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Posts Tagged ‘voting rights act’
August 26th, 2011 at 7:12 pm
Arizona Sues Feds Over Voting Rights Act

With its tough anti-illegal immigration law headed to the Supreme Court, the State of Arizona is opening up another legal front in its 10th Amendment tussle with Eric Holder’s Justice Department.  NBC News reports that the issue this time is the Voting Rights Act:

Arizona is challenging the law’s requirement that the state seek Justice Department approval for any changes in how elections are conducted. Many states are subject to the law’s pre-clearance requirement, generally to remedy past restrictions that discouraged minority voting.

“Arizona is still penalized for archaic violations that were corrected with the implementation of bilingual ballots prior to the 1974 elections,” said the state’s Attorney General Tom Horne. He noted that in 1974, Arizona became the second state to elect a Hispanic governor.

In his response, Attorney General Holder showed how tone deaf he is to any claim of federal overreach:

Vowing to fight the challenge, Holder said the provisions challenged in this case, including the pre-clearance requirement, “were reauthorized by Congress in 2006 with overwhelming and bipartisan support. The Justice Department will continue to enforce the Voting Rights Act, including each of the provisions challenged today,” he said.

So, a law is constitutional because Congress reauthorized it with “overwhelming and bipartisan support”?  There isn’t a justice on the Supreme Court who has let that kind of vapid thinking dissuade him or her from overturning a law.

If that’s the best defense Holder can muster, Arizona may have found the perfect foil to (unwittingly) help it downsize the federal government.

June 1st, 2011 at 4:20 pm
Will Lefties Finally Abandon Racial Gerrymanders?

NRO today reports the amazing news, via this blog post by Roger Clegg and Hans von Spakovsky, that the Atlanta J-C’s columnist Cynthia Tucker is having second thoughts about racial gerrymandering. Glory be! The big question is, will the rest of the Left follow suit, thus enabling all of us to end this pernicious practice even though the Obama-Holder Justice Department remains radically wedded to it and to related legal stances? Abigail Thernstrom wrote a great piece (one of many on this topic she has written through the years) at NRO last month.

I have been writing on this and related Voting Rights Act Section 5 issues for at least ten years now (I think even longer), and for what it’s worth I thought I’d share some of those pieces (some of which I acted as lead drafter of, on behalf of full editorial boards, whose opinions they represent rather than being my own personal columns). Here and here and here and here and here are some of them. Oh, and if you read ANY of them, please read this one, because it addresses the issue most directly.