"Justice John Roberts Signed Off On Obama’s Arrest For Treason." 1JUL14

THE lunatic fringe of the extreme right wing continues it's assault on Pres Obama, and this is one of the dumbest e mails being circulated in their hateful racist world. From +PolitiFact .....

The Truth-O-Meter Says:

"Justice John Roberts Signed Off On Obama’s Arrest For Treason."

Bloggers on Tuesday, July 1st, 2014 in various posts on the Internet

Did John Roberts issue an arrest warrant for Barack Obama over charges of treason?

This is one example of a rumor picked up on by conservative websites. It's not true.
Did Chief Justice John Roberts sign an arrest warrant for President Barack Obama? Not at all.

In some corners, impeachment talk is running high these days. Sarah Palin, the former Republican nominee for vice president, wrote on her Facebook page on July 8, 2014, that "it’s time" to impeach President Barack Obama.
But a claim that’s been making the rounds in the conservative blogosphere over the past few months is even more startling. It says that John Roberts, the chief justice of the United States, has ordered Obama’s arrest for treason.
The claim appeared on numerous conservative websites in April and May, including here, here, here, here and here. In this item, we’ll check the version of the claim that appeared on May 1, 2014, in theuspatriot.com, a conservative website. (The website did not respond to a query from PolitiFact.)
The headline of the post says, "BREAKING: Report Circulating That Justice John Roberts Signed Off On Obama’s Arrest For Treason."
The rest of the post is not exactly transparently sourced, citing "serious speculation" and an unlinked-to "leaked document."
"There is some serious speculation that Chief Justice John Roberts has signed off on Interpol, which would mean that Obama is one step closer to being removed from office for multiple counts of treason," the post says. "Charges include infringements of the Second Amendment, and declaring war without consent of Congress, and some other serious violations of Obama’s Oath."
It goes on to cite a litany of alleged infractions by Obama, which we’ve archived here. The post on this site alone had received more than 237,000 Facebook likes at the time we looked into it.
Is there anything to this post? No, say legal experts, it’s entirely bunk. (The Supreme Court did not comment for this story, as is its general policy.)
For starters, the phrase "Chief Justice John Roberts has signed off on Interpol" is not even "coherent English, let alone a statement that makes any constitutional sense," said Stephen Wermiel, a law professor at American University’s Washington College of Law.
Moreover, the powers of the chief justice are far more limited than this blog post imagines, Wermiel and other legal experts said.
The chief justice "has no authority to sign off on a warrant of any kind," said Paul Finkelman, a law professor at Albany Law School.
About the only type of arrest the chief justice could set into motion would be to "direct the sergeant at arms to remove a disruptive member of the audience" at an oral argument in the Supreme Court building, said Kurt T. Lash, director of the program on constitutional theory, history and law at the University of Illinois.
"It would be a serious violation of separation of powers for the court as a whole to involve itself" in allegations of treason by the president, Lash said. "In cases where the president might refuse to follow a lawful directive of the court -- say, a failure to turn over Oval Office tapes -- the court would simply report the matter to Congress for their consideration of impeachment. The court itself would take no action against the president."
If the House did proceed to impeach the president, the Senate would hold a trial -- and at that point, the chief justice would enter the picture, as the presiding officer over the trial in the Senate chamber. But that’s quite different than the scenario the blog post lays out, since the chief justice would be entering the fray at the final stage of a president’s possible removal, not as the official initiating it.
"Given his longtime participation as an advocate before the Supreme Court before joining the bench, John Roberts would know this, as does pretty much everyone else," Lash said. The likelihood that this rumor is false, Lash said, "is 100 percent."
Our ruling
Bloggers said Roberts "signed off on Obama’s arrest for treason." But even if he wanted to, the Constitution wouldn’t allow it. We rate the claim Pants on Fire.

About this statement:

Published: Wednesday, July 9th, 2014 at 4:32 p.m.
Subjects: Criminal Justice, Legal Issues
Sources:
theuspatriot.com, "BREAKING: Report Circulating That Justice John Roberts Signed Off On Obama’s Arrest For Treason," May 1, 2014
Breitbart.com, "Exclusive--Sarah Palin: 'It's Time to Impeach' President Obama," July 8, 2014
USA Today, "Palin calls for Obama's impeachment," July 8, 2014
Email interview with Kurt T. Lash, director of the program on constitutional theory, history and law at the University of Illinois, July 9, 2014
Email interview with Stephen Wermiel, law professor at American University’s Washington College of Law, July 9, 2014
Email interview with Paul Finkelman, law professor at Albany Law School, July 9, 2014
Email interview with Carl Tobias, law professor at the University of Richmond, July 9, 2014
Written by: Louis Jacobson
Researched by: Louis Jacobson
Edited by: Angie Drobnic Holan

This Study Said the South Is More Racist Than the North & The Formula & Maps Behind the Voting Rights Act 25&22JUN13

repiglicans and tea-baggers, with their racist supporters, will twist this into a liberal assault on white people. They will use it to promote fear and ignorance, to divide the people of our nation, making us more vulnerable to political and economic manipulation by the 1% who control Congress for their own gain. They are already using these tactics to prevent any congressional action on amending the 1965 Voting Rights Act, to block real immigration reform and in ongoing budget negotiations. The fanatical right wing and their racist allies fear the one thing Rev Martin Luther King alluded to in his I Have A Dream speech at the 1963 March On Washington (Monday, 28JUL13 was the 50th anniversary), that THE PEOPLE, UNITED, WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED! We are still marching, more and more of us, to make his dream a reality. From Mother Jones, and check out the NY Times article & voting rights act map. You may also want to see one of my earlier post on this Bob Cesca - Supreme Court Helps the GOP Revive the Era of Jim Crow 27JUN13 http://bucknacktssordidtawdryblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/bob-cesca-supreme-court-helps-gop.html
As a side note, I have lived in Virginia since April 1986 and have seen the racism that is still alive here, though I also see more and more people rejecting racism. Though I live in Virginia, home is still Scandia, PA. I am still a Yankee, and I am very ashamed Pennsylvania is listed as one of the most prejudiced states in the nation....

But that didn't seem to matter on Tuesday, when the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act.

—By Nick Baumann

| Published Tue Jun. 25, 2013 3:00 AM PDT | Updated Tue Jun. 25, 2013 8:00 AM PDT

Participants, some carrying American flags, marching in the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. BuyEnlarge/Zuma

"Is it the government's submission that the citizens of the South are more racist than the citizens of the North?" John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, asked that in February during oral arguments over the fate of the Voting Rights Act, a 1965 civil rights law. Donald Verrilli, the government's chief lawyer, said no. Not surprisingly, the Obama administration was not willing to assert that citizens in Southern states were statistically more likely to hold racist beliefs. Without making such a claim, though, it was harder for the government to defend the VRA's requirement that some states—but not others—seek federal approval (which lawyers call preclearance) before changing their voting laws.

More MoJo coverage of the Supreme Court's ruling on the Voting Rights Act

• Supreme Court Hands the GOP a Gift for 2014
• Supreme Court: The Voting Rights Act Worked—So Now It's Unconstitutional
• Chief Justice Roberts' Long War Against the Voting Rights Act
• This Study Said the South Is More Racist Than the North
• Supreme Court Poised to Declare Racism Over
• The Best Lines From Ginsburg's Dissent on the Voting Rights Act Decision

The eight states that are required to seek pre-clearance are determined by a formula intended to pick out areas with a history of discrimination. (Places that go for 10 years without discriminating can escape the requirement.) On Tuesday, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to strike down that formula as unconstitutional. Here's the idea that led to that decision: If all states are equally racist (or not racist), why not treat them equally?
Certainly plenty of people outside of the South are racist, and plenty of people in the South are not. But here's the trouble: There's social-science evidence that, 150 years after the Civil War, Southern states do have bigger racism problems than states outside the South. And many of them are the same states that the VRA requires to seek federal approval before changing their voting laws.
The key study on this subject is new. In May, Christopher Elmendorf and Douglas Spencer—law professors at the University of California-Davis and the University of Connecticut, respectively—released a paper arguing that the list of states required to obtain federal approval under the VRA "remarkably" mirrors "the geography of anti-black prejudice" in the United States. "What we have generated," Elmendorf says, "is an answer to the question that the chief justice asked during oral arguments and [Verrilli] was either unable or unwilling to answer." The answer, they argue, is yes.

.

Elmendorf and Spencer used data from the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey, which asked nonblacks to rank their own racial group and blacks regarding intelligence, trustworthiness, and work ethic. Respondents ranked their racial group above blacks by an average of 15 points in each of these categories, perhaps proving the Avenue Q claim that "everyone's a little bit racist." Elmendorf and Spencer, however, only counted a person as "prejudiced" if he thought his racial group was more superior to blacks than the average person—and only if he thought so in two or more of the three categories. That is, a respondent could think his race was a lot better than blacks and still not count as racist under their methodology.
The results were striking: The researchers' mathematical model suggests that of the seven states in the country with the highest percentage of people who are biased against black people, six are Southern states—Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina—required to seek federal approval for election law changes under the VRA. Arizona and Alaska, the other two states required to get the feds' permission before changing their election laws, ranked much lower in anti-black bias. But as Elmendorf and Spencer note, these states are presumably required to seek that permission because of other bias—anti-Latino in Arizona and anti-Native American in Alaska—which their study did not measure. (Besides the eight states mentioned above, the VRA requires some counties and municipalities in seven other states to seek federal permission to change election rules.)
The researchers crunched the data several different ways to make sure they were getting valid results. But "whichever approach you pick, the Deep South states are close to the top," Elmendorf says.
Elmendorf and Spencer's study came too late: On Tuesday, the Supreme Court struck down the portion of the VRA that governs which states are and are not required to seek the feds' permission to change their election rules. Now Congress will have to come up with new rules to determine which states this section of the VRA should cover. If lawmakers decide to embrace Roberts' implication that states with more racist attitudes should receive special scrutiny, Elmendorf and Spencer's study suggests they could end up with a list of VRA-covered states that looks a lot like today's.
This story has been updated to reflect the Supreme Court's ruling Tuesday morning.

Nick Baumann

Senior EditorNick Baumann covers national politics and civil liberties issues for Mother Jones' DC Bureau. For more of his stories, click here. You can also follow him on Twitter and Facebook. Email tips and insights to nbaumann [at] motherjones [dot] com.

If You Liked This, You Might Also Like...

• Supreme Court Poised to Declare Racism Over

  Conservative justices on the high court look set to scrap a key part of the Voting Rights Act.

• Chief Justice Roberts' Long War Against the Voting Rights Act

  Roberts has been a critic of the Voting Rights Act for 30 years. Now he will help decide whether the law's most important section lives or dies.

• Justice Scalia and the Voting Rights Act

• The Republican Who Could Kill Affirmative Action and the Voting Rights Act

  Edward Blum, a failed GOP congressional candidate, may end up dramatically reshaping US law.

• The Voting Wars Continue

  http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/06/south-more-racist-north?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NickBaumann+%28MoJo+Author+Feeds%3A+Nick+Baumann+|+Mother+Jones%29

The Formula Behind the Voting Rights Act

The Supreme Court ruled that a formula used to define which areas fell under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional. Section 5 required some places, mostly in the South, to obtain federal permission before changing voting laws. Related Article »

Places covered by the law

Covered since 1965 Section 5 was first applied to places that had voter registration or turnout rates below 50 percent in 1964 and also “devices” to discourage voting, like literacy tests.

Added in 1970 or 1975 On renewal, the law used data from 1968 and 1972 and defined a “device” to include English-only ballots in places where at least 5 percent of voting-age citizens spoke a single language other than English.

Bailed out

Places that had been free of any voting discrimination for 10 years could be released from coverage by a court.

What if the Formula Were Different?

Without the formula, Section 5 is largely without significance — unless Congress chooses to pass a new bill for determining which states would be covered. It's unlikely Congress could agree on a new formula, but here are some of the variables that have been discussed by lawmakers, judges and legal scholars.

States and counties with estimated citizen turnout below 50 percent in 2012

Places with low turnout now

When Congress reauthorized the law in 2006, one amendment proposed to use data from more recent elections. It failed by a wide margin.
While the places with low turnout now are very different from those with low turnout in the 1960s and 1970s, a trial court ruling in the case considered by the Supreme Court, Shelby County v. Holder, suggested the more recent data was irrelevant.
The years used as triggers, Judge John D. Bates ruled, “were never selected because of something special that occurred in those years; instead, they were chosen as mere proxies for identifying those jurisdictions with established histories of discriminating against racial and language minority voters.”

White-black gap of at least 5 percentage points in 2008, 2010 and 2012 (citizens only)

States with consistently large registration gaps

During oral arguments, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. noted that Massachusetts, a state that is not covered, had the greatest disparity in registration between whites and blacks, referring to data from 2004.
While that data comes with a high margin of error, five states — none covered — had registration gaps of at least five percentage points in all of the last three elections.
Some members of the court dismiss these sorts of statistics. According to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “Congress said up front: We know that the registration is fine. That is no longer the problem. But the discrimination continues in other forms.”

At least 1.1 cases between 1982 and 2005, per million people

Lost the most voting discrimination lawsuits

Lawsuits brought under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which applies to the entire nation, offer one way to compare discrimination across the country.
A study of cases that were published on two legal databases, Westlaw or Lexis, between 1982 and 2005 found that jurisdictions covered by Section 5 lost more such cases than the rest of the country, even though being covered might seem to deter discrimination.
Judge Stephen F. Williams, who dissented from the federal appeals court decision reviewed by the Supreme Court, considered this data in his opinion. Based on it, he found that “a more narrowly tailored coverage formula — capturing only Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, and possibly the covered portions of South Dakota and North Carolina — might be defensible.” But, he continued, “beyond these, the covered jurisdictions appear indistinguishable from their uncovered peers.”

At least 2.0 cases between 1982 and 2005, per million people

Lost or settled the most voting discrimination suits

Some voting discrimination suits, including those with a court-approved settlement, are resolved without a published opinion.
Judge David S. Tatel, writing for the majority in the appeals court's decision, found that “the difference between covered and non-covered jurisdictions becomes even more pronounced,” when including cases settled in favor of minority voters.
Critics of this metric, as well as one that includes only published cases, argue that adjusting for population is unfair to small states and that patterns have changed since the data was assembled.

At least 75% of non-blacks more prejudiced than the U.S. average

The most ‘prejudiced’ states

Law professors at the University of California, Davis, and the University of Connecticut have created an estimate of prejudice using survey data from 2008.
The National Annenberg Election Survey asked people to rank the intelligence, trustworthiness and work effort of different groups of people, on a scale from 0 to 100. Christopher S. Elmendorf and Douglas M. Spencer estimated prejudice based on how people rate their own ethnic group, compared with how they rate blacks.
“It may be argued that Virginia and perhaps South Carolina should not be covered, but the rest of the covered states in the Deep South top the list of the most prejudiced states by anti-black stereotyping,” the professors found.

Sources: Justice Department (covered and bailed out jurisdictions); Census Bureau (population estimates, citizenship estimates; 2012 registration statistics); Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections (2012 turnout); The Voting Rights Initiative at the University of Michigan Law School (published Section 2 cases); Declaration of Peyton McCrary, historian at the Department of Justice (unpublished Section 2 cases); Christopher S. Elmendorf, University of California, Davis and Douglas M. Spencer, University of Connecticut, "The Geography of Discrimination in Voting: MRP Meets the VRA" (prejudice estimates)

Related Links

• Supreme Court Weighs Cases Redefining Legal Equality

  http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/06/23/us/voting-rights-act-map.html?_r=0 

The Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. We must act now. 27JUN13

IN response to the supreme court's ruling on the 1965 Voting Rights Act progressive groups are organizing for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing the right to vote for every citizen, no matter what state you live in. This from Credo, and if you agree with it please click the link and sign on as a citizen sponsor, and please share this with others. And for more on this see my earlier post 

Bob Cesca - Supreme Court Helps the GOP Revive the Era of Jim Crow 27JUN13 http://bucknacktssordidtawdryblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/bob-cesca-supreme-court-helps-gop.html

Yesterday was a great day for those of us who support marriage equality. But we can't lose sight of the Supreme Court's shameful decision to accelerate voter suppression by gutting the Voting Rights Act. Please read the e-mail below and take action.

The Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. We must act now.

Become a citizen co-sponsor: "I support an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that guarantees the freedom to vote for all."

Just days ago, the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision in the case of Shelby County v. Holder1 that destroyed the Voting Rights Act, ending 40 years of protection for minorities against discriminatory and unfair attempts to limit voting based on one's race.2 It's a shameful decision, and after hearing oral arguments, it sadly comes as no surprise. During the oral arguments in this case, Justice Scalia described the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act as "the perpetuation of a racial entitlement," and other justices questioned whether racial discrimination even still exists. Now that the Voting Rights Act has been gutted, we must act to protect the rights of everyone to vote. That’s why there must be a constitutional amendment that guarantees the freedom to vote for every citizen, regardless of race or where they live. And we’re joining with our friends at Color of Change to help make that happen. Join the movement to pass a constitutional amendment that protects the right to vote for every citizen. Click here to automatically add your name as a citizen co-sponsor. While the Supreme Court did not invalidate Section 5, a key part of the Voting Rights Act, it threw out the basic formula that has been used practically since the bill's passage in 1965 to determine where the Justice Department must provide approval before local election rules that would suppress the votes of African American and Latino citizens can be put into effect. While voter suppression rules can still be challenged by the Department of Justice after the fact, this will most likely happen too late to prevent minority voters from being blocked from the polls. The court's decision effectively guts the Voting Rights Act, rendering it useless until we elect a Congress willing to update this formula — which could take years. For decades the Voting Rights Act protected voters in pockets of the country with a history of racially discriminatory voting practices. Just this past election, it allowed the Justice Department to block attempts by Texas, South Carolina and Florida to implement discriminatory voting rules. For decades, the Voting Rights Act has helped narrow the gap that exists between civic participation rates of white voters and voters from communities of color. But now, right-wing efforts to make it harder for African Americans and Latino citizens to vote will be completely unfettered. With so many state legislatures and governorships held by these right-wing extremists, efforts to block voting access will be widespread, targeted and coordinated. But a constitutional amendment would forever enshrine the right to equal and protected access to the vote and ensure that we never again come face-to-face with the type of voter suppression that we’ll surely see in the next election, as the ramifications of this court decision are felt. Join the movement to pass a constitutional amendment that protects the right to vote for every citizen. Click here to automatically add your name as a citizen co-sponsor. For African Americans, voting has never been a “racial entitlement.” It is a right that was earned through extraordinary sacrifice. The Voting Rights Act was the result of decades of hard work, of advocacy, of protests and marches and courage before fire hoses and police dogs. It was one of the crowning achievements of a generation. Now we can put those protections back in place and ensure that the right to vote is guaranteed by the highest law of the land. While the road to passing a constitutional amendment for the freedom to vote is long and paved with obstacles, if we join together with our allies, we can make it happen. Join the movement to pass a constitutional amendment that protects the right to vote for every citizen. Click the link below to automatically add your name as a citizen co-sponsor: http://act.credoaction.com/go/974?t=6&akid=8248.179403.-BqL33 Thank you for standing up for the right to vote. Becky Bond, Political Director CREDO Action from Working Assets Learn more about this campaign 1. Lyle Denniston, "Voting rights case: Made simple," SCOTUSblog, February 8th, 2013. 2. Mark Sherman, "High Court Voids Key Part of Voting Rights Act." Associated Press, June 25, 2013

Bob Cesca - Supreme Court Helps the GOP Revive the Era of Jim Crow 27JUN13

THE ignorant bastard chief justice john roberts has finally achieved his dream of gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The supreme court of the United States, while not committing a judicial coup d'etat, as they did in 2000, has endorsed the repiglican / tea-bagger goal of disenfranchising millions of voters across the nation, threatening the very foundations of democracy in our Republic. The fascist pigs who voted with the chief justice are a disgrace to the history of the court, and we, as a nation, should be outraged and ashamed. Check out more on robert's war on the Voting Rights Act in my earlier post on this blog....

In Voting Rights Arguments, Chief Justice Misconstrued Census Data & Chief Justice Roberts' Long War Against the Voting Rights Act 1MAR&27FEB13

http://bucknacktssordidtawdryblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/in-voting-rights-arguments-chief.html

From HuffPost......

Here's a fantastic example of cognitive dissonance. On Tuesday, Republicans and conservatives continued their collective screeching about the rapidly fizzling IRS non-scandal and how the government unfairly targeted conservatives, while also applauding the Supreme Court's Shelby County v. Holder ruling which allows Republican-controlled states to deliberately target and disenfranchise Democrats.

That's a remarkable display of intellectual violence right there.

Chief Justice John Roberts along with four other justices gave a dying party a resuscitating zap with an electoral defibrillator. The Court decided that Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional, thus undermining Section 5, which requires certain states with particularly egregious histories of racism to seek approval from the Justice Department for any and all changes to voting rules and regulations. Put another way, the Supreme Court just removed a huge barrier between the Republican Party and its continuing strategy for suppressing Democratic voters, thus giving the Republicans an extra advantage on Election Day.

It's difficult to envision a more obvious example of a political party abusing government power as a means of deliberately targeting the opposing political party. In fact, the IRS non-scandal, as it's described by the Republicans, doesn't even come close. Nothing the Republicans have alleged about the IRS strips conservatives of their right to vote or to participate in campaigns in any way. In reality, conservative groups were granted non-profit status twice as often as liberal groups, so there's no substance to their scandalmongering. It only serves to illustrate the conservative penchant for hypocrisy and projection, given the voter suppression effort.

With a non-white majority growing larger in the window, Republicans cleverly ginned up a fake voter fraud crisis then prescribed new laws to combat the fake crisis. Every single Republican-controlled state government has passed or is attempting to pass laws that will require a second layer of government approval, the acquisition of a Voter ID, on top of registering to vote. You know, because Republicans hate big government bureaucracy.

The nefarious goal is to make it more difficult for low income voters to successfully cast a ballot by engaging yet another step in the process -- and sometimes charging money for the privilege, which clearly recalls the days of poll taxes.

So this will weed out voter fraud, we're told. Nonexistent voter fraud. In Ohio, for example, Secretary of State Jon Husted ballyhooed his war against fraud and the nabbing of a whopping 20 potential cases. 20 out of nearly six million votes cast. The Bush Justice Department found that there were as few as 80 successful prosecutions of voter fraud cases out of hundreds of millions of votes cast since 2000. For this ratio of possible-fraud-to-votes-cast we're told we need laws that make it more difficult to vote, not less.

And that's the key to understanding all of this. Casting a ballot should be as easy as ordering a hamburger at a drive-thru window, and the steps to get there are no-brainers. We should enact universal voter registration: when citizens turn 18 or attain citizenship status, they should be automatically registered to vote. Early voting should be permanently expanded to a full month nationwide, culminating with the traditional first Tuesday of November. Each precinct should be provided with more than enough voting machines and poll workers to guarantee that no one has to wait in line to vote. And that's it.

But none of this conforms to the Republican electoral strategy. Republicans simply don't want you to vote. There are countless examples of Republicans derping their true intentions in public beginning most-famously with Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, who said:

"I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."

There was Jim Greer, former chairman of the Florida Republican Party:

"The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates," Greer told the Post. "It's done for one reason and one reason only...'We've got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us.'"

There was Dallas Tea Party activist Ken Emanuelson who admitted:

"I'm going to be real honest with you. The Republican Party doesn't want black people to vote if they are going to vote 9-to-1 for Democrats."

There was Republican state representative from Pennsylvania, Mike Turzai, who said:

"Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania? Done!"

From here we can thumb through the list of Republican state governments that played grabass with early voting hours (Democrats predominantly vote early when possible) or that provided fewer voting machines to African-American precincts. And now the conservative-leaning Supreme Court has allowed these governments, under the preposterous cover of 10th Amendment "states' rights," to pass more of these laws with impunity. By the way, this is the centerpiece of everything Ron and Rand Paul believe as self-proclaimed Tenthers, and come to think of it, in 2006, Ron Paul was one of only 32 congressmembers who voted against renewing the Voting Rights Act. So it's not just the Republican establishment, it runs the entire gamut of the right -- from libertarians and the tea party on through the old guard.

Now, there's a small glimmer of hope here, believe it or not. Congress is now tasked with coming up with a repalcement for the Section 4 formula determining which states much comply with pre-clearance. And the new formula might sweep up more states and municipalities for DOJ scrutiny. That's a big might. Meanwhile, Voter ID laws in North Carolina, Virginia, Texas and Misssissippi are being hustled onto the books now before any changes occur, avoiding the pre-clearance process. So by the time a new formula is passed, if it's passed at all, it'll be too late for the states that've already passed these new Jim Crow laws.

And in the face of all of it, the Republican Party is still regarded as a serious outfit with noble intentions on this matter when in fact it's resurrecting one of the most horrendous episodes from American history: the era of Jim Crow.

Cross-posted at The Daily Banter.

Click here to listen to the Bubble Genius Bob & Chez Show podcast.
BobCesca.com Blog with special thanks to Karin Porter.
Subscribe to the uncensored and totally raw Bob & Chez Show After Party podcast.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/supreme-court-helps-the-g_b_3511931.html?utm_source=Alert-blogger&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Email%2BNotifications

In Voting Rights Arguments, Chief Justice Misconstrued Census Data & Chief Justice Roberts' Long War Against the Voting Rights Act 1MAR&27FEB13

THE 1965 Voting Rights Act, which protects the right of all Americans to vote, is before the Supreme Court. This is just another example of the gop / tea-bagger assault on our civil liberties as they try to dismantle, piece by piece, the US Constitution, their goal being the evisceration of the government a la grover norquist and the consolidation of power by the rich and corporate America. The effectiveness or their propaganda campaign, based on lies, manipulation and misrepresentation, can be seen in the glaring example of how the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court misconstrued census data. Obviously he is getting his information from fox news, and that doesn't bode well for the decision on this case. And there is further reason for concern. Read Mother Jones' article on Justice Roberts' long running  battle to totally destroy the VRA. From NPR and Mother Jones......

by NINA TOTENBERG

Enlarge image

Chief Justice John Roberts, shown here during a presentation last June in Pennsylvania, questioned the U.S. solicitor general about voting statistics during this week's arguments on Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

Ann Wilkins/AP

At the voting rights argument in the Supreme Court on Wednesday, Chief Justice John Roberts tore into Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, grilling him on his knowledge of voting statistics.

The point the chief justice was trying to make was that Massachusetts, which is not covered by the preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act, has a far worse record in black voter registration and turnout than Mississippi, which is covered by Section 5 of the act.

But a close look at census statistics indicates the chief justice was wrong, or at least that he did not look at the totality of the numbers.

So, let's start with the exchange in court:

Roberts: "Do you know which state has the worst ratio of white voter turnout to African-American voter turnout?"

Verrilli: "I do not."

Roberts: "Massachusetts."

Roberts went on to add that the state with the best record, where African-American turnout actually exceeds white turnout, is Mississippi.

Roberts' questions and conclusion appear to be taken from a census survey cited in a lower court dissent. But upon close examination, the numbers are less than reliable, according to the Census Bureau itself.

Here's the deal. The Census Bureau does voting surveys to look at voting patterns nationwide, but the survey is based on a very small sample. Most recently, in 2010, the survey looked at 94,208 voters nationwide. Break that up into roughly proportional samples in each state, Census officials say, and it is really not possible to compare states because those with relatively low minority populations have a much higher margin of error.

The number of black citizens eligible to vote in Massachusetts is 236,000, while it is 721,000 in Mississippi, more than three times that number. Therefore, according to Census officials, when looking at the estimated turnout rate in Massachusetts, the voting percentage for African-Americans at first blush is estimated at 39.3 percent. But the margin of error is 11.5 percentage points, meaning that the black voter turnout actually could be as high as 50.8 percent (or, conversely, as low as 27.8 percent).

Now, look at Mississippi, where black turnout is listed at 48.7 percent. But because of the large size of the African-American population that was sampled, the margin of error is only 5.4 percentage points.

That means that factoring in the margin of error, the black turnout rate in Mississippi could be as high as 54.1 percent, or as low as 43.3 percent.

So, if you factor in the margins of error at their extremes — with Mississippi at the low end and Massachusetts at the high end — Mississippi could have had a black voter turnout rate that was 7.5 percentage points lower than Massachusetts.

Bottom line, as Census officials told me, these numbers are simply not reliable for state-by-state comparisons because of the high margins of error in some states

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/03/01/173276943/in-voting-rights-arguments-chief-justice-may-have-misconstrued-census-data

Chief Justice Roberts' Long War Against the Voting Rights Act

Roberts has been a critic of the Voting Rights Act for 30 years. Now he will help decide whether the law's most important section lives or dies.

—By Adam Serwer

Then-President George W. Bush nominates John Roberts as chief justice on September 5, 2005. Wikimedia

When he was in his late 20s, John Roberts was a foot soldier in the Reagan administration's crusade against the Voting Rights Act. Now, as chief justice of the Supreme Court, he will help determine whether a key part of the law survives a constitutional challenge.

Memos that Roberts wrote as a lawyer in President Reagan's Justice Department during the 1980s show that he was deeply involved in efforts to curtail the effectiveness of the Voting Rights Act, the hard-won landmark 1965 law that is intended to ensure all Americans can vote. Roberts' anti-VRA efforts during the 1980s ultimately failed. But on Wednesday, when the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder, he'll get another chance to gut the law. Roberts' history suggests a crucial part of the VRA may not survive the rematch.

At issue in Shelby County is whether a major portion of the Voting Rights Act, called Section 5, is constitutional. Section 5 compels jurisdictions with a history of discrimination, mostly in the South, to ask the Justice Department for permission—preclearance, in legalese—before making any changes to election laws. Shelby County, Alabama, is arguing that Section 5 is an extreme measure that is no longer justified because racism is no longer the problem it once was. If Section 5 is overturned, voting rights groups say, the federal government's ability to ensure Americans are not denied the right to vote on the basis of race—at a time when race has been used as a proxy for party identification—will be severely weakened.

Shelby County offers Roberts an opportunity to complete a mission he began three decades ago. When the chief justice was a young lawyer, in 1981, Southern legislators hoped an ascendant conservative movement could pressure Reagan into opposing an extension of the VRA. In June of that year, Reagan wrote a letter to Attorney General William French Smith requesting an "assessment" of the law. "I am sensitive to the controversy which has attached itself to some of the Act's provisions, in particular those provisions which impose burdens unequally upon different parts of the nation," Reagan wrote. "But I am sensitive also to the fact that the spirit of the Act marks this nation's commitment to full equality for all Americans, regardless of race, color, or national origin." Reagan didn't go as far as former segregationist and then-Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) by opposing the Voting Rights Act in its entirety, but his administration fought efforts to strengthen the law.

Roberts was a major player in the Reagan administration's VRA policy, drafting numerous op-eds and memos for top Justice Department officials that argued for a weaker version of the law. At the time, crucial parts of the VRA were due to expire, but congressional Democrats and moderate Republicans weren't just trying to renew the law—they were also trying to strengthen the law. After the VRA was enacted, it was interpreted as barring all discriminatory voting practices. In 1980, however, the Supreme Court, in a case involving the election rules in Mobile, Alabama,weakened the law by ruling that, except in those jurisdictions with a sordid history of blocking minority voters, the VRA only forbade intentional discrimination. Civil rights activists wanted to fix that by modifying the law to make it crystal clear that all discrimination in voting practices, not just intentional discrimination, was illegal.

Roberts wasn't having it. Voting rights violations, according to one memo he helped draft in 1981, "should not be too easy to prove since they provide a basis for the most intrusive interference imaginable." If Roberts and the Reagan administration had gotten their way, discriminatory voting systems in most of the country could only be barred when discrimination could be shown to be intentional. That would make it much tougher for the feds to intervene in states and localities and guarantee equal voting rights. The Reagan administration argued that they were just trying to preserve the Voting Rights Act, but it was really attempting to preserve a Supreme Court ruling neutering the law. 

Read more of MoJo's coverage on voter suppression efforts.

• MoJo's Guide to Voter Suppression and Poll Problems
• The Dog That Voted and Other Election Fraud Yarns
• UFO Sightings Are More Common Than Voter Fraud
• The Quick Way to End the Vote-Fraud Wars? A National ID Card
• Pennsylvania Officials Accused of Running Misleading Voter ID Ads
• Voter Fraud Billboards in Ohio Target Minorities

Roberts helped the administration hone its argument. He wrote that it made sense for parts of the VRA to require proof that discrimination was intentional. "Broad aspects of criminal law and tort law typically require proof of intent," Roberts wrote in a draft op-ed in 1981. Allowing the VRA to apply in cases of unintentional discrimination all over the country and not just those places with a history of disenfranchising minorities, Roberts insisted, "would raise grave constitutional questions." In the case of Mobile, the Justice Department's voting rights attorneys eventually did prove the discrimination was intentional—by heading to Alabama and poring over the historical record to establish the election law had been passed deliberately to disenfranchise blacks.

To Roberts, that demonstrated there was no problem with requiring the government to prove that discrimination was intentional. "John Roberts and others used that case to say anyone who wants to prove intent could do it," explains Gerry Hebert, an attorney now with the Campaign Legal Center who was part of the Justice Department team that went to Alabama. But proving intent "took enormous resources that only the Justice Department could have." More important, says Hebert, having to prove "intent" placed voting rights attorneys in a difficult position: "You basically have to get judges to call local or state officials racist."

Despite the best efforts of Roberts and others in the Reagan Justice Department, civil rights activists outmaneuvered Southern conservatives and the Reagan White House, forging large bipartisan alliances in the House and Senate to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act in 1982. And they strengthened the law, amending it to explicitly ban all discriminatory voting rules across the country, whether the discrimination is intentional or not.

Civil rights leaders and Voting Rights Act supporters in Congress had succeeded by embracing an idea that they had initially opposed—and that Roberts and the Reagan administration supported. It was called the bailout provision, and it provided a way for jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to prove they no longer needed close Justice Department supervision under Section 5. By accepting this compromise, VRA backers won the overall political battle.

Now, VRA defenders are hoping that it's Roberts who is in a conciliatory mood and not set on eviscerating the law as the Reaganites wanted to do three decades ago. Is there reason for such hope? Roberts' defenders have long argued that his Justice Department writings merely show that he was being a good soldier when he was in the Reagan administration. "The defense was that Roberts was just a government lawyer taking the position of his boss," explains Rick Hasen, a professor at the University of California-Irvine School of Law who wrote about the memos during Roberts' 2005 confirmation hearings.

But in 2009, when an earlier challenge to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act reached the Supreme Court, Roberts sounded a lot like Reagan during oral arguments. He echoed the late president's view that Section 5 represented an unconscionable punishment for the South's past sins. "Congress can impose this disparate treatment forever because of the history in the South?" Roberts asked the government attorney defending the law.

In his subsequent opinion in the 2009 VRA case, in which the court seemed close to striking down Section 5, Roberts wrote that the government had made the bailout provision "all but a nullity." In the three years since that verdict, however, more than 100 jurisdictions have been allowed to bail out of Section 5—more than twice as many in the nearly three decades before. It's not even that expensive to bail out; the usual cost is $5,000. The reason Shelby County hasn't been able to take advantage of the bailout provision is that in 2006, county election officials redistricted the only black city council member in one of the county's towns out of a job.

Roberts and conservative opponents of a strong Voting Rights Act may have lost in 1982, but in 2012, they're poised for a victory: The Supreme Court appears ready to strike down Section 5. Defending Reagan's support for the bailout provision in 1982, Roberts wrote that bailout rules "should be addressed by Congress, and not pushed into the courts." Roberts was arguing that elected officials, not judges, should make the rules governing when jurisdictions like Shelby County should be able to escape Section 5. 

Has he changed his mind?

Reporter

Adam Serwer is a reporter at the Washington, DC, bureau of Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. You can also follow him on Twitter. Email tips and insights to aserwer [at] motherjones [dot] com. RSS | TWITTER

• The Voting Wars Continue

• The Republican Who Could Kill Affirmative Action and the Voting Rights Act

  Edward Blum, a failed GOP congressional candidate, may end up dramatically reshaping US law.

• Supreme Court Appears Ready to Nuke the Voting Rights Act

  The Supreme Court is preparing to hear a challenge to a key civil rights law.

• Obama Voters More Likely to Encounter Voting Troubles

  Problems at the polls can sometimes amount to disenfranchisement—with minorities at particular risk.

• Protecting the Voting Rights Of People With Mental Disabilities

  People like Clinton Gode are challenging state laws that deny Americans with disabilities the right to vote.
  http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/john-roberts-long-war-against-voting-rights-act