As Though Voting Elects a President

Under Section 5 [of the Voting Rights Act], and because of their thoroughgoing cleverness through the decades at devising strategies to deprive African Americans of their right to vote, several Southern states, including Texas, are required to obtain pre-clearance from the Department of Justice for any change in their voting procedures. Texas is challenging Section 5 and, through it, de facto, the entire enforcement mechanism of the VRA, which has been a burr under the butt of Southern states ever since they lost the right to segregate their societies in court.

To be sure, this is just another front in the national effort to suppress the vote that we've seen in many places, north and south. But the challenge to the VRA gives this particular case a certain urgency. The Supreme Court already has upheld a voter-ID law in Indiana, but Indiana is not one of the states covered under Section 5 and, thus, the provisions of the VRA were not in play in that case. The stakes are much higher here.

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Texas law [...] occasioned no little hilarity because, under its provisions, a college student ID is not valid for voting purposes, but a state gun license is.

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The 15th Amendment specifically protects the right to vote from actions "by any state." Only political considerations, and inexcusable institutional racism, allowed the states in question to behave the way they did for as long as they did. In 1965. because of the incalculable courage of people like John Lewis, and the indefatigable political will of Lyndon Johnson, those paper guarantees from 1870 were finally, as LBJ himself put it, "written in the book of law."

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It is unlikely that Section 5 — and, thus, the VRA — will fall in the current case, but several lawsuits challenging it seem fast-tracked to the next term of the United States Supreme Court, which earlier had expressed some skepticism over whether or not the disputed sections of the VRA were, in fact, constitutional.

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Sooner or later, it appears, the VRA is going to turn up in front of the Supreme Court and we'll see how liberal John Roberts really is.

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  Charlie Pierce

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.