Good post from Greg Palast on the US Supreme Court's invalidation of certain 1965 Voting Act provisions. As usual, the NY Times and other mainstreamers called the decision historic without explaining well what was going on. Something about Section 4 something? Next article. Palast minces no verbiage:
Last year, the GOP Secretary of State of Florida Ken Detzner tried to purge 180,000 Americans, mostly Hispanic Democrats, from the voter rolls. He was attempting to break Katherine Harris' record.
Detzner claimed that all these Brown folk were illegal "aliens."
But Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act requires that 16 states with a bad history of blocking Black and Brown voters must "pre-clear" with the US Justice Department any messing around with voter rolls or voting rules. And so Section 4 stopped Detzner from the racist Brown-out.
[...]
We can go from state to state in Dixie and see variations of the Florida purge game. It quickly adds up to millions of voters at risk.
Yet the 5-to-4 Court majority ruled, against all evidence, that, "Blatantly discriminatory evasions [of minority voting rights] are rare." Since there are no more racially bent voting games, the right-wing Robed Ones conclude there’s no more reason for “pre-clearance.”
Whom do they think they're fooling? The Court itself, just last week, ruled that Arizona's law requiring the showing of citizenship papers was an unconstitutional attack on Hispanic voters. Well, Arizona's a Section 4 state.
Palast says it's a political move by the court to prevent another Obama: "The Republican court knows that to swipe 2016, they had to replace the Voting Rights Act with a revival of the Katherine Harris act."