John Paul Stevens on The Supreme Court's Voting Rights Decision
ANDREW COHEN
JUL 20 2013,
Last month, in Shelby County v. Holder, the United States Supreme Court by a 5-4 vote voided the "coverage formula" of Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, upending Congressional authority to root out voter suppression under the 15th Amendment. To give you a sense of how radical the majority opinion was, I give you the recent words of a long-ago Republican appointee to the Court, a man who served 12,611 days as a justice, a man who presided over three of the four Congressional "re-authorizations" of the federal law.
I give you, in other words, the retired John Paul Stevens, the lone Supreme Court appointee of President Gerald Ford, the third-longest serving justice in Court history, writing in The New York Review of Books under a headline titled "The Court & the Right to Vote: A Dissent." To the surprise of many, Stevens has offered a sharply critical evaluation of Chief Justice John Roberts' majority opinion in Shelby County -- a rebuke that strikes like a thunderclap over a nation still coming to terms with what the Court's five conservatives have done to the Voting Rights Act and what it means for minority citizens.
What gives Stevens the right to criticize his former chief in such a fashion? Plenty. Justice Stevens earned his conservative bona fides on voting rights long before he authored the Court's 2008 majority opinion in Crawford v. Marion County, a case that sanctioned the current generation of (largely suppressive) state "voter identification" laws. In Crawford, Justice Stevens stood with those who sought to make it harder, not easier, for people to vote. A state did not have to prove voter fraud, Justice Stevens wrote in Crawford, to justify using the threat of voter fraud to impose burdens upon registered voters.
That is why his complaints about Shelby County carry such weight. In his NYRB essay, which every member of Congress ought to read before saying anything more about the future of the federal statute, Justice Stevens first takes issue with the argument offered by the Chief Justice that Section 4 (and Section 5) of the Voting Rights Act merited heightened judiciary scrutiny because those provisions treat different states differently. Stevens writes:
That provision was offensive because it treated African-Americans as though each of them was equal to only three fifths of a white person, but it was even more offensive because it increased the power of the southern states by counting three fifths of their slaves even though those slaves were not allowed to vote. The northern states would have been politically better off if the slave population had been simply omitted from the number used to measure the voting power of the slave states....
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http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/john-paul-stevens-on-the-supreme-courts-voting-rights-decision/277962/
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body and soul of America, each giving our Constitution a big middle finger with their almost every votes they are a disgrace and pox upon their office imo, by having committed what is tantamount to an assault upon the letter and intent of our founding principles. 
