Justice Scalia Redefines Discrimination
Tuesday April 29, 2008
See also: Justice Antonin Scalia
Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Indiana's restrictive new voter ID laws are constitutional.
Well, sort of.
It was actually more of a 3-3-3 ruling; justices Stevens, Kennedy, and Roberts held that the Indiana law was constitutional, but expressed concerns about possible voter disenfranchisement and an implicit willingness to reconsider these sorts of laws if they have the net effect of suppressing turnout. Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, and Souter wrote against the Indiana law, arguing that it poses an unacceptable burden on citizen voting rights.
But Justice Scalia went way off in right field, taking justices Alito and Thomas with him, in an opinion that would have upheld practically any restriction on voter participation as long as it is neutrally constructed, regardless of whether it has the net effect of disenfranchising voters.
Justice Scalia grounds his definition of unconstitutional discrimination solely in legislative intent, not the actual effect of a given piece of legislation. End result: Although he says he would oppose poll taxes now, the inescapable logic of Justice Scalia's opinion seems to be that if the Supreme Court happens to believe that a legislature didn't mean to suppress a specific group of voters, it doesn't matter what a given piece of legislation actually does. There is no reason why poll taxes, literacy tests, and other traditional voting restrictions of the Jim Crow era would not meet the Scalia test, provided that they were passed with no discernible whiff of conscious discriminatory intent.
As we head into an era where laws are increasingly passed that would have the net effect of discriminating against Latinos, I don't find it all that comforting that this sort of pre-civil rights era interpretation of voting rights law appears to be held by one-third of the U.S. Supreme Court. Let's hope Justice Scalia and his like-minded colleagues revise or clarify their position in a later opinion.
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Well, sort of.
It was actually more of a 3-3-3 ruling; justices Stevens, Kennedy, and Roberts held that the Indiana law was constitutional, but expressed concerns about possible voter disenfranchisement and an implicit willingness to reconsider these sorts of laws if they have the net effect of suppressing turnout. Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, and Souter wrote against the Indiana law, arguing that it poses an unacceptable burden on citizen voting rights.
But Justice Scalia went way off in right field, taking justices Alito and Thomas with him, in an opinion that would have upheld practically any restriction on voter participation as long as it is neutrally constructed, regardless of whether it has the net effect of disenfranchising voters.
Justice Scalia grounds his definition of unconstitutional discrimination solely in legislative intent, not the actual effect of a given piece of legislation. End result: Although he says he would oppose poll taxes now, the inescapable logic of Justice Scalia's opinion seems to be that if the Supreme Court happens to believe that a legislature didn't mean to suppress a specific group of voters, it doesn't matter what a given piece of legislation actually does. There is no reason why poll taxes, literacy tests, and other traditional voting restrictions of the Jim Crow era would not meet the Scalia test, provided that they were passed with no discernible whiff of conscious discriminatory intent.
As we head into an era where laws are increasingly passed that would have the net effect of discriminating against Latinos, I don't find it all that comforting that this sort of pre-civil rights era interpretation of voting rights law appears to be held by one-third of the U.S. Supreme Court. Let's hope Justice Scalia and his like-minded colleagues revise or clarify their position in a later opinion.
Read more:
Comments
The decision was the CORRECT one. We ask people for all kinds of IDs for just about EVERYTHING these days, so why should something as IMPORTANT to our Representative Democracy as voting be any different?
With idiots like Scalia on the Supreme Court it is a wonder we have any justice left in this land.