From The Oyez Project:

The Fourteenth Amendment protects every person’s right to due process of law. The Fifteenth Amendment protects citizens from having their right to vote abridged or denied due to “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The Tenth Amendment reserves all rights not expressly granted to the federal government to the individual states. Article Four of the Constitution guarantees the right of self-government for each state.

The Civil Rights Act of 1965 was enacted as a response to the nearly century-long history of voting discrimination. Section 5 prohibits eligible districts from enacting changes to their election laws and procedures without gaining official authorization. Section 4(b) defines the eligible districts as ones that had a voting test in place as of November 1, 1964 and less than 50% turnout for the 1964 presidential election. Such districts must prove to the Attorney General or a three-judge panel of a Washington, D.C. district court that the change “neither has the purpose nor will have the effect” of negatively impacting any individual’s right to vote based on race or minority status. Section 5 was originally enacted for five years, but has been continually renewed since that time.

Shelby County, Alabama, filed suit in district court and sought both a declaratory judgment that Section 5 and Section 4(b) are unconstitutional and a permanent injunction against their enforcement. The district court upheld the constitutionality of the Sections and granted summary judgment for the Attorney General. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held that Congress did not exceed its powers by reauthorizing Section 5 and that Section 4(b) is still relevant to the issue of voting discrimination.

Question
Does the renewal of Section 5 of the Voter Rights Act under the constraints of Section 4(b) exceed Congress’ authority under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and therefore violate the Tenth Amendment and Article Four of the Constitution?

ORAL ARGUMENT OF BERT W. REIN ON BEHALF OF THE PETITIONER

Chief Justice John G. Roberts: We’ll hear argument first this morning in Case 12-96, Shelby County v. Holder.

Mr. Rein?

Bert W Rein: Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court:

Almost 4 years ago, eight Justices of the Court agreed the 2005 25-year extension of Voting Rights Act Section 5′s preclearance obligation, uniquely applicable to jurisdictions reached by Section 4(b)’s antiquated coverage formula, raised a serious constitutional question.

Those Justices recognized that the record before the Congress in 2005 made it unmistakable that the South had changed.

They questioned whether current remedial needs justified the extraordinary federalism and cost burdens of preclearance.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor: May I ask you a question?

Assuming I accept your premise, and there’s some question about that, that some portions of the South have changed, your county pretty much hasn’t.

Bert W Rein: Well, I–

Justice Sonia Sotomayor: In — in the period we’re talking about, it has many more discriminating — 240 discriminatory voting laws that were blocked by Section 5 objections.

There were numerous remedied by Section 2 litigation.

You may be the wrong party bringing this.

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The Neo-Confederate Supreme Court Gearing Up to Restore White Rule Over America, Alternet:

 If white rule in the United States is to be restored and sustained, then an important first step will be the decision of the five Neo-Confederate justices on the U.S. Supreme Court to gut the Voting Rights Act, a move that many court analysts now consider likely.

The Court’s striking down Section Five of the Voting Rights Act will mean that jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting – mostly in the Old Confederacy – will be free to impose new obstacles to voting by African-Americans, Hispanics and other minorities without first having to submit the changes to a federal court…..

The Supreme Court’s apparent intention to gut the Voting Rights Act also could be viewed in the continuum of its five-to-four ruling in the Citizens United case of 2010 in which the right-wing justices freed up rich Americans to spend unlimited amounts to influence political campaigns. In other words, the Court’s majority seems intent on tilting the political playing field in favor of white plutocrats.

But the Court’s Neo-Confederate rationale was underscored mostly openly by Justice Scalia and his sneering remark about minority voting rights being a “racial entitlement” and by Justice Kennedy’s insistence that Alabama has the “independent sovereign” right to set its own voting rules without federal oversight.

From NYLJ:

The U.S. Supreme Court will take up California’s ban on same-sex marriage, a case that could give the justices the chance to rule on whether gays have the same constitutional right to marry as heterosexuals.

The justices said today they will review a federal appeals court ruling that struck down the state’s gay marriage ban, though on narrow grounds. The San Francisco-based appeals court said the state could not take away the same-sex marriage right that had been granted by California’s Supreme Court.

The court also will decide whether Congress can deprive legally married gay couples of federal benefits otherwise available to married people in a case from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. A provision of the federal Defense of Marriage Act limits a range of health and pension benefits, as well as favorable tax treatment, to heterosexual couples.

The cases are likely to be argued in March, with decisions expected by late June.

From WashingtonPost:

The Supreme Court begins a new term Monday with the most important civil rights agenda in years on the horizon and amid intensified scrutiny of the relationship between Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and his fellow conservatives.

…

The justices will consider the continued viability of affirmative action in college admissions when it hears a challenge next week to the University of Texas’s race-conscious selection process.

And there are several challenges awaiting the court’s action on the most controversial part of the Voting Rights Act — the Civil Rights-era requirement that some states with a history of racial discrimination receive federal approval before enacting voting or election-law changes.

The court seems all but certain to confront the issue of same-sex marriage by considering suits against the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act. The law’s provision denying federal recognition of same-sex marriages performed in states where they are legal has been deemed unconstitutional both by the Obama administration and lower courts that have considered it.

In addition, the court will be asked to review a decision that overturned California’s Proposition 8, in which voters amended the state constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman.

Full Text of SCOTUS Ruling

The Grio: Supreme Court health care ruling a huge victory for uninsured, minorities, people with chronic illnesses

ThinkProgress on 2nd Anniversary of “ObamaCare” March 23, 2012

Happy Monday, folks. I’ve been off the grid for a few days for a desperately needed re-charging. The news all around is dire these days and information overload can be a bit much. A piece will be forthcoming on how acts of kindness to one’s self can be revolutionary and necessary for change.

Anyway, without further ado:

• Report Finds Google Supervisors Knew About Wi-Fi Data Harvesting
  

  Google’s harvesting of e-mails, passwords and other sensitive personal information from unsuspecting households in the United States and around the world was neither a mistake nor the work of a rogue engineer, as the company long maintained, but a program that supervisors knew about, according to new details from the full text of a regulatory report.

  The report, prepared by the Federal Communications Commission after a 17-month investigation of Google’s Street View project, was released, heavily redacted, two weeks ago. Although it found that Google had not violated any laws, the agency said Google had obstructed the inquiry and fined the company $25,000.

  On Saturday, Google released a version of the report with only employees’ names redacted.

  The full version draws a portrait of a company where an engineer can easily embark on a project to gather personal e-mails and Web searches of potentially hundreds of millions of people as part of his or her unscheduled work time, and where privacy concerns are shrugged off.

  The so-called payload data was secretly collected between 2007 and 2010 as part of Street View, a project to photograph streetscapes over much of the civilized world. When the program was being designed, the report says, it included the following “to do” item: “Discuss privacy considerations with Product Counsel.”

• Not Just Apple, How Microsoft Sidestepped Billions In State Taxes
  

  In 1997, Microsoft et al. lobbied to reduce Washington State’s Royalty Tax from 1.5% to .5%, a threefold reduction. This wasn’t low enough. The company decided to open a small Reno, Nevada office to dodge the tax completely.

  Between 1997 – 2011, the company used its Nevada office to avoid $1.51 billion in Washington state taxes, interest and penalties. If you include impacts from the company’s lobbying and calculate its savings at the original 1.5% rate, it’s saved $4.37 billion.

  Since 2008, Washington State has cut $4 billion from K-12 and Higher Education. We rank 31st in K-12 spending. 18% of University of Washington freshman are now foreigners (because they pay more) up from 2% six years ago. We rank 47th nationally in 18-24 yo college enrollment and 48th in K-12 class size.

• Understanding Hipster Racism: Lester Bangs’ 1979 “White Noise Supremacists”
  

  Lindy West’s piece at Jezebel this week, “A Complete Guide To Hipster Racism,” has been blowing up my Facebook wall (and probably yours too) for good reason. As justice-minded folks have critiqued HBO’s ‘Girls’ for its lily-white representation of New York City, the pushback to the pushback has gotten ugly fast — whether it’s show story editor Lesley Arfin making jokes about Precious, or Vice founder (and old-school hipster racist) Gavin McInnes knowingly throwing the word ‘lynching’ around. At the core of every statement defending the whiteness of ‘Girls,’ and the ‘ironically’ racist jokes that accompany it, is the argument that only bad people are susceptible to racism, so therefore it’s okay for us good people to pretend to be racist, for comedy’s sake. Anyone who doesn’t like it is the real racist. There’s a bunch wrong with this argument, both in terms of logic and basic decency, and West does an excellent job of debunking it piece by piece.

• Public Perception and the Law in Arizona v. United States
  

  Some observers claimed that SB 1070 would increase racial profiling of Latinos. The key question was how police would decide whether there was, as Section 2(B) provides, a “reasonable suspicion … that the person is an alien and is unlawfully present in the United States.” The fear is that “foreign-looking” people, especially Latinos, will bear the brunt of the mandatory immigration checks. Concerns with racial profiling contributed to the considerable public attention received by SB 1070 and Arizona v. United States.

  As discussed above, the oral arguments focused on federal preemption law, not racial profiling. Counsel for the US government emphatically denied that racial profiling was at issue in the case. Counsel for the state of Arizona, as well as the justices, eagerly accepted that denial. The justices therefore did not ask questions about whether Section 2(B) of SB 1070 might result in the racial profiling of Latinos.

  Unlike some of the other plaintiffs in related cases challenging the Arizona law, the US government had not made any claims that SB 1070 violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because it was adopted with some kind of invidious discriminatory intent. Claims of discrimination will likely have to wait another day, with the issues possibly addressed in the other cases challenging SB 1070 or in a new challenge based on the application of Section 2(B) by police.

  It should be readily apparent that there is a serious disconnect between the public debate over Arizona’s SB 1070, as well as similar state immigration enforcement laws, and the legal arguments in the Court.

• ALJ’s Errors Win Lawyer a New Hearing on Student Loan Repayment
  

  A lawyer has won her bid for a new student loan repayment hearing after a state judge determined that her initial proceeding was rife with errors made by an administrative law judge.

  Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Alice Schlesinger (See Profile) found that the ALJ appeared to lose control of the 2009 hearing and made the “shocking” pronouncement that the attorney, Marisa Rieue, owed $108,376, including principal and interest, in unpaid loans in the absence of concrete evidence to support that conclusion.

  “A review of the hearing transcript reveals that it would be a waste of judicial resources and improper to transfer this case to the Appellate Division based on substantial evidence because the record is barely comprehensible and defective in countless ways,” Schlesinger wrote in Rieue v. New York State Higher Educ. Servs. Corp., 107745/09.

  She added, “While the rules of evidence are not strictly applied in administrative proceedings, the hearing must be conducted in an orderly fashion so that it is fundamentally fair, and all exhibits offered into evidence must be appropriately authenticated and explained by a proper party, with evidentiary foundations established where appropriate.”

  Rieue, who once worked in the litigation bureau of the state Department of Law, has an unpublished phone number and could not be reached for comment.

From The Nation:

According to a study using Martin-Quinn scores, “the current court is the most conservative since at least the 1930s,” wrote Nate Silver of the New York Times recently. Of the ten most conservative members of the Court from 1937 to 2006, five are serving today: Clarence Thomas (1), Antonin Scalia (3), John Roberts (4), Samuel Alito (5) and Anthony Kennedy (10). The fact that Kennedy is now regarded as a moderate swing vote underscores how far to the right the Court has moved. (Only Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg makes the most liberal list, at number 10.)

That rightward shift of the Roberts Court is especially pronounced today, in the wake of the ghastly 2010 Citizens United decision and the prospect that the Court may invalidate the Obama administration’s healthcare law. These consequential decisions could be a frightening preview of things to come. In the next year or two, the Court will consider a number of blockbuster cases. In late April the justices will hear arguments on Arizona’s draconian “papers please” immigration law. The fall term, which begins in October, includes a challenge to affirmative action at the University of Texas.

In the not-so-distant future the Court will likely decide the merits of: California’s Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage, and/or the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibits states from enforcing gay marriage laws outside their borders and denies government benefits to gay couples; Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which forces states and localities covered by the act to pre-clear voting law changes with the federal government to make sure they do not discriminate against minority voters; Montana’s ban on corporate campaign contributions and its challenge to Citizens United; the indefinite detention of enemy combatants at prisons like Guantánamo; the ability of foreign nationals to sue corporations and their employees in the United States for human rights abuses abroad; and possibly even Roe v. Wade, given the slew of anti-abortion restrictions passed by Republicans since the 2010 elections. “It’s the most startlingly jampacked period in the past century,” says Tom Goldstein, a veteran Supreme Court litigator and publisher of SCOTUSblog. “It’s hard to imagine a more perfect storm of cases that will be granted or argued right before the presidential election that are so freighted with politics.”

…

Four justices are now in their 70s: Ginsburg (79), Scalia (76), Kennedy (75) and Breyer (73). If Romney wins, he could shore up the right flank of the Court; if Obama wins, he could tip the balance of power back to the center. “Citizens United would have never been put into law and America would never have been sold to the highest bidder had Al Gore won in 2000,” says former DNC chair Howard Dean. “Obama, if he wins, is going to appoint maybe one or two more Supreme Court justices. That could make all the difference.” At the Conservative Political Action Committee convention in February, Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA, warned conservatives about an Obama second term. “If Obama wins re-election, he will likely appoint one—and perhaps three—more Supreme Court justices,” LaPierre said. “It’ll be the end of our freedom forever.”

Criminal InJustice^† is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Criminal InJustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm CST.

Another Shame of the Nation ~ Juvenile Life Without Parole
by nancy a heitzeg

On March 20, 2012, The Supreme Court of the United States will hear Oral Arguments in the cases of Miller v. Alabama and Jackson v. Hobbs. Both cases, argued on Eighth Amendment grounds by Equal Justice Initiative, involve 14 year old boys – sentenced to die in prison for their involvement in homicides. Miller had a documented history of abuse, and Jackson, an accessory but not the gunman, was charged in a felony murder case, an Arkansas store robbery gone wrong.

But, as always, much more than the fate of these two rests on this case. At stake is the fate of more than 2500 persons serving Life without Parole for crimes committed while under the age of 18, some, all future redemption denied, when they were as young as 11 years old. 73 of these 2500 were under the age of 14 at the time of the commitment offense.

One might also argue that our status as a “civilized” nation rests, at least in part, on the Court’s judgment here. The U.S. is the only country in the world that practices JLWOP, and remains, with Somalia, one of two nations in the world which has refused to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, a document which expressly forbids this very practice.

And, as in the 5-4 Roper v. Simmons (2005) and Sullivan v. Florida/Graham v. Florida (2010) which finally finally finally abolished the death penalty and Juvenile Life Without Parole (JLWOP) for non-homicide offenses respectively, the fate of these youth and the moral compass of the nation will rest on the whims of one Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Too much responsibility for Just One Man….

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