Voting Rights Appear Doomed; Our Country Remains Ours', If We Want It

Voting Rights Act of 1965: "To enforce the
fifteenth amendment of the Constitution of the
United States, and for other purposes."

Madison, Wisconsin — The United States Supreme Court demonstrated anew the institution is a naked political force intent on ending protections for Americans' foundational right to cast their vote.

The Roberts Court did well for itself this week in Brnovich v Democratic National Committee.

Voting rights, our voting rights, fared poorly, as the Court makes clear that legal claims that our rights are violated, per the Voting Right Act protections, will be met with great skepticism, even judicial hostility.

Rights? Liberties, you say, in federal court? Ha.

Chief Justice John Roberts is a veteran political operative.

No doubt this Summer he is all smiles after a milestone of his political campaign, eight years after five Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated critical sections of the Voting Right Act in Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder in 2013, and other cases contriving the end of racism has arrived in America, Ricci v. DeStefano (07-1428 & 08-328).

Let's not forget how we arrived here.

Identity politics in all of its madness bequeathed to us this ridiculous Court, a legislative-executive branch creating law made-up by nine people, or in Brnovich, six.

After the Democratic National Committee rigged the 2016 Primary, Hillary Clinton won the nomination as the most unpopular nominee in recent history. You see, Democrats would rather virtue-signal than win.

That's three nominees to the high court delivered to a White House lunatic, including Ruth Bader Ginsberg who made the idiotic decision to stay on the Court, as liberals celebrated her "obstinacy as a sign of female empowerment," as noted by Shant Mesrobian.

The evisceration of the Voting Rights Act by our country's supreme branch of government towering over the other two branches, now forces field and policy work despised by the Democratic Party.

The Democratic Party three main constituencies are corporate largess, law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

All three interests make exorbitant claims their interest alone should predominate over the American government.

Now, a branch of government, the judiciary, that declares itself supreme in its holdings nullifies even the ratification rights of the peons whose liberty interests lurks in the shadows of the powers that be.

Happy Independence Day 2021.

Happy MLK Day, A Dream Deferred

Martin Luther King speaks in Memphis for labor
the day before his assassination in 1968

Happy Martin Luther King Jr Day, 2015

"The Voting Rights Act of 1965 employed extraordinary measures to address an extraordinary problem. ... This was strong medicine, but Congress determined it was needed to address entrenched racial discrimination in voting, 'an insidious and pervasive evil which had been perpetuated in certain parts of our country through unremitting and ingenious defiance of the Constitution.'" [South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U. S. 301, 309 (Chief Justice Warren, 1966)] ....

There is no denying, however, that the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions." (Chief Justice John Roberts, Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder et al (2013))

With these words Justice Roberts declared against that "conditions" caused by the the "insidious and pervasive evil," i.e.: racism, are no longer present.

What world do John Roberts and the Republicans Party live in?

Certainly not reality world.

The national party of de facto segregation today, openly hostile to civil rights and voting rights, maintains its war against ethnic minorities.

One hopes for a revival of the civil rights movement. (New York Times, MLK Day, 2015)

Wrote Justice Ginsberg in dissent in Shelby County, "In the Court’s view, the very success of §5 of the Voting Rights Act demands its dormancy. Congress was of another mind. Recognizing that large progress has been made, Congress determined, based on a voluminous record, that the scourge of discrimination was not yet extirpated. The question this case presents is who decides whether, as currently operative, §5 remains justifiable,¹ this Court, or a Congress charged with the obligation to enforce the post-Civil War Amendments “by appropriate legislation.” With overwhelming support in both Houses, Congress concluded that, for two prime reasons, §5 should continue in force, unabated. First, continuance would facilitate completion of the impressive gains thus far made; and second, continuance would guard against backsliding."

It's apt that the gutting of the Voting Rights Act should come in a case arising from rural Alabama.

The fight for equality live on. In King's words:

I have a dream today! I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of ‘interposition’ and ‘nullification’ -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today! I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; ‘and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.’

This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

Not free this day in 2015. The struggle continues. From April 3, 1968 in Memphis:

The Voting Rights Act to be Argued in February before U.S. SC

Racism is gone from America?

The Voting Rights Act enacted in 1965 is set to be Argued in February before the United States Supreme Court in Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder.

Few are optimistic that the Roberts Court will not take a sledgehammer to this pillar of the modern civil rights movement.

To no one's surprise the case pits those who are pro-voting and pro-democracy against the those who cannot stand the thought that black, brown and yellow Americans are hitting the voting polls at what they view as alarming rates.

Elections are for white Americans; proper, land-owning, white Americans.

Jeffrey Toobin sums up the case in The New Yorker.

No Republican, including those who voted for the Voting Rights Act's reauthorization in 2006, has spoken up and defended the Act against the judicial targeting by the Roberts Court.

Congress reauthorized the act by votes of 390 to 33 in the House and 98 to 0 in the Senate in 2006 for an additional 25 years.

In the 2009, the Roberts Court invited the challenge (Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder) now before the Court in another attack on non-Republican Americans.

As Toobin notes in 2009, "Even more than (Justice) Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party."

Roberts' Court Decides Issues Not Asked in Body Blow to Organized Labor

Update: In a related article on how First Amendment doctrine is being created for Corporate America by academic shills such as Eugene Volokh, Martin Redish, and Kathleen Sullivan, see How Top Law Professors Are Working to Expand Corporations’ Constitutional 'Rights.' (Rosenfeld. AlterNet; June 18, 2012)

As the nation's top appellate court, the U.S. Supreme Court under chief justice John Roberts again has taken upon itself its power to cast its political vision onto cases where the litigants do not present the issues upon which Roberts decides to cast judicial fiat in yet another 5-4 case, Knox v. Service Employees (628 F. 3d 1115).

Justice Sotomayor concurs in a narrow judgement of the issues presented upon appeal and rightfully heaps judicial scorn upon Roberts and the GOP majority for its authoritarian overreach in its pursuit of partisan power:

I concur only in the judgment, however, because I cannot agree with the majority’s decision to address unnecessarily significant constitutional issues well outside the scope of the questions presented and briefing. By doing so, the majority breaks our own rules and, more importantly, disregards principles of judicial restraint that define the Court’s proper role in our system of separated powers.

Mitt Romney, corrupt GOP justices, Scott Walker and the Republican Party resemble a plundering Army.

Chief Justice 'Startled' by Gov Errors in Vets Cases

U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Renault, I mean Roberts, is shocked, shocked to find that screwing veterans is going on in here!

Justice Roberts said Monday he was "startled" to learn the government makes mostly errors in veterans' disability claim cases.

Just got this in via Dan Cedusky's Veterans Issues Newsletter. Dan cites Marcia Coyle's piece in the National Law Journal (Feb. 24, 2010) in which Coyle quotes Chief Justice John Roberts in oral arguments of a case, Astrue v. Ratliff (08-1322), heard Monday.

"Well that's really startling, isn't it? In litigating with veterans, the government more often than not takes a position that is substantially unjustified?," asks Chief Justice Roberts. Yes. This is really startling. From Coyle:

When he was in private practice at Hogan & Hartson, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. did not handle veterans' benefits claims. So, he understandably found "startling" information with which lawyers for veterans are only too familiar: In litigating with veterans, the government more often than not takes a position that is substantially unjustified.In oral arguments Monday in Astrue v. Ratliff, an attorney fee case under the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA), James Leach of Rapid City, S.D., told the Court that 42 percent of Social Security cases result in an EAJA attorney fee award.

'If it's 42 percent, that's quite a high number of cases in which the government's position is found substantially -- not substantially justified as well as legally erroneous,' Leach said. 'In veterans cases, it's even worse.'

The U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, which reports the number of EAJA awards granted annually, reported that for 2008 and 2009, 70 percent resulted in fee awards, Leach told the justices.

When Assistant to the Solicitor General Anthony Yang got up for his rebuttal in the case, Roberts interrupted him and the exchange went like this:

ROBERTS: Counsel do you -- do you dispute your friend's statement that 42 percent of the time in Social Security cases the government's position is unjustified, and 70 percent of the time in veterans' cases?

YANG: Well, I think that reflects the stakes often, Your Honor. Oftentimes the government does not contest, for instance, the $2,000 EAJA award and because it's the government, has to --

ROBERTS: So whenever it really makes a difference, 70 percent of the time the government's position is substantially unjustified?

YANG: In cases in the VA context, the number's not quite that large, but is a substantial number of cases at the court of appeals --

ROBERTS: What number would you accept?

YANG: It was, I believe in the order of either 50 or maybe slightly more than 50 percent. It might be 60. But the number is substantial that you get a reversal, and in almost all of those cases EAJA --

ROBERTS: Well that's really startling, isn't it? In litigating with veterans, the government more often than not takes a position that is substantially unjustified?

YANG: It is an unfortunate number, Your Honor. And it is -- it's accurate.

Bart Stichman, co-executive director of the National Veterans Legal Services Program, said he thinks the percentage is greater than the government’s number. 'That means the quality of decision-making at the Board of Veterans Appeals is not very good,' he said. 'We’ve been saying that for years. The number means not only did they wrongly decide the case but their position wasn’t substantially justified. Not too good.'