Breaking News: Arizona Attorney General sue Feds that Section 5, reauthorization of VRA, and language minority sections unconstitutional

here is link to press release,the filing cites four claims, summarized here:



  1. The 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act is facially unconstitutional. It exceeds Congress’s authority under the 14th and 15th Amendments because it suspends all changes to state election law – however innocuous – until preclearance is given by the federal government. There is no rational relationship to the powers given to the federal government in the constitution.

  2. The formula for determining which states should be covered jurisdictions, found in Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act, is unconstitutional. It places enforcement burdens on Arizona for problems that have been corrected for decades. For example, Arizona is still penalized for archaic violations that were corrected with the implementation of bi-lingual ballots prior to the 1974 elections.

  3. The Voting Rights Act is facially unconstitutional because it treats states within the union differently without a rational justification. For example, the “language minority” coverage formula unconstitutionally differentiates between states by applying three different standards for “Spanish heritage” to three different groups of states.

    4. In 1975, Arizona would not have been a covered jurisdiction if the Census Bureau had applied the definition of Spanish heritage it applied to New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, to Arizona. Just because a person claims that Spanish is his mother tongue does not mean that he cannot speak or read English or that he suffers from discrimination, but the Act treats him that way. The same is true of those with a Spanish surname. There is no basis to claim that a person with a Hispanic surname cannot read or speak English or suffers from discrimination.


    The entire classification system is flawed, arbitrary, and irrational. No explanation was given as to why persons with a “Spanish surname” (but who did not speak Spanish as their native language) would encounter discrimination in Denver but not Las Vegas or Orlando; why a person who did not speak Spanish but had one Puerto Rican parent would face discrimination in Erie but not Stamford or Chicago; or why persons who spoke Spanish as their native language and did not have “Puerto Rican birth or parentage” faced discrimination only in the forty-seven states not in New Jersey, New York, or Pennsylvania. Yet, there are all results of the Act and its application.


    The definitions of “Spanish language” and “Puerto Rican birth or parentage” included white English speakers raised in the United States within the calculation of “language minorities” if they married a native Spanish speaker or were born to vacationers in Puerto Rico. As such, a white English speaker would be classified as a “language minority” upon marriage to a Spanish speaker in Baltimore but not when the couple moved to Atlantic City, and a non-Hispanic English speaker born to vacationers in Puerto Rico would be classified as a “language minority” while residing in Pittsburg but not upon moving to Cleveland.


  4. In the alternative, the provisions are unconstitutional as applied to Arizona

Rep. Giffords requests approval from FEC to use campaign funds for home security improvements

Meanwhile at the Federal Election Commission, (FEC), Rep. Gabrielle Giffords requests an expedited advisory opinion from the Commission on approval to use campaign funds for security improvements to family home during her rehabilitation.  A sympathetic request but may open a whole new area for candidates to use campaign funds.  A Link to the request.

DOJ haggles with AZ over same law FL passed

Arizona has yanked a Section 5 submission from DOJ regarding how third party groups may treat voter registration forms after they harvest them.  These laws are intended to prevent the forms from being lost and thus disenfranchising the voter on election day who appears at the polls to vote.  Many dislike the restrictions on the third party groups.  Multiple guilty pleas around the nation have come from fraudulent misconduct regarding this activity.

Not long ago, Florida Secretary of State Browning yanked a submission from DOJ because it appeared to him Florida wasn’t going to get a fair hearing on a similar submission.  Expect Arizona now to go to federal court.  And it wouldn’t be much of a surprise if Arizona attacked the constitutionality of Section 5 as applied in this instance. 

CFIF on DOJ voting section (et al) hiring

More on DOJ hiring from the Center for Individual Freedoom:

 

According to every outlet of the establishment media, it was a near-earthshaking scandal when the Bush Justice Department rejected some applicants for “career” (officially non-political) jobs because the applicants were too liberal. “The entire Justice Department and all Americans were harmed” screamed the Washington Post. The New York Times, in high dudgeon, wrote that “the strength of American democracy depends on our ability to be shocked by abuses like these — and to punish them appropriately.”

The Post and the Times were crying crocodile tears. It wasn’t hiring bias to which they objected; it was merely conservative hiring bias that bothered them. Neither they nor any other establishment news organ seems the slightest bit perturbed now that, thanks to Pajamas Media, it is abundantly clear that the Obama Justice Department’s liberal hiring is far more politicized than anything the Bushies even dreamed of.