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.

Unless I'm mistaken, there is no constitutional legal right to ride roller coasters, so there's that.

But it's just amazing that clowns like Podhoretz don't understand that waiting in line for hours on end to vote might be a wee bit of a problem if, say, you get paid by the hour, and your boss doesn't give you time off.

Guess you wouldn't if you were bequeathed a wingnut welfare gig by your dad.

The voter roll purges continue. But when one is a voting rights activist who votes in every election, it's pretty shocking to find out your own name has been purged from the rolls!

Via ProgressNowNM:

Wood received a notice in the mail at her Santa Fe home on Tuesday. The notice directs Wood to verify her voting status with the Secretary of State's own database, "Voter View" .

However, when Wood checked her voting status there, she found that her status had been changed to "INACTIVE" in this mail purge alongside a list all of the elections she has voted in since 1992, a total of 44. Wood's most recent vote was just 88 days before she received the notice sent to alleged non-voters.

Wood moved from Albuquerque to her current address in Santa Fe more than 5 years ago and has voted absentee from there at least 4 times during elections when she was working in other parts of the state protecting others' right to vote.

"I'm just shocked that I took my job to fight for other people's job to get their vote counted, and now I'm having to fight for my own," Wood told ProgressNow New Mexico in a recorded interview.

The secretary of state's voter purge began just weeks after Secretary Duran stopped printing new voter registration cards, leaving at least six New Mexico counties without registration forms. Now we learn that during that same time Duran was not printing new voter cards she was instead able to print more than 177,000 voter registration cards to target to those she deemed non-voters.

New Mexico has an estimated 250,000 - 600,000 eligible but unregistered voters.

"This is exactly what we have all been afraid of when the secretary of state acts unilaterally to terminate the right to vote for voters only she can identify," says Pat Davis of ProgressNow NM. "Diane is just the first of the more than 177,000 legal voters to get this notice and it shows the incompetence of the secretary in administering our elections. How many more active voters were included in her massive purge of voters?"

It's bad enough that they're purging active voters from the rolls, but how do they explain the failure to print sufficient numbers of voter registration cards, causing voters to be unable to register?

In the coming weeks, voter registration is going to be the single biggest issue around this election. Groups like the Voter Participation Center are gearing up for a registration drive in 28 states. Now that the right wing doesn't have ACORN to push around, they're targeting any group which is actively involved in getting unregistered voters registered. It's going to be ugly and we're going to be successful, which will cause right wing heads to explode nationwide, no doubt.

Just remember this: If the right wing can't count on your vote, they don't want your vote to count.

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Louie Gohmert (R-TX) is one of the most reliably crazy members of the Republican Caucus in the House and also one of the most reliably stupid. So it makes perfect sense why Faux News would want him to comment on Texas' effort to disenfranchise brown people challenge the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

You can really see the Faux News "interview" MO in full force here, as Shannon Bream just lets Gohmert babble talking points spout lies uninterrupted. And look what happens when she lobs him what should be a softball.

BREAM: Congressman, let me ask, because folks on the other side of this will say those are all scare tactics and there aren't real cases of fraud you can point to in Texas.

GOHMERT: Well there, well there have been, and you can go back to Duval County and Lyndon Johnson days when he told his, his ah, supposedly his campaign manager, "No, this man in this grave has every bit as much to vote as all the other people in this cemetery." I mean, those things have been going on. But when you don't have a requirement for a photo ID, it's hard to identify the fraud.

Ah, see that? We need photo IDs to prove that there's all this voter fraud we keep talking about, which will also prevent said voter fraud from happening, which is why we need the photo IDs in the first place.

Nice tautology, Louie!

Also, it's awesome that when asked on national television to produce actual evidence of voter fraud in Texas in 2012, Gohmert recycles a decades-old fable (which may or may not be true) from one of Lyndon Johnson's Congressional campaigns in the '30s or '40s.

Doesn't take a genius to see what's going on here. Republicans in Texas know they are going to lose their iron grip on the state because of demographics eventually, but they want to hold onto it as long as possible, and by any means necessary.

Voter identification laws are one of the key battlegrounds in making sure that all Americans have access to the ballot

Labor organizations Working America and the AFL-CIO have stepped up their efforts to protect the rights of Americans. Working America has opened up two new regional offices in order to expand their efforts to assist working families on jobsites that are not unionized.

Working America, the community affiliate of the AFL-CIO, has opened in two new locations as it expands its efforts to organize and mobilize working-class people who don’t have the benefit of a union on the job.
The offices—in Falls Church, Va., and St. Louis—will add to the more than a dozen states across the country where organizers knock on doors, meet and organize each day with thousands of working people.

“There is no replacement for face-to-face conversations to build a movement of working people,” said Working America Communications Director Christian Norton. “We plan to hit the ground running in Virginia and Missouri to work with our labor and progressive allies and to take our country and our economy back from corporate lobbyists and their political buddies.”

Working America has 90,000 members in Virginia and 77,000 members in Missouri currently. Working America also works in Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and more.

Meanwhile, Working America's parent organization, the AFL-CIO is expanding its focus on registering voters and protecting the rights of voters, who have been targeted by conservatives in the last few years, through voter identification laws and other vote suppression laws.

The AFL-CIO today announced a far-reaching, multi-partner campaign to register voters, ensure they can cast their ballots without intimidation and follow through to make sure those votes are counted. Speaking at a press conference here in Washington, D.C., AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker said this campaign represents the union movement’s most aggressive push ever because: "the attacks we are seeing on the right to vote are unprecedented.:

“Over the past several months, the AFL-CIO has been working with our affiliates to ensure that registered voters are able to cast their votes without intimidation and to ensure that their votes are counted,” Holt Baker said, with a focus on Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada. Some of those partners joined Holt Baker today, including NAACP President Ben Jealous, National Council of La Raza’s Clarissa Martinez-De-Castro and Generational Alliance’s Carmen Berkley.

AFL-CIO outreach will address such challenges registered voters face as inadequate election administration, lack of access to required photo ID and intimidation and dirty tricks on Election Day. The AFL-CIO website MyVoteMyRight.org offers a resource hub for voters, which includes state-by-state fact sheets on voting laws and voter registrations rules. The site offers a story feature that allows voters to submit their stories online to be gathered as a resource.

Learn a lot more about the efforts at the new AFL-CIO website.

Wednesday night, Rep. Paul Broun tried to bring an amendment to the spending bill under consideration by the House to strip all funds appropriated to enforce Title V of the 1965 Civil Rights Act. Coming from Broun, this is not much of a surprise. He has a record of being one of the most hateful legislators in the House, but this time John Lewis let him have it with both barrels.

Transcription via Think Progress:

It is hard, and difficult, and almost unbelievable that any Member — but especially a Member from the state of Georgia — would come and offer such amendment. There’s a long history in our country, especially in the 11 states that are old Confederacy — from Virginia to Texas — of discrimination based on race, on color. Maybe some of us need to study a little contemporary history dealing with the question of voting rights.

Just think, before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it was almost impossible for many people in the state of Georgia, in the state of Alabama, in Virginia, in Texas, to register to vote, to participate in the democratic process. The state of Mississippi, for example, had a black voting age population of more than 450,000, and only about 16,000 were registered to vote. One county in Alabama, the county was more than 80 percent [black], and not a single registered African-American voter. People had to pass a so-called literacy test. . . . one man was asked to count the number of bubbles in a bar of soap. Another man was asked to count the number of jelly beans in a jar.

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Circuit Judge David Flanagan placed a temporary injunction on the implementation of Wisconsin's strict voter ID with a hearing set for April 16 to determine if the injunction should be made permanent. The decision is likely to be appealed.

The good news for Wisconsin voters is that this means the law certainly won't be effect in time for April 3 primary elections. More than 200,000 Wisconsin voters do not have an ID that complies with the law and in what many are calling a poll tax, there are financial barriers that prevent many from easily complying with the law.

Flanagan said the state’s new voter ID law required people who lacked government photo ID to spend money to acquire the necessary documents — such as birth certificates. He called that “a real cost that is imposed on constitutionally eligible voters,” adding that was especially “burdensome” for the elderly and disabled.

He said the ID requirement fell disproportionately on elderly people, people of color and poor people, and said claims that the voting process needed to be policed to prevent voter impersonation — or fraudulent voting — were overblown and “extremely unlikely.”

Governor Scott Walker (R) was an enthusiastic supporter of the law and faces direct consequences if the bill is not in effect during his upcoming recall election. Voters disenfranchised by this law are more likely to be from demographic groups that tend to vote Democratically and are likely to vote to recall Walker.

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Rick Santorum has been angry for days over an ad from Mitt Romney's SuperPAC claiming Santorum supports letting criminals vote. Unfortunately, Santorum's position is a bit more nuanced than Romney claims, and if there's anything Republicans don't fully understand, it's nuance.

We begin with Juan Williams asking the question:

Senator Santorum, today you said Governor Romney is guilty of distorting your record as well as of "lies and hypocrisy". You said this behavior is classic Romney and no one's holding him accountable. So, the same question that Kelly asked, this time to you.

Should these barbed personal attacks against fellow Republicans be abandoned by the candidates?

This launched a snowball of -- you guessed it -- personal attacks. Personal attacks launched while claiming to be above the fray. Personally, I was gratified to see them take aim at Romney. Until now, they've avoided it at all costs and it's probably too late now to make any difference, but it's still something worth doing.

After the obligatory self-congratulations from Santorum, he lays out his objection to Romney's SuperPAC attack.

SANTORUM: Governor Romney's SuperPAC has put an ad out there suggesting that I voted to allow felons to be able to vote from prison because they said I allowed felons to vote and they put up a prisoner - uh, a person in a prison jumpsuit.

I would ask Governor Romney, do you believe people who are felons who have served their time, who have exhausted their parole and probation, should they be given the right to vote?

Romney then exercises his right as the frontrunner to filibuster, going on about how he doesn't know what his SuperPAC does, blah blah blah. Santorum interrupts, requesting an answer to his question. It was kind of a nice contentious moment, actually. The audience agreed. As an aside, the audience reaction at this debate was really weird. It was like watching a football game, or lions eating centurions or something.

This was also the first of many interludes where Mr. Romney let his arrogance hang out all over the stage. He was determined to be the frontrunner and to swagger around letting everyone know that, too. Honestly, Santorum's question was a good one, but Mr. Romney tried very hard to filibuster it to his advantage.

Santorum used the moment to pander a bit to the African-American community as he reminded Mr. Romney that this was a big deal to them, and it was, after all Martin Luther King day. There was also a lot of this kind of condescension all night. Between Newt telling black women they could marry their way out of poverty to Rick Perry just whistling Dixie all night long to his faithful dogs in the audience, it was laden with classic Republican patrician disdain for those who aren't white or fortunate. At any rate, Santorum pointed out that there are disproportionately high incarceration rates among African-Americans, particularly on drug charges. This is true, though he neglected to point out that the Obama administration has sought to find a balance on drug policy and incarceration rates.

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Let's get this out of the way: James O'Keefe, the wannabe gotcha journalist who can't hide his punk stupidity, is a big, fat liar. If he directs his hidden camera at you, you can be sure that what turns up will be wildly edited and quickly discredited.

O'Keefe loves to go after liberal stalwarts: ACORN, NPR, voting and democracy. You know, basically things that aren't at all threats to anything other than the mindset that we're a center-right nation. In his latest stunt, he tried to "prove" that voting fraud was rampant, with dead people actually voting in the New Hampshire primary. Except....

With his last set of videos largely seen as meaningless and pathetic, his fundraising in shambles, and his allies leaving him in disgust, O'Keefe clearly hopes to press this non-issue to revive his standing in the conservative movement. As always, the Daily Caller is happy to help out, already trumpeting the "bombshell video" that they received "exclusively" from O'Keefe.

In the service of this aim, O'Keefe and associate Spencer Meads visited a number of polling locations during the January 10 New Hampshire primaries armed with hidden cameras. At each polling location, the videographer in question would approach a poll worker who was checking in voters and ask the poll worker if a recently deceased voter's name is on the rolls. When the poll worker, assuming that the right-wing operative is presenting themselves as that person, attempts to give them a ballot, the videographer says that they don't have their ID and leaves.[..]

But O'Keefe's claim [of rampant fraud] aside, there is simply no evidence that such fraud occurs more often then, say, community organizations are asked to help set up child sex rings. In a 2007 report, the Brennan Center for Justice reported that there are a "handful" of cases when votes have actually cast in the names of the deceased, compared to thousands of such allegations that ultimately proved fruitless.

Again, this whole conservative bugaboo demanding Voter ID to prevent voter fraud is a solution to a non-existent problem, and one that has been shown to actually prevent legitimate voting from taking place. But convicted parolee O'Keefe may have reached too far:

[E]lection law experts tell TPM that O’Keefe’s allies could face criminal charges on both the federal and state level for procuring ballots under false names, and that his undercover sting doesn’t demonstrate a need for voter ID laws at all.

Federal law bans not only the casting of, but the “procurement” of ballots “that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held.”

Hamline University law professor David Schultz told TPM that there’s “no doubt” that O’Keefe’s investigators violated the law.

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Ari Berman penned an incredibly important read in Rolling Stone two months ago on the GOP’s all-out war on voting:

As the nation gears up for the 2012 presidential election, Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008. Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots. "What has happened this year is the most significant setback to voting rights in this country in a century," says Judith Browne-Dianis, who monitors barriers to voting as co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C.

Berman’s piece detailed the efforts of a Republican nationwide campaign, supported by the Koch brothers, which is working to prevent millions of Democrats from voting next year. The story is just now being picked up by traditional media outlets such as the Los Angeles Times, which featured the following telling quote from President Bill Clinton:

"There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today," former President Clinton told a group of college students in July.

Thankfully, Obama’s re-election campaign has been putting together a series of responses, fighting these sleazy and frankly anti-democratic GOP tactics, through voter-protection initiatives closely navigating these new election laws. Over in Congress, Representative Keith Ellison has introduced legislation to curb voter suppression. However, those who are interested in pushing back against the GOP’s war on voting, will get a chance to do it the old fashioned way – by VOTING (!) – next Tuesday in Maine.

That’s right, as Berman referenced in his Rolling Stone piece linked above, the GOP-led legislature in Maine passed a bill to end same-day voting registration earlier this year, which has been in effect for almost 40 years. Of course, Maine’s teabagging governor, Paul LePage – who we can call the Scott Walker of New England -- signed the bill. Now the voters in Maine will have a chance to throttle this effort next week through a referendum (which is being called “Question 1”). The polling is close in favor of the good guys (48-44).

Chris Bowers wrote about it on the Big Orange.

However, the campaign in Maine needs everyone’s help. If you want to help out, you can do so by contributing, volunteering and telling your story (if you are from Maine), here. You can also make a contribution to the campaign here as it will need all the help it can get down the stretch as the other side not surprisingly is playing dirty. They are also being bankrolled by secret wingnut donors. So the Mainers are going to need every penny they can get to protect their votes.

This is going to be a huge battle to keep an eye on. If Mainers prevail on Tuesday in protecting their vote, it will give much needed boost to those who are already fighting tooth and nail to beat back GOP’s war on voting.