Today was the day that the Republican challenge to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was argued before the Supreme Court. Arguments were fiery, but this particular quote from Justice Scalia was one worthy of Jim Crow. If ever there was a reason to preserve Section 5, Scalia articulated it. Via TPM:

Roberts and Kennedy led the questioning challenging the Voting Right Act. Justice Sonia Sotomayor led the questioning defending it.

Justice Antonin Scalia attributed the continued congressional reauthorization to a perpetual “racial entitlement” and suggested that it will be renewed into “perpetuity” because members of Congress would never let it lapse for fear for political repercussions.

“I don’t think there is anything to gain by any senator by voting against this Act,” Scalia said. “This is not the kind of question you can leave to Congress. They’re going to lose votes if they vote against the Voting Rights Act. Even the name is wonderful.”

The purpose of Section 5 was to proactively quash voter discrimination where it’s most likely to emanate, but conservatives argue that it has outlived its purpose and now discriminates against the mostly southern regions covered.

If we learned anything from 2010 and 2012, I'd like to think we learned that not only is Section 5 critical to holding free and fair elections, but that it should be expanded, not tossed out. Justice Scalia's remarks reinforce how important it is that this provision be preserved, since he sees voting rights as some sort of "entitlement" --at least, for some people.

Update: Here is the transcript of his remarks, courtesy of Daily Kos:

JUSTICE SCALIA: ...This Court doesn't like to get involved in -- in racial questions such as this one. It's something that can be left -- left to Congress.
The problem here, however, is suggested by the comment I made earlier, that the initial enactment of this legislation in a -- in a time when the need for it was so much more abundantly clear was -- in the Senate, there -- it was double-digits against it. And that was only a 5-year term.

Then, it is reenacted 5 years later, again for a 5-year term. Double-digits against it in the Senate. Then it was reenacted for 7 years. Single digits against it. Then enacted for 25 years, 8 Senate votes against it.

And this last enactment, not a single vote in the Senate against it. And the House is pretty much the same. Now, I don't think that's attributable to the fact that it is so much clearer now that we need this. I think it is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement. It's been written about. Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.

I don't think there is anything to be gained by any Senator to vote against continuation of this act. And I am fairly confident it will be reenacted in perpetuity unless -- unless a court can say it does not comport with the Constitution. You have to show, when you are treating different States differently, that there's a good reason for it.

That's the -- that's the concern that those of us who -- who have some questions about this statute have. It's -- it's a concern that this is not the kind of a question you can leave to Congress. There are certain districts in the House that are black districts by law just about now. And even the Virginia Senators, they have no interest in voting against this. The State government is not their government, and they are going to lose -- they are going to lose votes if they do not reenact the Voting Rights Act.

Even the name of it is wonderful: The Voting Rights Act. Who is going to vote against that in the future?

Yeah, the name is wonderful. It's the foundation of that thing we call democracy.

Just days after the chairman of Gun Appreciation Day tried to misappropriate the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., the always execrable Rush Limbaugh pointed both barrels at the civil rights movement. Just in time for the weekend jointly marking King's birthday and President Obama's second inauguration, Limbaugh asked:

"If a lot of African-Americans back in the '60s had guns and the legal right to use them for self-defense, you think they would have needed Selma? If John Lewis, who says he was beat upside the head, if John Lewis had had a gun, would he have been beat upside the head on the bridge?"

Now, Congressman Lewis didn't "say" he was "beat upside the head" on March 7, 1965; any American can watch the video of the vicious attack by Alabama state troopers. Regardless, Lewis responded to Limbaugh's obscenity in exactly the dignified way all Americans should by now have to come to expect from him:

"Our goal in the Civil Rights Movement was not to injure or destroy but to build a sense of community, to reconcile people to the true oneness of all humanity. African Americans in the '60s could have chosen to arm themselves, but we made a conscious decision not to. We were convinced that peace could not be achieved through violence. Violence begets violence, and we believed the only way to achieve peaceful ends was through peaceful means. We took a stand against an unjust system, and we decided to use this faith as our shield and the power of compassion as our defense."

To put it another way, for John Lewis the answer to the atrocities of the segregationists was love, not guns. But we didn't need Friday's statement from Congressman Lewis to remind us of that eternal lesson of the civil rights struggle. As he showed four years ago, Lewis is its living embodiment.

On May 9, 1961, Freedom Rider John Lewis was viciously beaten in a whites-only waiting room at the Rock Hill bus station. In February 2009--48 years after Lewis sustained a fractured skull in the assault--his attacker Elwin Wilson came forward and apologized to Georgia Congressman Lewis. As ABC News reported:

"I'm so sorry about what happened back then," Wilson said breathlessly.

"It's OK. I forgive you," Lewis responded before a long-awaited hug.

For Lewis, who in the intervening years became a U.S. representative from Georgia, the apology was an unexpected symbol of the change in time and hearts.

"I never thought this would happen," he told "GMA." "It says something about the power of love, of grace, the power of the people being able to say, 'I'm sorry,' and move on. And I deeply appreciate it. It's very meaningful for me."

As Lewis explained in a joint appearance with Wilson on CNN:

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Dan Froomkin really lets the media establishment have it for not pointing out the nefarious agenda behind voter ID laws. I live in a city where the two local papers have been aggressively covering the issue, but I'm not seeing it on the national news. Gee, I wonder if it has anything to do with protecting their own corporate interests?

This is not simply another gratuitously partisan act by the GOP. This is an attack on the very notion of democracy. The voter ID push, along with intimidation of voter registration groups and purges of voter rolls have only one goal: blocking legitimate but probably Democratic voters from exercising their constitutional rights. It is a poll tax with a new twist.

And the pursuit of this goal ostensibly in the name of voter fraud is an outrageous deception that only works if the press is too timid to call it what it really is.

For reporters to treat this issue like just another political squabble is journalistic malpractice. Indeed, relating the debate in value-neutral he-said-she-said language is actively helping spread the lie. After all, calling for someone to show ID before voting doesn’t sound pernicious to most people, even though it is. And raising the bogus issue of voter fraud at all stokes fear.

“Even if you say there is no fraud, all people hear is ‘fraud fraud fraud’,” said Lawrence Norden, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.Think about it. If you were covering elections in another country, and one political party was actively trying to limit voting in the name of a problem that objectively didn’t exist, would you hesitate for a moment to call out that tactic — and question that party’s legitimacy? Hardly.

Modern American journalists strive for impartiality, but there is a limit.

Mainstream journalistsshouldn’t be afraid of being accused of taking sides when what they’re doing is standing up for basic constitutional rights. Indeed, the greater danger is that readers condemn them — or even worse, stop paying attention to them — for having no convictions at all, and no moral compass.

The GOP has taken increasingly radical positions, confident that the media’s aversion to taking sides will protect it from too much negative coverage. But failing to call out the voter ID push is like covering the civil rights movements and treating “separate but equal” as if it was said with sincerity.

All reporters should get every candidate they can on the record about the issue of ballot access, make it clear to readers whether those candidates want to make voting easier or harder, and then assert the simple truth that there is no plausible justification for making it more difficult to vote, other than partisan trickery at the expense of the rights of minorities and the poor.

Today, we celebrate the life of a truly great man, who -- armed only with his bravery and powerful words -- brought Jim Crow to its knees. It's also important to remember that the political heirs of those who created and enforced Jim Crow for a century -- Southern conservatives -- are now running the Republican Party. And that's why it's easy to understand why the fiercest opposition to making MLK Day a national holiday was in the GOP.

The last Republican candidate for president opposed it.

"Mr. Conservative" (Barry Goldwater) voted against the holiday.

Ron Paul voted against the bill that created the holiday -- twice.

77 of the 90 nay votes in final bill in the House were cast by Republicans.

18 of the 22 nay votes in the final bill in the Senate were cast by Republicans.

And the Greatest American in the History of America, Ronald "States' Rights" Reagan, only reluctantly signed the bill into law because it arrived on his desk with veto-proof majorities. Before he signed it, he said,

Congress seemed bent on making it a national holiday.

What an inspiring endorsement.

American Conservatives: Wrong About Everything Since 1776.

What is it with Southern Republican candidates and their impulse to whitewash history?

First we had Haley Barbour trying to whitewash the history of the old White Citizens Councils.

Now we've got Mike Huckabee, trying out some new talking points yesterday on Fox News with Stuart Varney, while discussing the latest Fox fake scandal, this time involving the White House supposedly shipping unions money through the health-care reform law. First, he tried claiming that union supporters of Democrats are actually a form of "forced labor":

HUCKABEE: Stuart, they can't win if they don't have the unions' support. Unions are declining as a part of the overall American workforce, and yet the Democratic Party knows -- and it's not just the money, they get hundreds of millions of dollars from unions, but as important as the money is the manpower. Because the union workers will go out and they will work the polls and they will get people to the polls, and they will put up signs and they will staff rallies. And the Democrats know they've got to have that sort of forced labor, which is what it is.

The historical revisionism came a little later in the segment, while discussing their shared enthusiasm for repealing the health-care reform act:

HUCKABEE: I hope, if it doesn't die its death one way, it dies it the other. You know, it really doesn't matter. I think the courts will ultimately rule that it is unconstitutional -- that it is forcing people to buy a product in the private-sector marketplace in order to really be citizens. It's the equivalent of a modern-day poll tax. So I think they'll throw it out.

Just so everyone understands the analogy he's making -- as well as the absurd claim about the health-care law, here's Wikipedia on the Poll Tax:

In U.S. practice, a poll tax was used as a de facto or implicit pre-condition of the exercise of the ability to vote. This tax emerged in some states of the United States in the late 19th century as part of the Jim Crow laws. After the ability to vote was extended to all races by the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment, many Southern states enacted poll tax laws which often included a grandfather clause that allowed any adult male whose father or grandfather had voted in a specific year prior to the abolition of slavery to vote without paying the tax. These laws, along with unfairly implemented literacy tests and extra-legal intimidation,[1] achieved the desired effect of disenfranchising African-American and Native American voters as well as poor whites who immigrated after the year specified.

Initially, the United States Supreme Court, in the case of Breedlove v. Suttles, 302 U.S. 277 (1937), found the poll tax to be constitutional. The 24th Amendment, ratified in 1964, reflecting a political compromise,[citation needed] abolished the use of the poll tax (or any other tax) as a pre-condition in voting in Federal elections, but made no mention of poll taxes in state elections.

In the 1966 case of Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections the Supreme Court overruled its decision in Breedlove v. Suttles, and extended the prohibition of poll taxes to state elections, declaring that the imposition of a poll tax in state elections violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

In Arkansas, it was a cornerstone of Jim Crow, and led to the disenfranchisement of 80 percent of its voting population.

Is there even the slightest whiff that failure to buy health insurance will lead to any citizen's disenfranchisement under the new health-care law? That it would even hint at enhancing a system of racial segregation?

Ah, no. No one believes that, and no one has previously claimed that. Though there has been talk about 16,000 new IRS agents descending upon an unsuspecting populace.

I guess it's a lot easier to just make stuff up when you also also believe the President was raised among Mau Maus in Kenya.

Have you ever known anyone who sent their children to a neighboring school district and used a relative's address to qualify them? It happens here all the time, because an adjacent high school is on a block schedule, which many parents like better than the 6-period schedule in our own school district. However, I have yet to see any parent sent to jail for it.

But this is California, not Ohio. And in Ohio, if you're a single mom living in the projects who is going to school yourself to earn a teaching credential in order to make a better life for you and the kids, you might consider enrolling them in the district where your father lives, because that district has a terrific rating and great test scores. And if you did that, and got caught, you might be convicted of felonies and receive a jail sentence. For trying to get a better education for your kids.

[Kelly Williams-Bolar] is a single mother with two girls, ages 12 and 16, and is only a few credit hours short of graduating from the University of Akron with a teaching degree. She was working as a teaching assistant with special needs children at Buchtel High School. She also cared for her ailing father, who was charged with multiple felonies in the residency case.

Williams-Bolar was convicted of the two felony counts Saturday night after seven hours of jury deliberations.

On Tuesday, Cosgrove sentenced her to five years in prison but suspended all but 10 days in the county jail, saying that to not include time behind bars would ''demean the seriousness'' of the offenses.

She also was given two years of probation and 80 hours of community service.

In addition, her (ailing) father was charged with grand theft for allowing Williams-Bolar to use his address when the girls didn't live there. Prosecutors claim it cost the Copley-Fairlawn school district $30,500 for the girls' education at their school with no tax base supporting their attendance.

Which leads me to ask why it is that there was no offsetting charge for what their education could have cost in their home district? Either it should have washed, or else there's some inequity in the two districts. Perish the thought.

At first, the judge was the target of everyone's blame for what is clearly an outrageous miscarriage of justice. But reading further, it seems to be the fault of the prosecutor, the investigating officers and perhaps most especially the superintendent of schools for the Copley-Fairlawn district.

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