Rep. Sensenbrenner’s shallow approach to 2006 Voting Rights Act reauthorization caused its constitutional downfall

There have been recent coverage on Representative Sensenbrenner and his desire to work with the Congressional Black Caucus and the Obama Administration to place states under federal receivership with the Holder Department of Justice.  

As the article points out, Sensenbrenner was the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee during the reauthorization hearings and was responsible for the approach at establishing the congressional record necessary to support a reauthorization.
Sensenbrenner was instrumental in helping pass reauthorizations of the Voting Rights Act in 1982 and again in 2006, when Congress supplied 15,000 pages of supporting documents justifying the sustained need of the Act.

While some reporters will highlight the 2006 reauthorization as a success, both conservative and liberal commentators opined that the “quantity over quality” approach to collecting evidence was wrong-headed and that ignoring Supreme Court constitutional concerns expressed in Georgia v. Aschroft and other opinions actually set the Voting Rights Act for future constitutional challenge.   

Sensenbrenner ignored these reasoned arguments and pushed forward with dozens of hearings and developing a record a mile wide in paper and an inch deep in substance.  He was warned by experts, staffers and his colleagues, yet he ignored them all to earn the praise of civil rights groups. Years later, his stubbornness in keeping the flawed coverage formula resulted in the overturning of the Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. He is the person most responsible for the constitutional failings and he received grief for it.
“My colleagues from Texas and Georgia were kind of in my face after the Supreme Court decision saying ‘Ha-ha, we told you so,'”

Sensenbrenner wasn’t listening to the experts and he never will.  Instead, he was listening to liberal interest groups and was deeply desirous of their praise. He did the civil rights groups no favors by refusing to update the coverage formula or listen to Supreme Court concerns. Now, he wants a seat at the table to develop a new record of testimony and a new coverage formula when he was one person most instrumental and responsible in developing a flawed congressional record which failed to support the obsolete coverage formula under Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. 

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