South Carolina Attorney General thanks Supreme Court for overturning “an extraordinary intrusion into state sovereignty.”

There’s surprisingly little discussion today of the fact that a jurisdiction can get out of under the pre-clearance standard by simply demonstrating over a ten year period that they’re no longer abusing/discriminating against minority voters in the jurisdiction. And a substantial number of jurisdictions have been able to do that, especially with revisions to the law passed in the early 1980s. Here’s a piece on how New England got entirely out of under the VRA pre-clearances process (yes, there were covered areas) basically by not being racist.

As we move into the post-VRA era, I’m wondering just what new laws the ‘redeemed’ jurisdictions are now going to come up with to deal with minority voters? I figure this might be a good job for a crowd-sourcing effort. What laws are we likely to see? One day voting between 9 am and 1 pm? Minority voter districts must be under sea level? Ideas?

I hinted at this in my post from earlier today: the VRA decision is the perfect complement to the GOP’s increasingly clear strategy of ignoring the 2012 election and doubling down on maximizing the white vote. But Josh Green really captures it when he calls the decision a ‘poison chalice‘ for the GOP, encouraging and giving more tools to the GOP in its quest to max out white voting and make the Democratic party the home of the overwhelming number of non-white voters and the white voters who feel at home in a truly multiracial party.

To paraphrase Bill Clinton’s famous words from 1996, the Court has built the GOP a mobility scooter to ride into the 22nd century.

The first African American attorney general will speak shortly about today’s Voting Rights Act decision. Watch.

John Fund, top player in the voter suppression and vote fraud bamboozlement racket, takes to National Review to announce that the court decision is “actually a victory for civil rights.”

I still remain generally hopeful, over the medium term, certainly the long term that the changing nature of the electorate will prove too strong to be bridled by Republican voter suppression efforts which will undoubtedly redouble in response to this wildly activist ruling by the Supreme Court. In the short term, it’s not so clear, though, particularly with regards to 2014. Indeed, the 2012 election and this decision fit together like two pieces of a puzzle. Read More

Quick reminder on which jurisdictions were covered by Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act — until today.

Andrew Ross Sorkin apologizes for suggesting he’d arrest Glenn Greenwald.

I still remain generally hopeful, over the medium term, certainly the long term that the changing nature of the electorate will prove too strong to be bridled by Republican voter suppression efforts which will undoubtedly redouble in response to this wildly activist ruling by the Supreme Court. In the short term, it’s not so clear, though, particularly with regards to 2014. Indeed, the 2012 election and this decision fit together like two pieces of a puzzle. Read More