Court hears challenge to Voting Rights Act
Conservative legal activists are set to renew their campaign to overturn
the nation's landmark Voting Rights Act, arguing before a federal
district judge in Washington on Wednesday that states and local
jurisdictions should no longer be forced to justify voting changes to
the Justice Department or a federal court.
The lawsuit, brought by officials in Shelby County, Ala., revives a
constitutional challenge aimed at the heart of the 1965 law, a challenge
that many analysts called the most important issue of the year when it
reached the Supreme Court in 2009.
The high court ultimately sidestepped the question, but not before Chief
Justice John G. Roberts, writing for the panel's ascendant conservative
majority, signaled a willingness to entertain future challenges,
writing, "Things have changed in the South."
U.S. District Judge John D. Bates of the District set 21/2 hours for
arguments Wednesday in the ceremonial courtroom of the E. Barrett
Prettyman Federal Courthouse in downtown Washington - four blocks from
the Supreme Court, where many observers expect the case ultimately to
wind up.
At issue is Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires federal
approval - or "pre-clearance" - for any changes in election laws or
redistricting decisions in nine states, mostly in the South, and parts
of seven others.
Congress overwhelmingly passed the law and the Supreme Court upheld it
to dismantle a system of poll taxes, literacy tests and other strategies
used for decades by white leaders in the deep South and elsewhere to
suppress registration and turnout by voting-age blacks.
Congress has reauthorized the law several times, most recently in 2006.
However, critics allege that lawmakers merely extended the law to the
same jurisdictions - for 25 years - without examining whether some
should be added or removed, or whether circumstances had changed in the
intervening four-plus decades.
"There can be no question that the VRA ushered in long-overdue changes
in electoral opportunities for minorities throughout the Deep South,"
attorneys for Shelby County wrote in the lawsuit, filed last April.
However, they wrote, "it is no longer constitutionally justifiable for
Congress to arbitrarily impose on Shelby County and other covered
jurisdictions disfavored treatment . . . without a legislative record
showing that [they] are still engaged in the type of 'unremitting and
ingenious defiance of the Constitution' that justified enactment of the
VRA in 1965."
The Justice Department, joined by intervenor defendants including the
Alabama State Conference of the NAACP and several minority voters,
countered that Congress held 21 hearings and collected 16,000 pages of
testimony to establish that the act is still needed. The department has
rejected or forced modifications since 1982 to 800 proposed changes by
covered jurisdictions, including 420 cases in which changes appeared to
be "intentionally discriminatory."
"Congress' considered judgment that racial and language minorities
remained politically vulnerable . . . is not only amply supported by the
legislative history but is entitled to deference by the courts," Justice
lawyers wrote in seeking to dismiss the case.
The Shelby case follows the Supreme Court's ruling in a test case
brought by a municipal utility district in Austin. The court in June
2009 avoided the underlying issue by ruling narrowly that such small
jurisdictions have the same right as states and counties to try
individually to "bail out" of Section 5's restrictive provisions.
Such "bailouts" are so cumbersome that since 1982 only 17 of 12,000
jurisdictions covered by the act - all of them in Virginia, including
Fairfax City - have won such exceptions. In any case, Shelby County is
not eligible, because it has run afoul of pre-clearance requirements on
two previous occasions.
Chief Justice Roberts noted in the 8-1 opinion that Congress's actions
"raise serious constitutional questions" about whether Section 5 is
still needed, or can be deemed a relic of the nation's past.
Voter turnout and registration rates for blacks and whites now "approach
parity," Roberts wrote. "Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal
decrees are rare. And minority candidates hold office at unprecedented
levels."
--
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/02/AR20110202063
03.html
Via InstaFetch
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