Supreme Court guts Voting Rights Act

What was perhaps the biggest achievement of the Civil Rights Movement is now just a memory - because of 5 cowardly, gutless members of the Supreme Court.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act is a landmark law that stood stronger than a marble wall for 48 years. A key provision said some states and localities that had been practicing racial discrimination had to undergo federal monitoring before making changes to the voting process. But these states and communities could bail out of this requirement if they took strong, sustained measures to improve voting rights.

If a community doesn't want to have to follow this requirement, it should expand voting rights so it can bail out. You don't go and scream like a baby that the law is unfair because it doesn't let you discriminate. And you damn sure don't sue over it.

But that's exactly what white supremacist officials in Shelby County, Alabama, did.

Let me give you an idea of how Shelby County is being run. For years, county officials covered up a child molestation scandal by rallying around a teacher who admitted to groping little girls. When one of the victims reported this abuse, other folks in the community began harassing her constantly.

More recently, Shelby County officials sued to get the Voting Rights Act thrown out. Instead of rejecting the stain of racism and taking steps that would let them bail out, they jumped straight to the court system. And today they won.

If you're flabbergasted that the Supreme Court would side with a bunch of racist child molesters, consider that this apartheid ruling was made by the same 5 Justices who gutted a century of campaign finance law by declaring that corporations are people in the bogus Citizens United ruling. The more important point is that today's Jim Crow ruling is constitutionally wrong. The Fifteenth Amendment is very clear:

"Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

"Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

Pay special attention to Section 2. It clearly authorizes the Voting Rights Act. It's as simple as this: The Voting Rights Act is valid because the Constitution says it's valid. This is completely unambiguous.

The taint of racism rules the roost in the modern Supreme Court. Far-right Justice Antonin Scalia said in February that Congress's reauthorizing of the Voting Rights Act was "very likely attributable to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement." He thinks it's "entitlement" for somebody to expect their right to vote to be respected? Scalia's racial rhetoric ranks right up there with the class war propaganda that fills right-wing websites and talk radio.

How extreme is today's Supreme Court ruling? It's almost like the Civil Rights Movement (let alone Occupy) never even happened! Americans died while fighting for racial equality - and now the apartheid Supreme Court has the unmitigated gall to dishonor their memory.

Who knows how today's shameful ruling will play out?