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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSC Justice Ginsburg: "I didn't want to be right (on VRA ruling), but sadly I am."
WASHINGTON (AP) Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says shes not surprised that Southern states have pushed ahead with tough voter identification laws and other measures since the Supreme Court freed them from strict federal oversight of their elections.
Ginsburg said in an interview with The Associated Press that Texas decision to implement its voter ID law hours after the court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act last month was powerful evidence of an ongoing need to keep states with a history of voting discrimination from making changes in the way they hold elections without getting advance approval from Washington.
The notion that because the Voting Rights Act had been so tremendously effective we had to stop it didnt make any sense to me, Ginsburg said in a wide-ranging interview late Wednesday in her office at the court. And one really could have predicted what was going to happen.
The 80-year-old justice dissented from the 5-4 decision on the voting law. Ginsburg said in her dissent that discarding the law was like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.
Just a month removed from the decision, she said, I didnt want to be right, but sadly I am.
read: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/ginsburg-not-surprised-voter-id-laws-vra-gutted.php?ref=fpb
Jamaal510
(10,893 posts)find odd in all of this is that if times are different and the VRA is no longer needed, as the Right claims, then why have they been so anxious to get rid of it? Why fix what isn't broken?