We can add the opinion in the McCutcheon case to a list of horrible opinions by Roberts. Justice Roberts' opinion on Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act was a really horrible opinion which is based on the same flawed legal concept used to justify the Dred Scott decision. http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-96_6k47.pdf It is hard to read and is based on a concept of equal sovereignty among the states. I found the concept of equal sovereignty among the states to be a new concept that Roberts was using solely to gut the Voting Rights Act (Roberts has hated the Voting Rights Act since he was lawyer in the Reagan justice department). It seems that the "equal sovereignty concept is an old doctrine that was used to justify the Dred Scott opinion http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/demeaning-insult-chief-justice-john-roberts-voting-rights-act-decision
One of the enduring mysteries of Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion striking down part of the Voting Rights Act is which part of the Constitution the landmark civil rights law actually violated.
Roberts argued that the Voting Rights Act violated the “tradition” of “equal sovereignty” of the states. That concept is far more dubious than it might seem at first glance, according to a legal paper published by two longtime voting rights experts.
“The ‘equal sovereignty’ principle is not in the Constitution,” said James Blacksher, an Alabama attorney with a long career in Voting Rights. “It is, as the Chief Justice says, a ‘historical tradition.” Go straight past the penumbras, hang a right at the emanations.
Blacksher’s paper, co-authored with Harvard law professor Lani Guinier, argues that Roberts’s opinion in the Voting Rights Act case is a descendant of what is widely regarded as the worst Supreme Court decision in American history: The 1857 Dred Scott case, in which the high court held that blacks, slave or free, could never be citizens of the United States. That case is the “origin story” of the “equal sovereignty” principle, the authors argue, because the opinion by Chief Justice Roger Taney held that it would violate the sovereignty of the slave states to recognize blacks as American citizens. By invoking that principle, the authors write in Free at Last: Rejecting Equal Sovereignty and Restoring the Constitutional Right to Vote, Roberts was reviving “the oldest and most demeaning official insult to African-Americans in American constitutional history.”
“?‘Equal sovereignty’ was the basis of the longstanding argument, going all the way back to the founding of the United States, between the slave states and the free states. The slave states claimed that they were equally sovereign with the other states to decide whether to have slavery or not to have slavery,” Blacksher said. “The ‘equal sovereignty’ doctrine that Chief Justice Roberts relied on last year is rooted in the jurisprudence of slavery.”...
Prior to last year’s ruling, Akhil Reed Amar, a Yale law professor, wrote a Harvard Law Review article arguing that the Voting Rights Act was clearly constitutional. Amar wrote that an “extravagant anti-congressional theory of state equality” drove the Dred Scott decision, and that the court should “take care to avoid the decision’s biggest mistakes.”
The
Dred Scott opinion was bad law back when decided and I am not surprised that Roberts is now using this same concept to gut the Voting Rights Act.
The
Shelby County is one of the most partisan opinions in the history of the SCOTUS and is on a par with
Bush v. Gore and
Citizens United. We need to point out to the conservatives that Roberts is nothing but a racist who has to rely on the legal principle behind the
Dred Scott decision to justify the gutting of the Voting Rights Act.
I personally think that the
Shelby County opinion is actually worse than the
McCutheon opinion.
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