The Robert's Court Seems Skeptical of the Need for Sec. 5 of the Voting Rights Act and Why They're Mistaken

Click the pics to watch two short videos

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Keep that in mind - stacking, cracking, and packing

According to the NYTimes Justice Kennedy seemed to be most skeptical and had difficulty differentiating between the institutional, cultural, and parochial differences in this country.

“No one questions the validity, the urgency, the essentiality of the Voting Rights Act,” he said. “The question is whether or not it should be continued with this differentiation between the states. And that is for Congress to show.”

Maybe I'm not smart enough to understand, but, I don't what one has to do with the other. They know that discrimination has, and is, taking place even now, and if anything he's arguing that all election procedures need to be looked at. And I would not argue that point when taking into account what happened in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004.

Here John Payton is president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund answers those questions and points out why Sec. 5 is still needed in the regions covered

... In 2006 Congress reauthorized Section 5 by overwhelming margins after holding 21 hearings, taking testimony from some 200 witnesses and experts and compiling a record of more than 17,000 pages. That record revealed that some 2,400 discriminatory changes in voting practices and procedures had been caught by the Section 5 process since it was last reauthorized in 1982 to 2006.

The point? If Section 5 had not existed, those 2,400 discriminatory changes would have gone into effect ...

Just to repeat, 21 hearings; 200 witnesses; a record more than 17,000 pages long; and 2,400 discriminatory changes prevented by Sec 5.

Chief Justice John Roberts seems to be as confused as Justice Kennedy when he asks ...

whether “today Southerners are more likely to discriminate than Northerners?”

That would seem to be a, "yes." If the court has difficulty with the fact that discrimination and politicization of the voting process still exists, they need only remember the discriminatory practices utilized by USAtt Jeff Sessions in the Southern District of Alabama, whose actions were so egregious that he was only the second man in 50 years to be rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee when he was nominated for the Federal Bench

Sessions was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama. The year before his nomination to federal court, he had unsuccessfully prosecuted three civil rights workers--including Albert Turner, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr.--on a tenuous case of voter fraud. The three had been working in the "Black Belt" counties of Alabama, which, after years of voting white, had begun to swing toward black candidates as voter registration drives brought in more black voters. Sessions's focus on these counties to the exclusion of others caused an uproar among civil rights leaders, especially after hours of interrogating black absentee voters produced only 14 allegedly tampered ballots out of more than 1.7 million cast in the state in the 1984 election. The activists, known as the Marion Three, were acquitted in four hours and became a cause célèbre. Civil rights groups charged that Sessions had been looking for voter fraud in the black community and overlooking the same violations among whites, at least partly to help reelect his friend Senator Denton.

After all that, I'm left with the same question as Adam Cohen

Why The Supreme Court’s Hostility to the Voting Rights Act?

FAQ from the DOJ's Voting Rights page