"The Roberts court stands on the brink of making an error of historic proportions."

[elleng]

31. I respect Linda Greenhouse hugely,

and I hope her suggestion that SCOTUS will make the wrong decision is wrong.

'Without having asked a single question of Shelby County’s lawyer, Bert W. Rein, he taunted Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli with statistics purporting to show that Mississippi has the better record of African-American voter registration and turnout.

It was a “gotcha” performance beneath the dignity of a chief justice, and it turned out to be based on a – to put it charitably – misunderstanding of the data. The next day, the Massachusetts secretary of state, William F. Galvin, complained publicly that Chief Justice Roberts had used “phony statistics” in a “deceptive” and “truly disturbing” manner. (Mississippi, by the way, signed a brief urging the court to uphold Section 5.) . .

what the court’s conservatives seem to see in Section 5 is a threat to state sovereignty — the “sovereign dignity” of the states, a phrase Justice Anthony M. Kennedy has used in another federalism context. This theme ran throughout the argument. Justice Scalia referred to Section 5 as imposing “these extraordinary procedures that deny the states sovereign powers which the Constitution preserves to them.” Justice Kennedy asked whether “if Alabama wants to acknowledge the wrongs of its past, is it better off doing that if it’s an independent sovereign or if it’s under the trusteeship of the United States government?”

These are astounding comments, bespeaking willful ignorance of the origin (as in “originalism”) of the 14th and 15th Amendments, which transformed the constitutional relationship between the federal government and the states. Their very point was to invoke federal power to make sure the states delivered on the amendments’ promises: due process, equal protection, the right to vote for all.'


I hope a majority recognizes the above-quoted facts, and at least Roberts does an ACA and surprises Court-watchers. I suspect Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagen will give the others hell if they attempt to ignore and forget these facts. AND I suspect they read Greenhouse, tho she doesn't have to tell them the history.