Thursday, February 28, 2013

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is a racist

Yes, it's a bold claim. So what's the evidence? Per Rachel Maddow's usual fine reporting I learned Scalia said that the Voting Rights Act, which is now before the Supreme Court, is some kind of "racial entitlement." People in the Court actually gasped and for good reason. The right of a black person to vote is an entitlement? I thought the right to vote was a right for everyone, not some special entitlement. So let's follow Maddow's historical journey on why the Act was created.


There was a time in US history, particularly in the south, when even though blacks had voting rights they were put to onerous tests to do so that were not put to whites. So the federal government had to step in to enforce voting laws in those places. And Congress created the Act to require that any changes to voting laws must pass Federal muster so as to prevent the kind of abuses for which they past behavior was infamous. And time and again, when the Act expired and came up for another vote, it passed, the last time being 2006 when it got a unanimous Senate vote. Unanimous. And this was after the Senate studied thousands of pages of evidence and debated it for 10 months. And they concluded that the Act was still necessary in those States because racism was still rampant enough to want to prevent blacks from voting.

The attorney arguing for rescinding the Act said he thinks the problems that caused its inception are now resolved. He actually said that. Has he not seen the numerous voting laws being passed in regressively controlled legislatures that are doing the very things the Act was designed to prevent? They are making it more and more difficult for minorities to vote with ID laws, reducing voting days and hours, purging voting roles and on and on. All in the last 2 years. This should provide ample proof that not only is the conditions that caused the inception of the Act not resolved, they are rearing their head again en mass in many other States outside those controlled by the Act.

If  anything the Act should be extended to those States as well to protect a Constitutional right for all. But not in regressive minds. No, they do not want some people to vote, they really don't. And they have the majority of the Supreme Court and a basic civil right for which we have heretofore been the proud recipients is on the verge of being overturned. This is the worst kind of a travesty of injustice, and at the hands of what is supposed to be a Court that protects our rights. Abominable and blatant racism indeed, at the very pinnacle of Justice. My how we have fallen, and hard.


1 comment:

  1. Scalia actually meant to say that the Voting Rights Act infringes on HIS racial entitlement.

    ReplyDelete

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