No one could have seen this coming. Well, no, pretty much anyone could have.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says she’s not surprised that Southern states have pushed ahead with tough voter identification laws and other measures since the Supreme Court freed them from strict federal oversight of their elections.
Ginsburg said in an interview with The Associated Press that Texas’ decision to implement its voter ID law hours after the court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act last month was powerful evidence of an ongoing need to keep states with a history of voting discrimination from making changes in the way they hold elections without getting advance approval from Washington.
The Justice Department said Thursday it would try to bring Texas and other places back under the advance approval requirement through a part of the law that was not challenged.
“The notion that because the Voting Rights Act had been so tremendously effective we had to stop it didn’t make any sense to me,” Ginsburg said in a wide-ranging interview late Wednesday in her office at the court. “And one really could have predicted what was going to happen.”
The 80-year-old justice dissented from the 5-4 decision on the voting law. Ginsburg said in her dissent that discarding the law was “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
Just a month removed from the decision, she said, “I didn’t want to be right, but sadly I am.”
And that would be why the Justice Department is throwing down. Justice John Roberts likes to say that the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. It’s a nice, pithy sentiment, but it leaves out the obvious fact that some folks need to be made to stop discriminating on the basis of race. If the federal courts determine that Texas has been doing this and it needs to be bailed back in to preclearance under Section 3 of the Voting Rights Act, will he acknowledge that when the next appeal comes his way? Texas Redistricting has more.