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About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (July 10, 2013)
Opinion Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark “Challenging People to Shape a Better Future Now” B ERNIE F OSTER Founder/Publisher B OBBIE D ORE F OSTER Executive Editor T ED B ANKS Advertising Manager J ERRY F OSTER Account Executive L ISA L OVING News Editor H ELEN S ILVIS Multimedia Editor B RUCE P OINSETTE Reporter D AVID K IDD Graphic Designer M ONICA J. F OSTER Seattle Office Coordinator J ULIE K EEFE S USAN F RIED Photographers The Skanner Newspaper, established in October 1975, is a weekly publica- I f you’re looking for the justice on the Supreme Court who mirrors Thurgood Marshall’s tenure on the bench, it is not Sonia Sotomayor, the “Wise Latina.” And it certainly isn’t Clarence Thomas. It is Ruth Bader Gins- burg, the second woman to serve on the nation’s highest court. This became clear in the Fisher v. University of Texas affirmative action case. With Elena Kagan recusing herself, the court voted 7- 1 to send the case back to court of appeals for additional review. The lone dissenter was Ginsburg. “The University of Texas at Austin (University) … has steered clear of a quota system like the one struck down in Bakke, which excluded all nonminority candi- dates from competition for a fixed number of seats….” she said. “ Justice Powell’s majority opinion in Bakke “rules out a racial quota or set-aside, in which race is the sole fact of eligibility for certain places in a class.’ And, like so many educational institutions across the Nation, the University has taken care to follow the model approved by the Court in Grutter v. Bollinger.” In sending Fisher back to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, the 7-1 majority empha- sized that the lower court should apply a standard of strict scrutiny, meaning the University must prove that it has tried all available race-neutral approaches before allowing race to be considered a factor in admissions. T HE C URRY R EPORT George E. Curry Ginsburg wrote in her dissent, “I have said before and reiterate here that only an ostrich could regard the supposedly neutral alternatives as race unconscious.” Continuing to address the issue of race directly, Ginsburg said, “I have several times explained why was joined by Stephen G. Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan. The con- servative majority struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, effectively gutting one of the nation’s most effective tools to curb discrimination against Black voters. “In the Court’s view, the very success of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act demands its dorman- cy,” Ginsburg said. “Congress was of another mind. Recognizing that large progress has been made, Congress determined, based on a voluminous record, that the scourge of discrimination was not yet extirpated.” She explained, “The Voting Under our constitutional structure, Congress holds the lead rein in making the right to vote equally real for all U. S. citizens. government actors, including state universities, need not be blind to the lingering effects of ‘an overtly discriminatory past,’ the legacy of ‘centuries of law-sanctioned inequality.’ Among constitutional- ly permissible options, I remain convinced, ‘those that candidly disclose their consideration of race [are] preferable to those that con- ceal it.’” In Shelby County v. Holder, the Voting Rights Act challenge, Gins- burg filed a dissenting opinion that Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) has worked to combat voting discrimi- nation where other remedies had been tried and failed. Particularly effective is the VRA’s requirement of federal preclearance for all changes to voting laws in the regions of the country with the most aggravated records of rank discrimination against minority voting rights.” Quoting a 1966 decision in South Carolina v. Katzenbach, Ginsburg said, “A century after the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amend- ments guaranteed citizens the right to vote free of discrimination on the basis of race, the ‘blight of racial discrimination in voting’ continued to “infec[t] the electoral process in parts of our country.” The Voting Rights Act directly addressed that infection, Ginsburg stated. “Although the VRA wrought dramatic changes in the realization of minority voting rights, the Act, to date, surely has not eliminated all vestiges of discrimination against the exercise of the fran- chise by minority citizens,” she said. Ginsburg noted, “After consider- ing the full legislative record, Con- gress made the following findings: The VRA has directly caused sig- nificant progress in eliminating first-generation barriers to ballot access, leading to a marked increase in minority voter registra- tion and turnout and the number of minority elected officials. But despite this progress, “second gen- eration barriers constructed to pre- vent minority voters from fully participating in the electoral process” continued to exist, as well as racially polarized voting in the covered jurisdictions, which increased the political vulnerabili- ty of racial and language minori- ties in those jurisdictions.” She noted that Congress, not the judiciary, should have the final say on voting matters. George E. Curry is editor-in- chief of the NNPA News Service. tion, published each Wednesday by IMM Publications Inc., 415 N. Killingsworth St., P.O. Box 5455, Portland, OR 97228. The Shameful Voting Rights Decision Telephone (503) 285-5555. E-mail: info@theskanner.com World Wide Web site: http://www.theskanner.com Fax: (503) 285-2900 The Skanner is a member of the National Newspaper Pub lishers Associ- ation and West Coast Black Pub lishers Association. All photos submitted become the property of The Skanner. We are not re - spon sible for lost or damaged photos either solicited or unsolicited. © 2012 The Skanner. ALL RIGHTS RE SERVED. REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART WITHOUT PERMISSION PROHIBITED. To see The Skanner News on your smart phone go to theskannermobile.com or scan this QR code with your app. • • • • • • • • Local news Opinions Jobs, Bids Sports Entertainment Music reviews Bulletin board RSS feeds T he Voting Rights Act has been described as the “crown jewel” of civil rights legislation. Its passage was secured with the courage, grit and blood of activists throughout the south, including Fannie Lou Hamer who endured beatings sim- ply for trying to register to vote in Mississippi, Medgar Evers who was murdered by a White supremacist, students Andrews Goodman, James Cheney and Michael Schwerner, who went missing at the start of Freedom Summer 49 years ago, and Black demonstrators in Selma, Ala., who were beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge It’s hard to imagine a piece of legislation with a greater pedigree and for which more people have fought and died than the Voting Rights Act. And yet in a 5-4 deci- sion in Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the act. Under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, Congress designated particular jurisdictions in the U.S. that must obtain permission from a federal authority (either the Department of Justice or a federal court) before they enact voting changes that might have the effect of discriminating against minority voters. The jurisdictions are large- ly located in the south, although several boroughs in New York, parts of Alaska and Arizona are included as well. The formula used to designate the jurisdictions to be covered is set out in Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. The Page 4 The Portland Skanner July 10, 2013 NNPA G UEST C OLUMNIST Sherrilyn A. Ifill court has declared that Section 4 unconstitutional. This essentially hollows out the foundation of Sec- tion 5. The court’s decision is a shock- ing usurpation of power from the Congress, which in 2006 held hearings over the course of nine months, heard from almost 100 witnesses and amassed a 15,000- Charleston County proposed switching from single-member district to at-large voting for the council, and failed to inform any of the Black members of the school board of the proposed change. In 2001 in Kilmichael, Miss., the all-White town council decided to simply cancel the town’s election, once a number of Blacks decided to run, and data showed that the jurisdiction had become majority Black. In each of these cases, Section 5 prevented the discriminatory plans It’s hard to imagine a piece of legislation with a greater pedigree and for which more people have fought and died than the Voting Rights Act page record. The result of Con- gress’ searching inquiry was its determination that voting discrim- ination continued in the jurisdic- tions identified in Section 4 of the Act. In fact, the record was replete with examples of voting discrimi- nation in those areas. For example, Congress found that city officials in Calera in Shel- by County, Ala. discriminated in 2008 when they reduced the Black population in the sole majority Black council district from 70 per- cent to 29 percent. Congress learned that in 2003 once Blacks won a majority of seats on the Charleston, S.C. school board, from reaching fruition. Today, that protection has been removed, by a 5-member majority on the court that substituted its judgment for the record painstakingly amassed by Congress. This decision is devastating for minority voters in cities, towns, and counties all over this country. In essence, the voting protections of 48 years have been removed with a stroke of the court’s pen. Now we have to act. The NAACP Legal Defense and Edu- cational Fund has been fighting voting discrimination for more than 50 years, and we won’t stop now. Here’s what you can do: 1) If you live in the South or in a jurisdiction formerly covered by section 5, tell us about any vot- ing changes happening in your community. The court struck down section 4 of the act and, in effect, removed the power of Sec- tion 5, but the rest of the Act still provides protections for minority voters. The Voting Rights Act is not dead. But without section 5, you are our eyes and ears. Go to our website at www.naacpldf.org to “Take Action,” email us at vote@naacpldf.org, or call the Election Protection hotline shared by national civil rights groups at 1- 866-OUR-VOTE. 2) Call your representatives in Congress and tell them that they must fix the Voting Rights Act. Tell them they must act now to restore protections to minority voters in the south. 3) Join us for the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington on August 24 in Washington, D.C. We need a mas- sive mobilization to show America that we will not go back on voting rights. Contact the National Action Network for more infor- mation. We can win this. But to win, we will need to be in the courts, in the streets, on the airwaves and in the halls of Congress. Starting now! [A version of this article appeared in The Root, an online publication of the Washington Post] Sherrilyn A. Ifill is the President & Director-Counsel of the NAACP
