Today’s Supreme Court decision ruling Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional has some strange reasoning. I get that the conservatives on the court wanted to get rid of the VRA and then set about finding a way to do it.<\/p>\n
But it strikes me as odd that the decision does not say what constitutional provision is violated by the law. Steve Benen at Maddowblog makes the same point<\/a>.<\/p>\n But there’s more to the argument that this is a weak claim of unconstitutionality. The so-called conservatives speak fondly of original intent, as though that’s the only valid perspective to use in reading the constitution. Such a view says that the meaning of the constitution never changes. It is what it always has been. Yet today’s majority ruling allows that Section 4 may have been constitutional at one time, but conditions have changed and so it is not now consistent with the Constitution. How can that be, if the meaning is never-changing? Maybe the original intent isn’t so unchanging after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today’s Supreme Court decision ruling Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional has some strange reasoning. I get that the conservatives on the court wanted to get rid of the VRA and then set about finding a way to do it. But it strikes me as odd that the decision does not say what … Continue reading Unconstitutional? Tell us how<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tspannaus.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tspannaus.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tspannaus.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tspannaus.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tspannaus.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=177"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tspannaus.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":223,"href":"https:\/\/tspannaus.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177\/revisions\/223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tspannaus.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tspannaus.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tspannaus.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}