A Pair of Terrible Decisions

   You've got to love the timing of the Supreme Court's June 25 partial gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 coupled with the (unfortunately expected) racist verdict in Sanford, Florida last Friday. Two weeks after the shameful 5-4 decision by our highest court to allow the nine most minority voter-restrictive states in America to change their registration laws to become even MORE suppressive, we have just another horrific proof (as if anyone with a brain has any doubts anyway) that anti-black sentiment is alive and well in certain sections of what the Court's Chief Justice John Roberts actually seems to think is a color-blind America. 

   No reason to rehash the facts re: the Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin contretemps which resulted in the murder of the unarmed black teenager, who turned out to be a lot tougher than his armed killer George Zimmerman expected when he deliberately accosted him that night as Martin was on his way to visit his girlfriend. 

    But there's one foolish factoid in this case that has been repeated ad nauseam from the duration of the murder to last Friday's verdict : that somehow this case is different from other notorious racially-tinged examples because Zimmerman is half-Hispanic and not 100% Caucasian. The actual sad fact is that racial enmity is endemic in our society and crosses all "color schemes" to a greater or lesser extent. And it shouldn't be relevant WHAT race or nationality the principals in a tragedy like this belong to except statistically, rendering Zimmerman's ugly crime and subsequent acquittal just as noxious as the Rodney King travesty a couple decades ago. And also just as bad as if everything was reversed and Trayvon Martin had been the perpetrator instead of the innocent victim.  

   Any attempt by people to claim that this case is somehow "different" because of the skin colors of the two is as best simplistic. And at worst it is falling into the hate trap that somehow it's not as significant if a member of a certain race or nationality inflicts harm on a member of another.   

   But back to all the upcoming voter's rights transgressions sure to come next year. All the Supreme Court had to do was to leave the 1965 law alone instead of opening up a particularly hateful can of worms last month. Section 4 of the Voting Act was unquestionably a still-necessary safeguard against a number of states, including Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia, that had continued to "fight the Civil War" up to the law's 1965 enactment re: race relations/availability to the polls. And if you need any proof of this, just check out African-American voter registration percentages from 1965 to the present: in most cases we're talking about a huge jump from the teens/20s percentage of legal black voters to 70%-80% today. There is no chance that this could've happened without president Lyndon Johnson's necessary federal intervention five decades ago.  

   Until the Court acted last month, these nine states were federally prevented from enacting suppression laws or other chicanery to make it more difficult for any group of voters to exercise their rights on election day. Now there is no longer the slightest bit of oversight over these conservative states and their voting commissions, enabling them to institute any regressive new rules they can dream up. And predictably in the days following the ruling Texas, Mississippi and North Carolina have already jumped on the Supreme Court bandwagon, making new legislative moves to institute ultra-strict ID laws that will attempt to disenfranchise millions of minority voters. Georgia has already gerrymandered most of the voting districts of its most populous counties to favor their Republican candidates. 

   And the excuse for all of this will continue to be the ludicrous claim of counteracting  a "voting fraud" problem that has demonstrably been proven to be just another right-wing canard. And this is just the tip of a huge iceberg that is going to be fought over in lawsuit after lawsuit between now and November 2014 in most of these nine states, as they do their damnedest to get into the act and set up overwhelmingly GOP-friendly pathways to victory in 2014's midterms.    

   So hearty thanks to the jurors who rendered the worst high-profile court decision since the O.J. joke. And a special shout-out to our very own Supreme Court in Washington who, in one shortsighted decision, has succeeded in opening up a whole bunch of closed wounds that have a good shot of turning the run up as well as the aftermath of next year's election cycle into something resembling the 2000 one in Florida. And we all remember how THAT one went.