Dalhia Lithwick passionately, factually, persuasively argues that the declaration of the end of pre-clearance protections under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act as no longer necessary has, with unintentional and tragic hilarity, led within hours to those very districts formerly subject to pre-clearance rushing to the gates to reenact entire gluttonous slates of new Jim Crow laws that make a mockery of Roberts' self-denying, self-satisfied declaration of the End of Racism.
The overt cynicism of Republican circles here is sickening, if expected. North Carolina so immediately glutted itself on a raft of voter suppression provisions that it must only have been that the Land O' Marbles was closed during voting that prevented the addition of a further poll test requirement.
I'm more interested in how Roberts deals with the cognitive dissonance here, except with a pristine, mind-narrowing embrace of the inevitable justice that leads from untrammelled state sovereignty.
Containing his pristine certainty in the face of this multi-district, proximally immediate, all-you-can-suppress buffet must make it a special effort to maintain the certainty of his wish to believe in the end of history.
The fact that days--or hours--after the decision, those very states and districts under pre-clearance rushed to storm the gates with the newest forms of Jim Crow--undeniable on both intent and outcome, as the Fourteenth Amendment requires it--must particularly wrap Roberts in a shell of ice blue denial, fighting off just the smallest bare approach of the dissonance of obvious cause-effect consequence.
What more obvious, powerful, district-by-district demonstration is necessary to affirm that Robert was incorrect in his judgment--a judgment left, as former Justice Stevens notes, to Congress, not the Court--that the days of political racism and voter suppression can now be declared as ended.
Rather, straight to the present--the protections of the Voting Right Act are what kept this onslaught at bay.
As Lithwick notes, Ginsburg, in her dissent, put it best:
"Throwing out the law’s key protection for minority voters 'is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.'
Alito, less troubled by dissonance, is more than content, with the characteristic on-bench grousing discontent of the narrow pedant, to let it rain.
Scalia is beginning to lapse into the soft neurology of age-disinhibited neuronal discontrol of Holocaust comparisons to quite fully care.
And Thomas will see it as yet another step towards his grandfather's ever-and-all encompassing approach towards towards a perfect justice as practiced during his ineffably, pervasively justiciable childhood in Pin Point, Georgia.
So: The Lochner Era of voting rights has again ushered itself onto the stage.
Apres, le deluge.
