Litigating voter suppression laws was worth a try, but with today’s ruling in Brnovich vs. DNC which reaffirms Arizona’s voter-attack laws, I’m not surprised the SCOTUS conservatives rebuffed the challenge. Not at all.
I have other bad news. I think they’ll strike down any federal voting rights law just as casually. They already did it once. Efforts to litigate now would only pile on precedents. Therefore, I suggest we must undertake a long and arduous campaign for a Voting Rights Amendment. I know it looks like a long shot, but it’s the only remedy that will work now.
I urge this because the SCOTUS conservatives feel self-righteous about depriving people of the vote, and there’s no way they’ll budge, for these reasons:
1) the original Constitution doesn’t mention the right of the people to vote, this is serious, because
2) The Constitution gives the states practically the complete right to determine the rules for voting within their borders via the 10th Amendment;
3) the 15th Amendment is too weak a remedy for the first two points. It’s futile to prohibit voter discrimination when no other rules about voting have been defined;
4) Crucially, when they adopted the Constitution, the Founders themselves never intended there to be a universal right to vote; as a matter of historical record, they were opposed to it, from every region of the country;
James Madison wrote the Constitution, and clearly, he never intended for the US to have universal suffrage. Nevertheless, the notion was also barely a political theory then.
People believe the myth that our country was founded on democratic principles. No, it was founded in opposition to tyranny. Although democracy evolved in our system later, in 1789 almost all the Founders involved in the Constitution had in mind excluding some ethnic or economic groups from the vote. Of course, women were never considered.
That’s a matter of historical record, one that a conservative SCOTUS can and will always cite. The Conservatives on the court call themselves strict constructionists simply to protect racism and privilege under any and all other pretenses.
Here’s the legal and social divide we’re looking at: if a practice has a racial or gender-biased disparity, progressives will point at the obvious answer: racism and sexism. Conservatives, however, will always point to alternative explanations as the real reasons.
For example: if schools in minority neighborhoods are decrepit and poor at educating, liberals will point to racism as the reason. Conservatives will deny it, it’s all economics, they say. They then promote “school choice” and education vouchers to redress the “purely economic” disparity. Their solution will worsen the problem because it doesn’t even admit racism as the cause, and some-suspicious-how their solution “accidentally” gives the racists even more power.
That’s what the SCOTUS asshole contingent is doing here, and will do for any federal VRA. They’ll say, “Racism? What racism? No, it just has unintentionally biased results that are necessary evils despite the absolute good of the law’s intent.”
Sophistry, in other words. Since it's based on the Constitution being used as originally intended, the only way to fight it is to change the intent.
We need a VOTING RIGHTS' AMENDMENT.