The Wall Street Journal report on Shelby tells you everything you may need to know. Two and out: Justice Anthony Kennedy focused on what he considered the demeaning nature of the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance requirement, under which some localities must get approval in advance from Washington for changes to their voting laws. Justice Kennedy said preclearance effectively put some states under the “trusteeship of the United States government.”
Chief Justice John Roberts on Wednesday asked Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, who was defending the law, whether the government was contending that citizens in the South were more racist than those in Northern states. The chief justice was ready with statistics intended to rebut such images, telling Mr. Verrilli that Massachusetts clocked the nation’s lowest ratio of black turnout to that of whites, while Mississippi had the highest.
More from the Washington Post:
The act has come to be seen as a “racial entitlement,” Scalia said, and “I am fairly confident it will be reenacted in perpetuity” no matter how much progress the states make in eliminating discrimination.