"Let’s be clear about what has just happened. Five unelected, life-tenured men this morning declared..."

“Let’s be clear about what has just happened. Five unelected, life-tenured men this morning declared that overt racial discrimination in the nation’s voting practices is over and no longer needs all of the special federal protections it once did. They did so, without a trace of irony, by striking down as unconstitutionally outdated a key provision of a federal law that this past election cycle alone protected the franchise for tens of millions of minority citizens. And they did so on behalf of an unrepentant county in the Deep South whose officials complained about the curse of federal oversight even as they continued to this very day to enact and implement racially discriminatory voting laws.”

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On Voting Rights, A Decision as Lamentable as Plessy or Dred Scott. 

via The Atlantic.

“The Court,” Justice Ginsburg wrote [in her dissenting opinion], “makes no genuine attempt to engage with the massive legislative record that Congress assembled. Instead, it relies on increases in voter registration and turnout as if that were the whole story.” And then she proceeded to outline the countless ways in which racial discrimination in voting practices is alive and well in Alabama and other jurisdictions covered by the law. “The sad irony of today’s decision,” she wrote, “lies in its utter failure to grasp why the VRA has proven effective.” It has been effective, of course, because it has made it harder for vote suppressors to suppress the votes of minority citizens. No more and no less.

(via portiaofourchambers)