Justice Scalia calls key Voting Rights Act provision a "racial entitlement"

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Justice Antonin Scalia said yesterday during oral arguments that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires preclearance for any effort to change "any voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure with respect to voting" in any "covered jurisdiction," and hence which is key (if not the key) instrument the federal government has in terms of blocking lower orders of government from restricting voting rights, is a "perpetuation of racial entitlement."

Which is to say, Scalia, like other conservatives (on the Court and otherwise), thinks that efforts to enforce equal voting rights are somehow discriminatory against the majority race (i.e., whites, or otherwise those who didn't need the Voting Rights Act to have their voting rights protected). As Think Progress notes, his remark "raises concerns that his suspicion of the Act is rooted much more in racial resentment than in a general distrust of unanimous votes," the latter being an argument he has made in the past (as if somehow unanimous votes are, in and of themselves, suspicious and indeed illegitimate, which is remarkably stupid).

I'll leave it to others to dissect this contemptible man's legal views. I'd just add that if you don't know the difference between a right and an entitlement, if you don't understand the purpose of the Voting Rights Act and why it might still be necessary to protect voting rights from those out to strip them away, and if your judicial mind and worldview generally is clouded by self-regarding bitterness, you should have no place on the highest court in the land.