A cynical celebration of civil rights
Dana Milbank
Fri, Jun 28, 2013
WASHINGTON – The Roberts court chose a most cynical way to celebrate this summer’s 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington ...
Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote Tuesday’s opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, was 10 years old in 1965, when police officers beat and gassed citizens in Selma, Ala., who were demonstrating for the right to vote; that assault, and King’s subsequent march from Selma to Montgomery, spurred passage of the very law Roberts and his colleagues undid on Tuesday by declaring a key provision outdated ...
It was difficult to hear the tiny and frail Ginsburg in the chamber. But her dissent, joined by the other three liberal justices, was a sharp rebuke of the conservatives for the yawning gap between their frequent vows of judicial modesty and the “hubris” apparent in their “demolition” of the Voting Rights Act. “What has become of the court’s usual restraint?” she asked the judicial activists of the right ...
Ginsburg, though, was steely as she scolded the majority for their conservative activism. “It was the judgment of Congress (in 2006) that ’40 years has not been a sufficient amount of time to eliminate the vestiges of discrimination following nearly 100 years of disregard for the dictates of the 15th Amendment,’” she said from the bench. In Alabama, she said, Congress found that “there were many” barriers to minority voting rights. “They were shocking and they were recent” ...
http://www.abqjournal.com/main/215461/opinion/a-cynical-celebration-of-civil-rights.html
