Category Archives: Voting Rights Act

That’s the suggestion in this New Yorker piece.

Wow:

The grilled shrimp appetizer had just arrived at the 128th annual press-pols Gridiron dinner Saturday night when NAACP President Benjamin Jealous fell into conversation with a fellow white-tied dinner guest about the Supreme Court’s recent argument over the Voting Rights Act.

The distinguished-looking gentleman told Jealous he thought the NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyer, Debo P. Adegbile, had done a fine job arguing that the law needed to be continued.

Sure, but what happened to the solicitor general? Jealous wondered aloud, he was just awful.

Well, I am the solicitor general, Donald Verrilli Jr. replied.

Linc Caplan uses the incident to defend Verilli, and to argue that Justice Kennedy might like his “as applied” argument in the Shelby County case

CLC press release.

David Cole on Shelby County.

At this link.  Tomorrow, you should be able to use the same link to find event video.

Extensive posting from Armand Derfner.

David Gans blogs.

The Mirage of Racism: “Under the VRA as it currently stands, we have too much federal intervention too soon, for too long, and for too little cause. The Supreme Court should strike the VRA down and let Congress return to the drawing board for something better.”

More from Doug Kendall (and Ryan Woo).

Details here on what looks like a great event.

“I think by the time the debate is concluded, there will be a very bipartisan consensus that if there is an amendment needed to Section 5 to keep it viable, the votes will be overwhelming.”

—Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, on what will happen if the Court strikes down the coverage formula for Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby County case.

Bloomberg Businessweek: “At a sensitive and historic moment in racial relations in the U.S., late-night comedian Bill Maher has offered some of the most provocative commentary on the future of civil rights. I will explain.”

Texas Redistricting analyzes.

HuffPo: “If the Obama administration needs a plan to deal with the likely death of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, it may be able to dust off its blueprint from 2009….Unbeknownst to the public, President Barack Obama’s administration had prepared a statement from Attorney General Eric Holder for the possibility that the court would strike down Section 5. Officials were so surpised the court didn’t toss out the section, in fact, that an alternative Holder statement — praising the ruling as a ‘victory for voting rights in America’ — had to be written the day of the decision. A written statement wasn’t the only thing the administration did to prepare for a possible adverse court ruling in 2009. Greg Craig, the White House counsel at the time, recalled that his team “worked close with, kept track of, commented on, and met with an internal DOJ task force” on the Voting Rights Act issue. Other officials confirmed that there was a Voting Rights Working Group made up of both Justice Department and White House officials, and records show Holder was briefed by the group roughly a month before the Supreme Court decision.”

The New Yorker reports.

NYT:  “Emerging from the bloody protests in Selma, Ala., the Voting Rights Act was initially heralded as a declaration that the federal government would no longer tolerate the open racism of the segregated South. But this narrow mandate to monitor elections in six Southern states grew quietly over the years, extending to unexpected corners of the country, including the Bronx.”

The Nation:

On Sunday, March 3, Representative John Lewis locked arms with Luci Baines Johnson and Vice President Joe Biden and marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge here. Forty-eight years earlier, on “Bloody Sunday,” Lewis was badly beaten by Alabama state troopers at the foot of the bridge while attempting to march from Selma to Montgomery in support of voting rights. Eight days later, Luci’s father introduced the Voting Rights Act before a joint session of Congress. “When Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965,” Lewis said, “he helped free and liberate all of us.”

Amy Howe: “That leaves, as it so often does, the vote of Justice Kennedy.  And although at least one of his questions has been interpreted as signaling support for the law, for the most part his comments and questions left the overwhelming impression that he too would be inclined to rule in favor of Shelby County.”

Carvin, Hebert, Thernstrom and Lindenbaum discuss Shelby County at GW Law, moderated by Spencer Overton.  Unfortunately closed to the press.

Here.

Nate Silver: “As much as it pleases me to see statistical data introduced in the Supreme Court, the act of citing statistical factoids is not the same thing as drawing sound inferences from them. If I were the lawyer defending the Voting Rights Act, I would have responded with two queries to Chief Justice Roberts. First, are Mississippi and Massachusetts representative of a broader trend: do states covered by Section 5 in fact have higher rates of black turnout on a consistent basis? And second, what if anything does this demonstrate about the efficacy of the Voting Rights Act?”

Her Opinionator column concludes:

The Roberts court stands on the brink of making an error of historic proportions. A needless and reckless aggrandizement of power in one case to satisfy the current majority’s agenda will erode the court’s authority over time.

But there was no sign from the majority last week of an appetite for stepping back this time, as the court did in its last confrontation with Section 5 four years ago. Justice Scalia – he who flaunts his refusal to join any portion of any opinion that cites legislative history – returned repeatedly to his view that manifest Congressional support for the Voting Rights Act was somehow illegitimate, not to be taken at face value. The problem was, he said, that members of Congress “are going to lose votes if they do not re-enact the Voting Rights Act.”

Justice Scalia, that’s called democracy.

Or it was.

Ilya Shapiro weighs in on the Chief Justice’s remarks in the Shelby County case, concluding: “To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Massachusetts is a hotbed of racism and should be subject to Section 5.  Instead, I’m saying that Mississippi – the whole broader South – has changed, obviating the need, and therefore constitutional justification, for Section 5.”

Jon Stewart for his part weighed in on Northern racism: “Yeah, we’ve been to Boston.”

HuffPo: “Whatever Scalia’s talents as a jurist, those skills do not include vote-counting in the United States Senate. The Huffington Post asked a sampling of Senate Republicans and found that, contrary to Scalia’s presumption, some of his legislative branch colleagues across the street are just as ready as he is to toss out the heart of the Voting Rights Act, its Section 5, which prevents states with a history of racial discrimination from altering their voting laws without federal approval.”

Here.

Read this.

[Bumping to top---now out from behind the paywall]

The National Law Journal reports in an article (quoting Pildes, Persily, Fishkin, and me).

Marcia Coyle of NLJ also has written An Embattled Voting Rights Act.

David Dante Troutt has written this Reuters oped.

Lyle Denniston on Justice Scalia.

From Meet the Press interview:

Question: Do you believe that the Voting Rights Act is still needed?

Boehner: “Oh, I think the Voting Rights Act is passed with large majorities in the House and Senate. I think it’s something that has served our country well. But there is an argument over a very small section of the Voting Rights Act. And that’s what the court is going to consider.”

The following is a guest post from Chris Elmendorf and Doug Spencer:

Are the Covered States “More Racist” than Other States?  

Christopher S. Elmendorf

Douglas M. Spencer

 During oral argument last week in Shelby County v. Holder, the constitutional challenge to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, Chief Justice Roberts asked, “[I]s it the government’s submission that the citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the North?”  Solicitor General Verrilli responded, “It is not, and I do not know the answer to that . . . .”

This post offers a preliminary answer to the Chief Justice’s question, using recent data.  Our initial results suggest that the coverage formula of Section 5 does a remarkably good job of differentiating states according to the racial attitudes of their nonblack citizens.

There are essentially three schools of thought about how best to measure racial prejudice using survey questions.  Some researchers favor explicit measures of prejudice (“old-fashioned racism” or stereotyping), based on agreement with statements like “blacks are less intelligent than whites” and “blacks are lazy.”  Others favor symbolic measures of prejudice or “racial resentment,” based on questions about affirmative action and whether blacks have gotten “more than they deserve.”  Still others favor measures of implicit or subconscious bias.  For the results reported here we use explicit stereotyping, as it remains disputed whether racial resentment measures capture prejudice as opposed to conservatism, and it is uncertain whether implicit bias predicts political behavior.

We created a binary measure of stereotyping that roughly captures whether a person is more prejudiced toward blacks than is typical of nonblack Americans.  Our data source is the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES), which asked non-black respondents to rate their own racial group and blacks in terms of intelligence, trustworthiness, and work effort, on a scale of 0-100.  On average respondents ranked their own group about 15 points above blacks on each trait.  We coded respondents as holding “prejudiced” views with respect to blacks on a particular trait if the difference between their rating of their own racial group and their rating of blacks exceeded the national mean difference for the trait.  To create an overall measure of prejudice for each respondent, we summed the number of traits on which the respondent was more prejudiced than the national mean.  Finally, we converted this sum into a binary variable, coding as “prejudiced overall” those respondents who exceeded the national mean with respect to at least two of the three traits.[1]

To be clear, a respondent whom we have coded as “not prejudiced overall” may well be quite prejudiced.  But the Chief Justice’s question—whether “citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the North”—is a question about relative prejudice, and this is what we are trying to capture.

We provide two estimates of the proportion of adult, nonblack residents in each state who are “prejudiced overall.”  The first is based on simple disaggregation of the large NAES dataset (N=19,325).  This method should work pretty well for the largest states but may yield unreliable estimates for smaller states, which contribute relatively few respondents to the NAES sample.  For the second estimate we use multilevel regression with post-stratification (MRP), a recently developed statistical technique that has been shown to yield remarkably accurate estimates of state-level public opinion.  We model prejudice as a function of individual-level covariates (sex, race, age, and education) and a set of state-level predictors (black population, percent of blacks in poverty, segregation, and income inequality).

Using either technique we find a strong positive correlation between Section 5 “covered status” and anti-black prejudice, but with MRP the correlation is truly stunning:

The MRP model suggests that the six fully covered states in the South are, by our measure, six of the seven most prejudiced in the nation.  The two fully covered states that rank lower on the list, Arizona and Alaska, are presumably covered for reasons other than discrimination against blacks (anti-Latino discrimination in Arizona, and anti-Native discrimination in Alaska).

We wish to emphasize that these are preliminary results only.  Though our findings are not entirely unexpected, other ways of aggregating the NAES prejudice questions, or of modeling responses, may yield different rankings of the states (to say nothing of other ways of measuring prejudice).  We will present additional results at the Midwest Political Science Association conference in April.

Suffice it to say for now that the coverage formula seems defensible under the standard implicit in the Chief Justice’s questioning.  Or, to borrow a metaphor from Judge Williams of the D.C. Circuit, Congress appears to have “hit the bull’s eye throwing a dart backwards over its shoulder.”

Elmendorf is Professor of Law at UC Davis.  Spencer is a doctoral student in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at UC Berkeley.  Elmendorf contributed to an amicus brief on behalf of the respondents in Shelby County v. Holder.

HuffPo reports.

Transcript.

Really? with Seth and Kevin.  “The South is still the Michael Jordan of racism.”  VRA is a backup defender.

“I don’t think you get to say what’s outdated when you’re a small council of old people in robes who can’t be fired.”

via Amanda Becker and Kevin Collins.

NPR:

SIMON: Based on what was reported about the oral arguments, it seems like the Voting Rights Act might be in trouble.

TOTENBERG: I’d say dead meat. I’d be wildly astonished if Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, the [pre]clearance section, survives this iteration of legal arguments. And just four years ago, when the court upheld the Voting Rights Act, it held its nose and said, Congress, you better take a serious look at this law and see if the formula for who’s covered needs changing. And Congress, of course, didn’t change it. So, it was pretty hostile questioning from the conservative wing of the court. And that’s five justices I could count pretty clearly.

Justin Levitt posts the order and notes its possible significance, As Ryan Reilly reported, a conservative group tried to block the bailout.  Both sides are using the New Hampshire case to debate the fairness and necessity of continued section 5 coverage for parts of the country.

New George Will column.