The latest on the Shelby County challenge to mend not end the Voting Rights Act. Shelby County is appealing two recent lower court decisions that upheld the constitutionality of the landmark civil rights-era law. If the justices agree to accept the case, they’ll schedule it for oral arguments sometime after they return in October, and it would be one of the highest-profile cases of the court’s 2012-13 term.
Shelby County took its challenge of the Voting Rights Act to the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday, asking the justices to declare part of the 1965 law an unfair burden on states such as Alabama where the federal government still keeps a close watch on elections for evidence of racial discrimination.
A bit from the petition.
…”It is this court’s duty to ensure that Congress appropriately remedies Fifteenth Amendment violations without usurping the states’ sovereign powers,” according to Shelby County’s petition. “Shelby County asks the court to protect this important federalism interest.”
…”Congress needed to find that Section 5 was justified under actual conditions uniquely present in the covered jurisdictions; it could not proceed from an unsubstantiated and unbounded assumption that the covered jurisdictions have a latent desire to discriminate that does not exist elsewhere in the country,” the petition states.