The five arch-reactionaries would not dare to hand down such a ruling if they were not encouraged as well by the cowardice and complicity of American liberalism and the Democratic Party, which have gone along with sweeping attacks on democratic rights. None of these spent forces will lift a finger to defend the democratic rights of the people.
The claim by Roberts that there is no longer any significant racial discrimination in the states targeted by the Voting Rights Act is patently false. These states, particularly in the Deep South, remain among the most politically reactionary and backward in the US, with the highest rates of executions, the worst conditions of life for the masses, and incessant efforts to curtail the right of workers and minorities to vote.
The dissenting opinion written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and signed by three other justices, had no difficulty citing a mass of empirical evidence of ongoing racially-motivated discrimination, including efforts to purge the rolls of black voters, the redrawing of electoral boundaries to eliminate black office-holders, and the moving of polling places to make it harder for blacks to vote.
Ginsburg noted the character of the plaintiff, Shelby County, Alabama, in the suburbs of the city of Birmingham, one of the key battlegrounds of the civil rights era. The majority opinion made no attempt to explain why federal oversight of Shelby County should be ended, nor could it since both the county and towns within it have repeatedly been sanctioned under the Voting Rights Act for discriminatory practices, as recently as 2008.
As for the claim by the majority that the Voting Rights Act had become outmoded by social progress in the South, Ginsburg pointed out that the law was designed to be flexible and included a bailout mechanism allowing states to leave federal oversight if they went ten years without being successfully sued for discrimination. Not one of the states covered by the law has attempted to qualify, although hundreds of cities, counties and smaller jurisdictions have done so.
Ginsburg also made short work of the claim that the Voting Rights Act formula amounts to "unequal treatment" of the states, pointing out that this is commonplace in federal laws, from appropriations bills that award funding disproportionately to small and rural states to laws that apply to only a single state (as in provisions covering disposal of nuclear waste).
The dissent underscored the fact that the court majority is engaged, not in rational argument and analysis, but in pushing toward a predetermined goal, using whatever pseudo-legal verbiage might fill the bill.
Scalia voiced the sentiments of this majority when he sneered during the oral arguments in the case that Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act in 2006 only because of "a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement."
The attack on the right to vote is not fundamentally a racial issue. It is part of an assault on the democratic rights of the entire working class. Dozens of states in recent years have enacted voter ID laws and other anti-democratic provisions in a deliberate effort to make it harder for the poor, the elderly, and students to vote.
There is a definite class logic behind this campaign: the American ruling elite is well aware that its policies of militarism and social austerity are opposed by the vast majority of the population. Opinion polls show only 15 percent support the Obama administration's drive to war in Syria, and even fewer back cuts in Social Security, Medicare and other social benefits. To carry through the reactionary program of the financial aristocracy requires dispensing with democratic forms of rule.
The 5-4 ruling to wipe out a crucial legal guarantee of the people's right to vote comes barely a decade after a similar political milestone: the 5-4 ruling that ratified the theft of the 2000 presidential election and installed the loser of the popular vote, George W. Bush, in the White House.
From Bush v. Gore to Shelby County, the Supreme Court has lost all credibility in the eyes of the people. It deserves neither deference nor respect. The defense of democratic rights requires the development of a mass popular movement of working people and youth in opposition to the entire political establishment, its two-party system, and the capitalist state institutions they defend.
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