Senate The Supreme Court

The Supreme Court decided to raise the standard for affirmative action in colleges (7 to 1), but did not get rid of it or simply uphold the status quo. So, a pretty uncontroversial compromise for a ruling.

They have created an extra day to release rulings, tomorrow, and then I think the last day is Thursday. So I'm guessing it's the Voting Rights Act tomorrow, and then the two gay marriage cases on Thursday.

 

Sooooooooooooooooo

 

Aaaaannnnnnndddd


Every time I see your avatar, I think immediately of that really old Backstreet Boy. He was like 40 when the rest were in their teens and 20's.

 

How consequential is striking down that section of the Voting Rights Act? Can't people still sue the states if they enact unconstitutional voting changes? It seems that it simply changes the course of action from preventative to reactionary. And Congress could theoretically just update the formula too (though probably not anytime soon).

Also, the Supreme Court has changed its last day to tomorrow, so we can expect the DOMA and Proposition 8 cases then too (as well as a third case).

 

The issue not so much with the ruling itself, but the legal reasoning behind it.

Using the mantra "The country has changed", Roberts went on to state that Congress's failure to update the law served as grounds to invalidate it, since their "formula" was outdated.

Sounds pretty innocuous, until you realize in what other ways this type of legal reasoning can be applied. Will "Times have changed" be used to invalidate DOMA or Prop 8 tomorrow? I tend to doubt it, because the court can just as easily say times haven't changed "that much."

And how about Roe v Wade? If there were ever a framework that was outdated, then looking solely at trimesters when determining viability-a standard from an era of much more primitive medical technology-has certainly not kept up with science's ability to keep pre-term fetuses alive outside of the womb weeks earlier than existed back in the early 1970's. I don't know how far the Court will go when it comes to sexual and reproductive issues, but what they did today-issuing a technically narrow ruling with very broad and sweeping implications-allows them both to upend a decades-old law while sidestepping the charge of activism.

Of course, this court is one of the most activist in recent memory, just on the conservative side.

Elections matter, folks. I do not think it would have gone down this way had Sandra Day O'Connor still been where Samuel Alito now sits.

Peace,

V-03

 

Weak analogy. The formula was a temporal solution to a temporal problem. If the Court were as activist as you suggest, they would have all concurred with Thomas's dissent that Section 5 is unconstitutional. Whatever tension there is or isn't between DOMA and the Constitution isn't temporal at all.

 

Vaderize, the SCOTUS seems to take them one at a time and in their own fashion. I wouldnt be surprised if they didnt use the same "times have changed" justification for tomorrow's rulings.

 

If I understand him correctly ,That was Vaderize's point. He thinks "the times have changed" was a weak, intellectually vacuous argument that can be deployed at an activist judge's whim since it doesn't actually convey anything substantive.

 

Maybe. But he was concerned they would suddenly have some consistent "times have changed" movement within their ranks. I think they just make it up as they go.

 

Shifting the burden of proof is pretty huge. If they released a ruling that said from now on, murderers are presumed guilty instead of presumed innocent, would you ask "how consequential" the ruling was?

 

But what pragmatic effect does this ruling have?

And does anyone know under which article/amendment of the Constitution this was found to be unconstitutional?

 

Article make it up as we go in section grab something out of thin air that sounds smartypants.

 

It voids pre-clearance. It is technically still allowed, but seeing as there is no formula to designate which regions need it, it cannot actually be applied anywhere.

 

Obviously the Voting Rights Act is obsolete. States don't try to disenfranchise minorities anymore.

 

I don't know, Roberts strikes me as trying to be activist without looking activist.

He almost has a skill for it, but it's been wearing thin ever since Citizens United. This just cements it even more into place.

Peace,

V-03

 

Are Republicans trying to lose? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/25/ken-cuccinelli-sodomy-supreme-court_n_3498444.html

It's like they're committing slow-motion suicide. Abortion bills, gay rights issues, and so on. They're enthusiastically doing the opposite of what the 2012 election results told them to do. A lot of the base is still fighting immigration reform, and that includes a lot of representatives in the House.

You can be a Republican and see how monumentally stupid this is.

 

And this is what's going to be shoved in front of my TV screen this year (re: Cuccinelli). Gotta love the good ol' boys GOP politics in Va screwing over Va voters by - passing the primary process to get bat ***** crazy Cuccinelli on the ballot.

 

Yep. The best thing to do is try and solve immigration. And if you don't like the Senate bill, well, you are in the House and can vote on your own and try and craft one that has tighter enforcement mechanisms in place.

But, they keep following this tract of doing nothing and "secure the borders first" without anything else. Well, if you want to fix it then get in there and try and fix it by doing something about it. Don't just sit back and keep the status quo. That is not working.

And our immigration laws need to be relaxed, especially for the high-skilled workers that saw their visa amounts cut in half over the last decade plus.

It's not just the GOP that is committing suicide, it's the country by doing stuff like that. We need to encourage people to come here, high-skilled and common laborers.

And the best way is to create a legal framework in which they can do so openly and transparent.

But I would say the same thing about our drug laws too and how it creates this whole shadow market of trafficking and selling. It's all tied into illicit trafficking....illegal drugs, illegal aliens, etc. That's one of the things that has our borders so messed up with criminal activity.

 

We're waiting for our 'base' to finally leave like they keep threatening too and realize they no longer represent even 25% of the country. Then they can either come back to us and bend the knee or we will let them be destroyed.

Essentially the republican party is divided with members like me who would prefer to gain victory an inch at a time with subtly and compromises... and the other part is Leroy Jenkins meets Rorschach.

As for the Supreme Court. Personally I feel it's a good thing what they did with the Voting Rights Act. You can't cling to old laws when the country has changed. Laws need updating, you can't expect something decades old to still work perfectly fine.

 

The base wants the status quo, and in fact wants immigration stopped. They don't want anyone that doesn't look like them, which of course is completely against reality. But it's what many of them want.

 

Say, are you familiar with the voter suppression that happened last year, both attempted and put into law? Racism is alive and well, and in fact there hasn't been such a powerful institutional effort to suppress voting rights in several decades.

 

If anything, the number of states to which the Voting Rights Act applies should be expanded. Ohio and Pennsylvania tried shameless voter suppression, and IIRC they're not covered.

 

Personally I feel that getting a library card should not be more difficult than voting. As to racism, it is not the powerful force it was in the 60s when the voting rights act was needed. If it happens now I'm pretty sure the media and the American populace will shame and force any 'racist' voting laws down.

 

I agree.

 

It's beyond question at this point-- voter fraud is statistically non-existent, and has zero impact on any races anywhere. Nobody tries to commit voter fraud, and all the ID laws and other nonsense were just an attempt to suppress the votes of people who heavily favor Democratic candidates and policies. That's a historical fact.

If you're ignorant about what happened over the past couple years, that's not my problem, but you better believe I'll point it out. Many Republicans in various states outright stated that they were trying to suppress the vote. It's all in the historical record. Go look it up.

Racism is a huge problem, and the VRA is still needed to combat it. Period.

The media didn't do much to combat the attempted and sometimes successful voter suppression, and it took dedicated lawyers to do their best to stop it. "Shame" does not stop people who will stop at nothing to gain power.

I'm not going to tolerate any kind of nonsense about how times have changed. They have indeed changed, but a lot of people with a lot of power have done their best to act as if people who don't vote for them shouldn't be voting at all.