Op-Ed News: Supreme Court's plan to gut the Voting Rights Act

In Texas Case, Challenge to Rights Act founded on Obama's Election; Gutting Section 5 would remove Arizona from Justice Department Pre-Clearance.

Article by Mark Crispin Miller

This is but of the part of the Republicans' not-so-stealthy drive in preparation for the next election. There are also the voter ID laws winning passage in state after state.Through such measures they will do much better than expected (and, in fact,much better than they really did).

The hideous irony of all this is that the champions of both maneuvers--stripping Section 5 out of the Voting Rights Act, and passing voter ID laws--are using the election of Barack Obama to justify their actions. After all, since America has elected a black president, why do we need a Voting Rights Act, anyway? And the advocates of voter ID legislations are contending, incredibly, that such laws actually increased the turnout on Election Day. (Hans von Spakovsky actually made this case, in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Jan. 30.)

The Democrats had better get their act together; and that means way more than the Holt Bill, even if the latter could be much improved (about which more in a moment).

MCM

Read this March 28 Wall Street Journal article: A Showdown on Voting Rights
In Texas Case, a Divide Over How Far Minorities Have Come
And here is the rest of it.