Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Reconfirming the Constitution

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act bans any “standard, practice, or procedure” that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen… to vote on account of race or color.” After yesterday’s Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder, that is still the law in America, in every state in the country.
What was struck down yesterday was another component of the Voting Rights Act, embodied in Sections 4 and 5. Those sections have always been such a broad, fundamental departure from the Constitution that they were barely constitutional when adopted in 1965. But they were justified then by the fundamentally immoral and uncivilized racial practices still going on in too much of America at the time.
The long and extremely bloody Civil War, with 650,000 dead and wounded, which would be the equivalent of nearly 6 million today, achieved the abolition of slavery. But in most of the former slave states, that was replaced by the evils of segregation, which denied blacks most of their constitutional rights, including the right to vote.

http://spectator.org/archives/2013/06/26/reconfirming-the-constitution 

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