Arizona Attorney General: Section 5 of Voting Rights Act has “outlived its usefulness”



Since the Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act took effect nearly 50 years ago, the state began offering bilingual ballots, negating one of the reasons the state was originally put under review, Horne said.


 


The law also requires jurisdictions to pre-clear laws and procedures if more than 5 percent of the population isn’t fluent in English. But Horne noted that the method the U.S. Department of Justice uses to determine that is a person’s heritage, not whether he or she can actually speak English. Arizona’s rate by the latter is less than 2 percent, Horne said.  “In the case of Arizona, it absolutely makes no sense to have preclearance any longer.”


 


In a brief filed with the Supreme Court, Horne wrote that “costs associated with Section 5 have only continued to increase while the statute’s benefits have all but vanished.” As a result, it said, affected states “spend millions of dollars and thousands of attorney hours to preclear an ever-expanding array of laws.”  


 


More on the upcoming challenge to Section 5 here.

“Photo ID requirement not a major factor in Tennessee”

There were few complaints of people being turned away from the polls in Tennessee’s general election because they did not have an acceptable photo ID. Yet, opponents of the statute say any disenfranchisement is unacceptable. State election coordinator Mark Goins told the Chattanooga Times Free Press problems meeting the photo ID requirement on Nov. 6 appeared to be minimal. The final tally of provisional ballots was not yet available. 

An interesting facts from the article:

Hundreds of calls on the voter hotline, only two photo ID questions. 

Link to AP article.

“The ever more solid South”

The South, as a whole, was largely resistant to the Democratic winds last
week. The GOP now controls every legislature in the South, and every
governorship except Arkansas. Republicans also managed to hold every one
of its House and Senate seats in the region on Election Day – and even
managed to pick up a few House seats.   Link to Politico.

Rush Limbaugh Reads Latest PJ Media Article on Air

As usual the phones and email lit up as soon as Rush Limbaugh started reading my latest PJ Media column on the air today.  Here is the column. 

Here is the transcript.

RUSH: I’ll tell you something else. I’ll tell you something right along the same lines. In fact, I want to read to you from our old buddy J. Christian Adams who left the Justice Department because Holder refused to prosecute the guilty New Black Panther Party for vote for fraud in 2008 in Philadelphia. J. Christian Adams left because he realized that black defendants were not gonna be charged nor prosecuted, pursued by this Justice Department. He writes the following about immigration: . . .

[Reads column linked above]

RUSH: We have nothing countering public education, and we have nothing countering Entertainment Tonight or TMZ or whatever the pop culture, we don’t have anything that counters it. All we have is, “Gee, I hope that they listen to us or see us and realize what they’re being told is a bunch of lies.” I hope they could see that Newt is really not a nerd or a square. I wish they could see that Paul Ryan really is hip. He really is a great American. And now look. Their comedians can be the most raucous, filthy, insensitive, insulting they can be, and they are given accolades. We can’t even joke about them without being called racists, sexists, bigots insensitive or what have you. We can’t even laugh at them. We have to sit by and allow ourselves to be the subjects of derision, mockery, insult, and lies.