I am going to take a look at a fairly representative right-wing way of looking at the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in Shelby County v/ Holder. It’s part dishonesty and part self-delusion. The author is Jonathan Tobin who writes for Commentary. He begins by accusing the left of hyperbole.
Listen to the hue and cry from liberals over the Supreme Court’s decision today in Shelby County v. Holder and you would think the conservative majority had just overturned Brown v. Board of Education or declared discrimination on the basis of race to be legal. Of course, the 5-4 decision on the future of the Voting Rights Act did nothing of the kind.
As i pointed out in a prior post, Justice Ginsburg’s dissent discusses the Congressional Record from 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act. Congress discovered roughly 1,800 instances between 1982 and 2006 in which areas covered by Section 4 of the Act were prevented from enacting voting laws that were discriminatory in nature. That averages out to 67 attempts to discriminate per year, every year, for 24 straight years.
