Weirdo Conservatives Spread Lies About Supreme Court Decision That Brings Back Jim-Crow Lite

Weirdo Conservatives Spread Lies About Supreme Court Decision That Brings Back Jim-Crow Lite

Right-wing media are offering multiple false reassurances to those outraged at the Supreme Court's attack on voting rights in Shelby County v. Holder, while failing to report on the progress of one possible fix.

In the aftermath of Shelby County, which held that Congress' extensive 2006 findings of ongoing voter suppression did not justify the Voting Rights Act's formula for determining which jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination must "preclear" their election changes, right-wing media are incorrectly claiming that this decision will not have an adverse effect on voting rights.

Repeating the lie that the preclearance requirement in Section 5 of the VRA - gutted when the Supreme Court invalidated the formula within Section 4 that determines which jurisdictions are subject to it - was insignificant, right wing-media continue to argue that only a "small part" of this historic civil rights law was struck down.

Megyn KellyIn their day-after analysis of Shelby County, the editors of the National Review Online proclaimed the preclearance process to be "worthless," adding "[t]he decision brings an end to the automatic and perpetual punishment of states that are guilty of crimes in decades past. It does nothing else."

On the June 26 edition of America Live, Fox News host Megyn Kelly dismissed the idea that "racism was given the stamp of approval officially by the Supreme Court yesterday." Her guest, NRO contributing editor Andrew McCarthy, repeated the right-wing myth that voter suppression that engages in systematic racial discrimination "has long ago passed to the dustbin of history" and progressives who cannot recognize its demise are demagogues and "race hucksters." From America Live:

But this argument denying the "vital scaffolding" that is Sections 4 and 5 was debunked by the actions of states that immediately reanimated voter suppression measures, previously blocked or deterred as potentially racially discriminatory by preclearance, in the hours after Shelby County was decided.

Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, and North Carolina have announced they will proceed with voter ID and redistricting measures whose racial discrimination could have been scrutinized and stopped by the preclearance mechanism of the VRA. Indeed, Texas is going forward with both a voter ID law and redistricting plan that federal courts have already found to be forms of systematic racial discrimination. Alabama, and Shelby County in particular, may be an even clearer example of how Section 5 has repeatedly and recently deterred voter suppression on the basis of race. From The New Yorker:

    Reading the opinion it's possible to forget that a grand total of three African-Americans senators and two governors have been elected in the past hundred and thirty-six years, only one of them in a Southern state. In arguing that the preclearance section of the V.R.A. was outmoded and based upon aged presumptions about Southern states, the court had to bypass not only history but contemporary reality. As Justice Sotomayor pointed out during oral arguments, Shelby County--the Alabama county that brought the challenge to the Court--had failed preclearance some two hundred and forty times. Given that Section 5 of the V.R.A. allows districts covered by its provisions to move out of coverage by consistently demonstrating that their laws have no discriminatory impact, this decision was something of an end run: places that have consistently failed the litmus tests of discrimination were, in a second, given the status of those where there's been legitimate progress. 

Self-admittedly scared of being called "racist" for their opposition to the preclearance mechanism, right-wing media are offering a litany of hollow reassurances for why Shelby County will not negatively affect voters of color. If right-wing media really want to listen to the concerns of voters of color - a growing demographic that Republicans are desperately seeking to attract - perhaps they should actually report on the one reassurance about the decision they have mentioned that is actually true: Congress can, once again, reauthorize Section 4. So far, right-wing media have been silent on the efforts that were immediately launched to do just that, both on the Democratic and Republican sides of the aisle.

This omission is peculiar.

Sections 4 and 5 were reauthorized in 2006 by bipartisan majorities of 98-0 in the Senate and 390-33 in the House of Representatives, then signed into law by former President George W. Bush. The fact that many of the same congresspersons are now mobilizing to revive this bipartisan effort and save the heart of the Voting Rights Act is surely news.

At the very least, it's a more important story than dredging up demonstrably false claims about preclearance and voter suppression.

The UnAmerican freaks at Fox News and The National Review try very hard to appear to be adults and patriots. In reality, when the facts are presented, these freaky conservatives are left shouting lies because they have lost yet another debate.One of the great things true patriots have learned from history is that when one side constantly resorts to lies and disinformation to win a debate, they have a twisted radical agenda.

Radical UnAmerican Conservatives on Supreme Court Protects Mega-Corporations From Responsibility For Their Actions

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Simple Truths message to Congress (April 29, 1938). "Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power.
The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living. Both lessons hit home. Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing." Radical UnAmerican Conservatives on Supreme Court Protects Mega-Corporations From Responsibility For Their Actions

In case it wasn’t clear already, the U.S. Supreme Court hammered home Thursday morning that it will protect the rights of corporations to force arbitration over the individuals’ access to the court system at any expense.

In a 5-3 ruling with Justice Sonia Sotomayor recused, Justice Antonin Scalia eviscerated almost any opportunity small merchants have to challenge alleged monopolistic practices by American Express in their credit card agreements.

Sound familiar? Earlier this term, the court turned back on procedural grounds a lawsuit alleging monopolistic practices by Comcast. A week after that, they turned back the claims of workers to challenge employer practices as a class. And in 2011, they issued one of the worst blows to consumer rights in years when they held that consumers challenging $30 fees could not sue together as a class. In each of these cases, the court’s procedural rulings mean the parties may never get to argue about whether these corporations actually violated the law. And as a consequence, these corporations may never be held accountable.

With Thursday’s ruling, the court added small businesses to the list of aggrieved parties whose access to the courthouse has been foreclosed by boilerplate contracts that prohibit parties from filing their challenge as a class, or from otherwise alleviating the immense cost of filing their claims individually. This time, the litigants were small businesses taking on American Express, and their lawyer was none other than conservative powerhouse Paul Clement. Clement has argued many of the major conservative court wins of the past few years, and his argument on the side of the plaintiffs was probably the last best shot at curbing the Roberts Court’s total perversion of the Federal Arbitration Act.

As in the AT&T case, the plaintiffs here argued that the only way they could challenge the policy of mega-corporation American Express was by banding together as a class and pooling their resources. But consumers’ claims in AT&T were struck down on a different rationale, that their state law claims were preempted by the Federal Arbitration Act. This time, the plaintiffs argued that because their antitrust claims are federal , they are protected by the principle of “effective vindication,” meaning that where an arbitration clause effectively immunizes otherwise meritorious federal claims, plaintiffs are entitled to vindication of their actual rights. To show that that the arbitration clause would make any challenge prohibitively expensive, they deployed formal affidavits by economists attesting to the immense cost of these claims — “’at least several hundred thousand dollars, and might exceed $1 million’,” while the maximum recovery for an individual plaintiff would be $12,850, or $38,549 when trebled,” meaning they could not afford to launch their claims without the ability to file them together.

No matter, said the majority. In AT&T, “[w]e specifically rejected the argument that class arbitration was necessary to prosecute claims ‘that might otherwise slip through the legal system’.” This case is about federal law vindication and AT&T was about state law preemption, but as Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent, “to a hammer everything looks like a nail.” Joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, Kagan explains the case this way:

    Here is the nutshell version of this case, unfortunately obscured in the Court’s decision. The owner of a small restaurant (Italian Colors) thinks that American Express (Amex) has used its monopoly power to force merchants to accept a form contract violating the antitrust laws. The restaurateur wants to challenge the allegedly unlawful provision (imposing a tying arrangement), but the same contract’s arbitration clause prevents him from doing so.

    That term imposes a variety of procedural bars that would make pursuit of the antitrust claim a fool’s errand. So if the arbitration clause is enforceable, Amex has insulated itself from antitrust liability—even if it has in fact violated the law. The monopolist gets to use its monopoly power to insist on a contract effectively depriving its victims of all legal recourse.

    And here is the nutshell version of today’s opinion, admirably flaunted rather than camouflaged: Too darn bad.

    That answer is a betrayal of our precedents, and of federal statutes like the antitrust laws.

Today’s ruling was yet another point in the Chamber of Commerce’s remarkable tally of wins before the Roberts Court, and another chance for the most business-friendly justices in 65 years to side with their friends.

It is neither hyperbole or name calling to say that American Express and the Chamber of Commerce are simply proto-fascists. Their mission is not good old business - competing to see who can sell good and services for a fair price. No, their agenda is to take as much power away from the people, individual Americans as they can.