so many fewer districts competitive.
President Obama was especially disappointing, showing himself once again to
be a divider, not a uniter. He declared in a rare public comment on the High
Court that the decision "upsets decades of well-established practices" to
keep voting fair in areas where "voting discrimination has been historically
prevalent." So the country that has twice elected an African-American to
the highest political office must in his telling be forever locked into a "
Mad Men" time warp.
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Far from a civil-rights defeat, Tuesday's ruling is a triumph of racial
progress and corrective politics. The Voting Rights Act was designed to
eliminate barriers to minority voting, and it succeeded as well as any
modern law. You'd think that liberals who claim to believe in human progress
would recognize progress when it occurs, rather than assume that whatever
is is right. | c******i
发帖数: 4091 | 2 米弟高法向来不是主持正义的机构，只是记录文明进步的档案馆。
高法原来说黑人和妇女不算人不能投票，现在是维护肤色票蛆投票欺诈。 |
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