The decision by Roberts gutting the Voting Rights Act was based on some old bad law used to justify the Dred Scott decision. Now it turns out that the factual basis used by Roberts to gut the voting rights act is also false. Roberts had no facts backing up his claim that there was no discrimination on the basis of race in voting and gutted the Voting Rights Act on his belief (with no facts) that this was the case. A new study establishes that Roberts was wrong as to the facts (this is in addition to using very bad law to justify this decision). http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/new-study-rebuts-john-roberts-voting-rights-act
When the Supreme Court badly weakened the Voting Rights Act in 2013, it described the landmark civil rights law as outdated. The formula that Congress had used back in 1965 to decide which areas of the country should have their voting laws placed under federal supervision no longer matched modern patterns of discrimination, Chief Justice John Roberts claimed.
“If Congress had started from scratch in 2006, it plainly could not have enacted the present coverage formula,” Roberts wrote for the majority, explaining why that formula was being struck down.
But a comprehensive new study by a renowned historian and expert in voting discrimination suggests what voting rights advocates have been saying all along: that Roberts got it wrong.
Since 2009, Morgan Kousser, a professor of history and social science at the California Institute of Technology, has been collecting data on voting rights “events” across the country that resulted in a win for minorities. Kousser looked at over 4,100 voting rights lawsuits, inquiries by the Justice Department, and changes to laws in response to the threat of lawsuits, the great majority at the county level, stretching from 1957 to 2013.
Kousser found that over 90% of these events occurred in “covered jurisdictions”—that is, places that, until the Supreme Court’s decision, were required to submit their voting changes to the federal government for “pre-clearance.” The great majority of these jurisdictions were in the South.
The evidence, Kousser writes, “shows that the Chief Justice’s factual assertions were incorrect, that the coverage formula was still congruent with proven violations.”
Roberts first tried to gut the VRA back when he was a lawyer in the DOJ and has been going after the law ever since. The Shelby County case was a horrible case and now it is clear that this decision was not only based on bad law (the same legal principle used to justify Dredd Scott) but also on bad facts.
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