Supreme Court Buries Section 5 of Voting Rights Act
The Supreme Court has decided Shelby v. Holder. It is one of the most important decisions in decades.
Now, federal preclearance of state election procedures seems to be forever dead and buried. While some congressional Republicans had vowed to enact new legislation to “fix” any coverage formula deemed unconstitutional, the opinion today offers almost no room to do so. They would have to decide what’s more important: the Republican Party, or the Constitution?
Section 5 required states to obtain preclearance approval for any change involving elections — any change, even moving a polling place 20 feet. Only 15 states were covered by Section 5, including hotbeds of Jim Crow like Michigan, New York, and Alaska.
Over the years, the Justice Department unit enforcing Section 5 has had hundreds of thousands of dollars in court sanctions imposed against it for abusing the Section 5 process. They even demanded that Alabama submit felon DNA testing to the Justice Department for approval, a law which had nothing to do with elections.
Now, voter ID laws in Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi are in effect after a delay of years. Section 5 is dead and gone, and congressional Republicans, no matter how much racialist false witness is lobbed at them, simply have no ability to resurrect the law. Will the GOP defend itself against the already-commenced false racial attacks following the decision, or will they cave?
This decision restores the original post-15th Amendment balance to the Constitution. The opinion quoted the Tenth Amendment, and the Supreme Court asserted the core function of our federal system — to preserve liberty:
But the federal balance “is not just an end in itself: Rather, federalism secures to citizens the liberties that derive from the diffusion of sovereign power.”










Naa. We want everyone to vote, we just want them to be alive when they do it and just do it once.
If the twenty-first amendment overrules the eighteenth, and the twelfth overrules the Constitutional language about the election of the President, then the fifteenth trumps the tenth just by the plain language.
I can agree that the first through tenth amendments could be considered co-equal and require some balancing to get right, and arguments about where that balance should be are germane. But the fifteenth amendment clearly says that the Congress, not the States or the People, have the power to address discrimination in the ability to vote. No balancing with prior Constitutional text or Constitutional Law should be considered, nor permitted.
Subotai Bahadur
The US Supreme Court decision Crawford v. Marrion County provides a precedence for what kind of voter ID law is constitutional. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawford_v._Marion_County_Election_Board Clone the Indiana law and you're golden. It's now much more difficult for the Obama administration to delay until after 2014 the implementation of the voter ID laws, restrictions on absentee voting, changing hours polls are open, etc.