Obama Confronts Bush Court on Voting Rights, Gay Rights Cases

Yesterday's Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act underscores the reality that presidential elections have long lasting impacts through appointments to the Supreme Court.  The appointees of Chimperator George W. Bush tipped the balance against protecting voting rights.  It goes without saying that the conservative majority's ruling was a huge gift to Republicans who seek to disenfranchise as many minorities as possible as their last defense against demographic change that will eventually mean the end of angry white Christofascist rule in America.  One can only hope that these same backward thinking bigots do not hand down defeats to gay rights later this morning.  As Politico reports, Barack Obama had some harsh words to say yesterday.  Here are story excepts:

President Barack Obama faced an uncomfortable truth Tuesday: He was powerless to stop George W. Bush’s Supreme Court from eviscerating the most consequential civil rights law of the past half-century.

The constitutional law professor sat by helplessly — “deeply disappointed” — as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a 5-4 majority opinion that tore down one section of the Voting Rights Act and effectively killed another. Obama, who voted against Roberts in 2005, could see it coming. Everyone in Washington could.

“The judge was on the wrong side of history. He was on the wrong side of the Voting Rights Act, not just the letter but also the spirit of the act,” John Lewis, the Georgia Democratic congressman who was savagely beaten during a 1965 voting rights march in Alabama, told senators back then. On Tuesday, Lewis described Roberts’s opinion as a “dagger into the heart” of the law.

Obama is hardly the first president to govern at a time when the Supreme Court is controlled by justices appointed by the other party — but for a president with big ideas about the government’s role in protecting the disenfranchised, Bush’s moves loom as a particular obstacle, as Tuesday showed.

The historic pairing of Obama and Roberts — two singular talents of their respective parties at this moment in time — sets them up to be opposing forces on some of the most important issues of the day, long after Obama leaves office and the Roberts court lives on. That clash on Tuesday took the form of Roberts striking down key parts of a law central to the civil rights movement — perhaps doing more in one opinion to change civil rights protections than Obama could do singlehandedly as president to advance them, even by his presence as the nation’s first black president.

The decision striking down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act — and effectively nullifying Section 5 — did little to settle the political debate over whether minorities still need the federal government to ensure access to the polls in states and counties that have a history of racial discrimination. But it ensures that Bush’s record on civil rights will be seen at least as much through the prism of his court picks as his signature on the 2006 Voting Rights Act extension, the fourth renewal of the law since its original enactment in 1965. The Roberts legacy outlived the law.

The Old South is alive and well in many parts of Virginia and elsewhere.  For Roberts to claim otherwise is a lie.  Minorities and gays have every reason to fear the Roberts Court.  Again, I hope gays are not savaged in the rulings to be released today.