A liberal decides he wants to run for public office but does not know what position so he goes to his local party's office.
The person who interviews him asks him has he been circumcised and he says yes but asks what does that have to do with his running for office?
The response given was that to be a liberal politician you have to be a complete prick!
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It is always great to get this type of comment: and particularly when from a good friend
"Dick, Your posts are always great, but this was an especially noteworthy one.
If someone were to look back on this post in three years, I wonder what might be different?
Great stuff - keep 'em coming! R.."
My friend was referring to the one entitled "Carter Cannot Tame His Lame Tongue" and I responded that I leave Friday for a conference in Washington and will be meeting with and hearing from a variety of guest speakers. I have also signed up for some interesting sessions. One in particular is about the Israeli Dome which they have proven works and will be relying upon should another rocket confrontation begin.
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Send in the clowns? Hell, they are already there. (See 1 below.)
Dumb them down first, then scare the hell out of them later. (See 1a below.)
Obama becomes his own sequester stuckee! (See 1b below.)
Low information all round! (See 1c below.)
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Here is one high profile black citizen who has the courage to tell it like he sees it!
"Google this guy, Harry Alford and view the following:
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With Obama having led from the rear and thus, lost a great deal of influence in shaping matters in Syria has our new Sec. of State been placed in a position where he has little leverage? Time will tell. (See 2 below.)
Obama's misguided approach to foreign policy, borne out of even worse domestic mistakes, will create vacuums and they will be filled in ways detrimental to our nation, our allies and the world in general. So much for our having elected a radical incompetent! (See 2a below.)
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Will Woodward find a cattle's head in is bed? (See 3 below.)
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If SCOTUS declares racism is over will it mean the experiment with affirmative action was also reverse discrimination? You decide. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)
The White House Court Jesters of Sequester
Traffic alert: There's a massive clown car pileup in the Beltway. And with the White House court jesters of sequester behind the wheel, no one is safe. Fiscal sanity, of course, is the ultimate victim.
President Obama has been warning America that if Congress allows mandatory spending "cuts" of a piddly-widdly 2 percent to go into effect this week, the sky will fall. The manufactured crisis of "sequestration" was Obama's idea in the first place.
But that hasn't stopped the Chicken Little in Chief from surrounding himself with every last teacher, senior citizen and emergency responder who will be catastrophically victimized by hardhearted Republicans. Curses on those meanie Republicans! How dare they acquiesce to the very plan for "cuts" -- or rather, negligible reductions in the explosive rate of federal spending growth -- that Obama himself hatched?
How low will the kick-the-can Democrats go? Among the ridiculous claims the administration is making: The National Drug Intelligence Center will lose $2 million from its $20 million budget. That scary factoid appears in an ominous Office of Management and Budget report purporting to calculate the Sequester Disaster. So lock the doors and hide the children, right?
Wrong. As Reason magazine's Mike Riggs points out, the NDIC shut down in June 2012, and some of its responsibilities were absorbed by the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Ready for more reckless, feckless farce? Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano played Henny Penny during a panicked speech at the Brookings Institution Tuesday. She warned that her agency's "core critical mission areas" would be undermined by the sequester. To cynically underscore the point, "waves" of illegal aliens were released this week from at least three detention centers in Texas, Florida and Louisiana, according to the Fort Worth Star Telegram.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed the release of some illegal immigrants Monday night, but would not say how many or from which detention centers.
The real punch line, as I've reported relentlessly, is that the catch and release of criminal illegal aliens has been bipartisan standard operating procedure for decades. The persistent deportation and removal abyss allows hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens -- many of them known repeat criminal offenders -- to pass through the immigration court system and then disappear into the ether because we have no determined will to track them down and kick them all out of the country.
While Napolitano shrieks about decimation of the DHS workforce, DHS workers tell me that the double-dipping of retired ICE brass -- who get back on the payroll as "rehired annuitants" -- is rampant.
While this open-borders White House phonily gnashes its teeth over the sequester's effect on national security, its top officials are lobbying for a massive nationwide amnesty that would foster a tsunami of increased illegal immigration for generations to come. The shamnesty beneficiaries will be welcomed with open arms, discounted college tuition, home loans and Obamacare. And as every outraged rank-and-file border agent will tell you, DHS top officials have instituted systemic non-enforcement and sabotage of detention, deportation and removal functions.
In another emetic performance, Obama parachuted into a Virginia naval shipyard this week to decry Pentagon cuts that would gut our military. But I repeat: The reductions in spending are CINO: Cuts In Name Only. If the sequester goes into effect, Pentagon spending will increase by $121 billion between 2014 and 2023. Fiscal watchdog GOP Sen. Tom Coburn adds that $70 billion is spent by the Defense Department on "nondefense" expenditures each year.
Send in the clowns. Wait. Don't bother. They're here.
1a)Obama and the Sequester Scare
Governing isn't about blaming someone else. It is about choosing.
President Obama's message could not be clearer: Life as we know it in America will change dramatically on March 1, when automatic cuts are imposed to achieve $85 billion in government-spending reductions. Furloughed government employees, flight delays and criminals set free are among the dire consequences the president has predicted. If the Washington Monument weren't already closed for repairs, no doubt it too would be shut down.
Scare tactics such as these are similar to the ones that were made when I co-authored the first sequester legislation in 1985, the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act. The 1986 sequester was triggered anyway, but the predicted disaster never came. The nation survived then. It will now.
The president's response to the sequester demonstrates how out of touch he is with the real world of working families. Even after the sequester, the federal government will spend $15 billion more than it did last year, and 30% more than it spent in 2007. Government spending on nondefense discretionary programs will be 19.2% higher and spending on defense will be 13.8% higher than it was in 2007.
For a typical American family that earns less than it did in the year President Obama was elected, the anguished cries and dark predictions coming out of the White House should elicit not sympathy but revulsion.
When the 1985 sequester was created, the formula for cuts was closely examined, debated, amended and agreed to by a Democratic House and a Republican Senate and White House. Today's sequester is denounced because of the allegedly arbitrary nature of its across-the-board cuts. Yet the sequester formula that goes into effect on Friday preserves the spending priorities legislated by the Congress and the president, including exemptions and limitations they favored when the Budget Control Act of 2011 became law. The president himself first proposed the sequester. He may not like the way it works, but he has offered no real alternative.
Congress and the president might have worked together to avoid this outcome. Congress could have passed a budget resolution. The Republican House has repeatedly passed budgets, but the Democratic Senate hasn't passed one in four years. Past sequesters allowed for fast-track consideration of alternatives or modifications to the cuts—but the 2013 version doesn't allow for those.
Even if the sequester goes into effect, the magnitude of the automatic cuts won't be very different from those imposed in 1986. Nor is the job of finding alternative spending reductions any harder than it was when alternative cuts were enacted in 1987.
The first Gramm-Rudman sequester took effect on March 1, 1986. It cut nondefense spending by 4.3% and defense spending by 4.9%.
The most recent estimate by the Congressional Budget Office for this year's sequester is that nondefense spending will be cut by 4.6% and defense spending will be cut by 7.9%. While the sequester will reduce spending authority by $85 billion, the actual cuts that will occur in 2013 will be $44 billion. That is a mere 1.2% of total federal spending this year.
The first round of cuts under Gramm-Rudman weren't so devastating that Congress and the president rushed to repeal them. In July 1986, Congress had the opportunity simply to stop the sequester after the Supreme Court invalidated its triggering mechanism. Instead it voted overwhelmingly to reaffirm the across-the-board cuts. The vote in the Democratic House was 339 to 72, and the Republican Senate approved it by acclamation, not deeming it worthy of a roll-call vote.
In 1987, Congress fixed the triggering mechanism and restored the sequester in Gramm-Rudman II. That deal would have cut nondefense discretionary spending by 8.5% and defense spending by 10.5%, far greater cuts than will be triggered this year. Yet a Democratic Congress and a Republican White House came together to replace that sequester with spending cuts in fiscal years 1988 and 1989 that werelarger than those called for by Gramm-Rudman II.
While history shows that a divided government can enact significant spending cuts as an alternative to sequesters, that doesn't appear to be the path Mr. Obama intends to follow. Instead of protecting civilian defense workers, the president will continue to force the Pentagon to buy biofuels at $27 per gallon to promote his green agenda. Instead of protecting children from cuts in nutrition programs, the president will continue to allow $2.7 billion of fraud and mismanagement he has identified in the food-stamp program. Instead of protecting Medicare from a 2% cut, the president will ignore $62 billion in annual waste that his administration has identified in Medicare and Medicaid.
But governing is not about blaming someone else—it is about choosing.
While Mr. Obama may choose to make the cuts ordered by the sequester in the most painful way possible, the best alternative—which is practiced every year to some extent—is allowing federal agencies to transfer funds among individual programs with congressional approval or by rearranging priorities as part of the March 27 resolution to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year.
That doesn't sound like a herculean task to Americans who make hard choices every day. Their choices have become harder and more frequent because the country's political leaders seem unwilling to do the same in Washington.
— Mr. Gramm, a former Republican senator from Texas, is a senior partner of US Policy Metrics.
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1b)
You Can't Community-Organize Your Way Out of a Sequester
You're familiar with the notion of the Hedgehog and the Fox, right? "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing"?
Hardball producer Michael LaRossa marvels, "Only in America can a President propose a law, get it passed, and then actively campaign against implementing it." Yes, instead of spending time in Washington, with all of the members of Congress who could pass something to replace the sequester, Obama went to Newport News to hold a campaign-style event shouting about the need to pass something to replace the sequester.
Permit me to spotlight a funny recent essay by RedState contributor Moe Lane, in which he examines the skills and philosophy of President Obama through the lens of role-playing video games:
To begin with: a munchkin (or power gamer, or mini-maxer, or a bunch of terms that cannot be repeated here) is a type of gamer (roleplaying, computer, roleplaying-computer) who looks for loopholes in the rules — because games have rules, and there isn't a rule-set in the world that cannot be manipulated by somebody with enough motivation/obsession. And it turns out that the American Democratic primary system was full of such loopholes, which is why Barack Obama won the nomination in 2008 despite losing almost all the big Democratic primary states (and arguably the popular vote, depending on how you score Michigan). And it also turns out that the intersection of our electoral system with our rapidly-expanding online culture can produce what computer gamers call "exploits:" which is to say, a glitch in the system that gives someone an unintended benefit (if it just crashes the system, it's a bug). Strictly speaking, the system is not designed to elevate a state Senator to the Presidency in five years – for what turned out to be very good reasons – but it can be done.
Mini-maxing is when a player designs a character that is fantastically good at one thing, at the expense of everything else. So you could end up with a character who is, say, obscenely good at hitting things with a sword — but can't convince a bunch of sailors to drink free beer. The mini-maxer doesn't mind; he'll just go around the game trying to resolve as many problems as he can by hitting them with a sword (tabletop gamers — err, "D&D players" — often call this The Gun is My Skill List, although obviously substitute a sword for a gun in the name). The problems that the mini-maxer can't resolve that way he'll either ignore until later, or else flail about on the screen while hitting the buttons quickly and/or at random ("button-mashing"), in the hopes that eventually the laws of probability will allow him to bull on through anyway.
And that's where we are now. Barack Obama knows how to do one thing: elect Barack Obama to public office. And that's not ‘elect Democrats.' Or ‘elect liberals.' Or even ‘elect people that Barack Obama likes.' It's just him: his team is trying pretty hard right now to figure out how to use their over-specialized skill more generally, but they don't have much time to figure it out and the system is actually rigged against them in this case. Barack Obama certainly doesn't know how to govern effectively; take away a Congress that will rubber-stamp the Democratic agenda and he flails about. He's so bad at this, in fact, that when confronted with a situation where all he had to do was do nothing to fulfill a campaign promise (the tax cuts) we somehow ended up with a situation where Obama gave in on 98% of those tax cuts and voluntarily signed up to take the blame for the AMT fix. In short: Obama was woefully unprepared for the Presidency, and he hasn't really spent the last four years trying to catch up. Instead, he goes from situation to situation either trying to recast the problem in ways that he does have some skill in (permanent campaigning for office), or else… flail about on the scene while hitting people's buttons quickly and/or at random, in the hopes that eventually the laws of probability will allow him to bull on through anyway.
But this is what he knows, and after his reelection, he's convinced it works. So here we go. More cowbell.
1c)Low Information Voters? How about a Low Information President?
By Bruce Johnson
There is a real possibility, a strong likelihood, that President Obama knows nothing of the nuts and bolts, the details and realities of the positions he promotes. He rides the Starship Air Force One, thrills adolescent crowds and frames himself with federal employees while orating vapid clichés dowsed in demagoguery.
He drives the fancy car but needs help filling it with gas and couldn't point to the air filter if you popped the hood. Imagery sans leadership. Celebrity is the accomplishment here, and adoration is the metric. Polls demonstrate people approve more of him and less of his execution of the responsibilities of office. This Presidency is therefore wrapped in a managed personal imagery that supersedes the measure of ability.
He speaks yet says nothing. He exists before the camera scripted to generalities and clichés. Once this is understood, we can sense there is no more. True leadership and real understanding of the issues just aren't there. Recall a few instances.
There was the Paul Ryan Obamacare summit in which Ryan began to peel back the skin on the Affordable Care Act. Ryan began reading from the bill itself, and as he did Obama's eyes glazed over. When Ryan was finished, Obama had nothing of substance to say. Dismissive and aloof, he pushed out a short narrative of banalities and bromides.
Did Obama know enough to defend his own program?
There was also the Univision interview in which Obama declared that George W. Bush began Fast and Furious back in 2007. This is inherently false. There was a similar program, granted. But, the program had ended and, by the way, the program attempted to capture gun runners. Two glaring differences. But did Obama know these facts? At first one thinks there is a twisting of the truth by the President. But, there is a strong possibility that indeed he believed what he said based on what he had been told.
Dr. Benjamin Carson revealed his version of the world and the shortfalls of Obamacare standing a few feet from the President himself. Obama's body language, as he was forced to bear witness, spoke volumes. This was the closest to an exchange between Obama and a critic of his beloved health insurance initiative to date. But there was no exchange. There was no defense. There was no telepromptered pre-authored clichéd speech to deliver.
Regarding the Benghazi incident, Obama suggested that for him to dig in and learn the details and facts of that 9/11 day would be to somehow interfere with an FBI investigation, an investigation that to date has provided nil. Wouldn't, shouldn't a President's attitude be more in the vein of "I will find out what happened and I will report back to the nation."?
He declares that he has cut over a trillion dollars, somewhere. He has been told this and it seems he believes it.
He will not engage a critic and nor defend his positions in detail. He can not apparently even engage a questioning reporter nor engage his congressional opposition. In my opinion, he couldn't last 5 minutes in a fact-driven analysis of that which he promotes. The President doesn't meet with the political opposition to initiate compromise because he simply couldn't keep up his end of the argument. His game is to broadcast insipid generalities wrapped in demagoguery and reliant on an arrangement that disallows honest questioning. Can we recall anytime that Mr. Obama had control and knowledge of the facts of an issue?
I maintain that Obama really believes that George Bush started Fast and Furious.
I maintain that Paul Ryan has read more of the Obama Care bill than the President.
I think he actually believes he has trimmed over 1 Trillion dollars from the budget and that the sequestration is a "real" cut rather than merely a trimming of the rate of increase in federal spending.
The president operates only on the information he is given. That is understandable. But does he sense that perhaps his information is flawed? Does he care? Not likely.
Obama's non-engagement and aversion to compromise is actually seated in his complete lack of knowledge, and therefore inability to defend his agenda or even forge a compromise. He is inactive in leadership and compromise because he simply lacks the ability and issue knowledge to lead and compromise.
It is becoming apparent that the President is purposely kept in a bubble by his handlers, protected by the aegis of screened questioning. He is merely a one trick pony with the trick being nothing but media-enabled and unrebutted declarative demagoguery delivered to fawning audiences and broadcast to the clinically under informed.
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2)US joins Russia in drawing ceasefire lines for ending Syrian war
Incoming US Secretary of State John Kerry, on his first foreign trip, set forth what sounded like a new Obama administration policy for Syria in his remarks in Paris Wednesday, Feb. 27. They were accompanied by reports that the US was stepping up its support for the Syrian opposition. It would cover training rebels at a base in the region and non-lethal assistances and equipment, such as vehicles, communications equipment and night vision gear.
But Kerry’s remarks did not reflect a new policy but merely recycled old definitions which confirmed US disengagement from Syria, rather than “stepping up support” for the Syrian opposition “for the first time.” US supplies of nonlethal assistance to Syrian rebels date back to early last year. The US has moreover been training Syrian rebels in Jordanian bases near the Syrian border for more than a year to carry out three missions:
1. To seize control of Bashar Assad’s chemical weapons arsenal;
2. To create a pro-Western core command structure as a factor in post-Assad government;
3. To ward off the takeover of the revolt command by Islamist factions, including groups associated with al Qaeda.
It turned out that none of these three missions was actually achieved. The chemical weapons remained firmly in the hands of Assad and his army - which never used them, contrary to rebel claims; factions close to Al Qaeda grew stronger; and their role in the rebel command expanded as they were seen to be the best-armed and trained of any Syrian rebel faction.
The Obama administration finally came to the conclusion that the only way to contain Islamist forces and retain a modicum of American control over the rebels was to catch a ride on Russian President Vladimir Putin plans for Syria, even through they entailed preserving Bashar Assad in power through to 2014.
Military and Russian sources reveal plans hinge primarily on establishing armistice lines dividing the country into separate sectors and determining in advance which will be controlled by rebel factions and which by Assad loyalilsts. This is the first practical basis to be put forward for an accord to end the two-year old civil war between Assad and the Syrian opposition and it is designed to go forward under joint Russian-American oversight.
Sources add that the teamwork between Washington and Moscow in pursuit of this plan is close and detailed. They have agreed to get together on the types of weapons to be supplied to each of the rebel groups and are sharing costs.
That is the real new American policy for Syria: It is based on Washington’s recognition of the new situation unfolding in Syria and the need to cooperate with Moscow, including acceptance of Assad’s rule, in order to salvage remnants of American influence within the Syrian rebel camp.
French President Francois Hollande showed he was quick on the uptake. No sooner had the Secretary Kerry departed Paris for Rome Wednesday, than Hollande was on his way to Moscow to scout out a role for France.
2a)American recessional
By Victor Davis Hanson
Republicans and Democrats are blaming one another for impending cuts to the defense budget brought about by sequestration. But with serial annual deficits of $1 trillion-plus and an aggregate debt nearing $17 trillion, the United States -- like an insolventRome and exhausted Great Britain of the past -- was bound to re-examine its expensive overseas commitments and strategic profile.
The president's nomination of Chuck Hagel for defense secretary was a sort of Zen-like way of having a Republican combat veteran orchestrate a reduced military. In fact, Barack Obama has nurtured a broad and diverse constituency for his neo-isolationist vision. Budget hawks concede that defense must suffer its fair share of cuts. Libertarians want back their republic and hate the big-government baggage that comes along with a big military's involvement overseas.
Leftists agree, adding that the U.S. has neither the moral authority nor the wherewithal to arrange events overseas. For liberals, a scaled-back military presence abroad means more entitlements at home. For each F-22 Raptor not built, about another 20,000 families could receive food stamps for a year.
The American public -- exhausted by Iraq and Afghanistan -- is receptive to all the above arguments. If our poorer grandparents thought 70 percent of the annual U.S. budget devoted to defense after the Korean War was about right, we, the more affluent, insist that even the present 20 percent is far too costly.
The result is that we lead from behind in Libya; France leads from the front in Mali. Syria andIran shrug off Obama's periodic sermons to behave. Our reset with Russia was abruptly reset by Russia. American policy in the Middle East could be summed up as "Whatever" -- as we become only mildly miffed that distasteful authoritarian allies are replaced by more distasteful Islamist enemies.
In his first major speech as secretary of state, John Kerry did not worry about radical Islam. Nor did he warn Americans of a rogue North Korea, a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran, or China -- bullying in the Pacific and cyber-hacking the U.S. -- but mostly of the need for collective efforts to address climate change. A shortage of solar panels and windmills, not impending cuts in U.S. ships and planes, is Kerry's idea of existential danger on the global horizon.
To the extent that there is a coherent American foreign policy, it is perhaps symbolized by drone assassinations: Every couple of days or so, just kill a terrorist suspect or two -- and as cheaply, as remotely and as quietly as possible.
What will the world look begin to look like as the global sheriff backs out of the world saloon with both guns holstered?
Japan and Germany, the world's third- and fourth-largest nations in terms of their gross domestic product, have never translated their formidable postwar economic strength into their past, prewar levels of military power. Yet both in theory could quickly do so -- and make nukes in the same way they make fine cars -- once they sense that there is no longer an unshakeable U.S. commitment and ability to shelter them from regional threats. In fact, an array of allies -- South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines -- would all be frontline garrison states should the U.S. military vacate their bad neighborhoods.
The world is full of hot spots apart from the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Shiite majorities in many of the Sunni-ruled and oil-rich Persian Gulf kingdoms believe that a terrorist-sponsoringIran is more a liberator than rogue nation, and that Gulf oil has not been fully utilized as a strategic weapon.
The Aegean, Cyprus, the former Soviet Republics, the Falkland Islands, Central America and the Baltic are all deceptively quiet. Potentially aggressive actors in the region don't quite know how the U.S. military might react -- only that it easily could, and has in the past.
We lament the terrible American losses in blood and treasure in tribal Afghanistan and Iraq. But privately, radical Islamists acknowledge that the U.S. military killed thousands of jihadists in both countries -- and hope never to see U.S. troops on the battlefield again.
Of course, a country that can neither budget the necessary money nor maintain the will to oversee the international peace has no business continuing to try.
But in our relief from the vast costs and burdens of maintaining the postwar global order, we might at least acknowledge the truth, past and present: Just as the world was a far better place after 1945 because of an engaged United States, so it will probably become a much worse place due to an increasingly absent America.
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3)Woodward: White House Warned Me "You Will Regret Doing This"
WOLF BLITZER, CNN: You're used to this kind of stuff, but share with our viewers what's going on between you and the White House.
BOB WOODWARD: Well, they're not happy at all and some people kind of, you know, said, look, 'we don't see eye to eye on this.' They never really said, though, afterwards, they've said that this is factually wrong, and they -- and it was said to me in an e-mail by a top --
BLITZER: What was said?
WOODWARD: It was said very clearly, you will regret doing this.
BLITZER: Who sent that e-mail to you?
WOODWARD: Well, I'm not going to say.
BLITZER: Was it a senior person at the White House?
WOODWARD: A very senior person. And just as a matter -- I mean, it makes me very uncomfortable to have the White House telling reporters, 'you're going to regret doing something that you believe in, and even though we don't look at it that way, you do look at it that way.' I think if Barack Obama knew that was part of the communication's strategy, let's hope it's not a strategy, that it's a tactic that somebody's employed, and said, 'Look, we don't go around trying to say to reporters, if you, in an honest way, present something we don't like, that, you know, you're going to regret this.' It's Mickey Mouse. (The Situation Room, February 27, 2013)
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4)Supreme Court Poised to Declare Racism Over
Pop champagne: Racism is over.
"There is an old disease, and that disease is cured," Bert Rein, the attorney leading the legal challenge to the Voting Rights Act—the landmark law intended to ensure all Americans can vote—told to the Supreme Court on Tuesday. "That problem is solved."
Rein represents Shelby County, Alabama, one of the jurisdictions covered by a key section of the Voting Rights Act called Section 5. Under Section 5, parts of the country with histories of discriminatory election practices have to ask for permission—or "preclearance," in legal terms—from the Justice Department before making any changes to their voting rules. But the South, where most of the covered jurisdictions are, has changed, Rein said, and the law, although once justified, is now unfair and unconstitutional. The five conservative justices on the Supreme Court seemed to agree. "The Marshall Plan was very good too," argued Justice Anthony Kennedy, "but times change."
That's not to say all discrimination is a thing of the past. In the eyes of the high court's conservatives, America has transcended its tragic history of disenfranchising minorities, but there's still one kind of discrimination that matters: Discrimination against the states covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Justice Antonin Scalia said that it was "sort of extraordinary to say" that "Congress can just pick out…these eight states," referring to the states covered by Section 5.
Later, Scalia telegraphed his reasoning for what will almost certainly be a vote to strike down part of the law. Explaining overwhelming support for the Voting Rights Act reauthorization in Congress in 2006, Scalia called Section 5 the "perpetuation of a racial entitlement" that legislators would never have the courage to overturn. "In the House there are practically black districts by law now," Scalia complained. (In Mississippi, a state which Roberts would later cite as a paradise of racial enlightenment, state lawmakers in the early 1990s referred to these as "nigger districts.")
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal appointed by President Barack Obama, held her tongue until Rein rose to rebut the government's arguments. She then lobbed Scalia's grenade back in his direction. "Do you think the right to vote is a racial entitlement in Section 5?" she asked. "No," Rein said, "the 15th Amendment protects the right of all to vote." It should, but sometimes it doesn't. That's why Congress passed Section 5.
Scalia wasn't the only conservative justice despondent over how unfair Section 5 is to the South. Chief Justice John Roberts, arguing that voter registration and participation of black voters is higher in Mississippi than Massachusetts, asked Solicitor General Donald B Verrilli Jr., who was defending the law, "Is it the government's submission that the citizens of the South are more racist than the citizens of the North?"
Verrilli awkwardly cleared his throat and said no. Being from the South doesn't mean a person is racist, and being from the North doesn't mean a person isn't. The notion that the South is more racist than the North might seem intuitive, though, given the hundreds of years of an economy based on the forced labor of enslaved blacks, the instigation of a bloody civil war fought over the right to own black people as property, decades of near slavery and apartheid following emancipation, and the fact that a massive effort by the federal government and several constitutional amendments were just required to ensure black Americans' basic rights. But when Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act—and Section 5—in 2006, it wasn't measuring anything so abstract as racism. It was looking at whether or not the states covered by Section 5 still sought, in less explicit ways than in the days of poll taxes and grandfather clauses, to abridge the right to vote on the basis of race.
"Of course [Section 5] was aimed at states," said Justice Stephen Breyer, a member of the liberal bloc. "What do you think the Civil War was about?" This crowd? States rights, probably. "It's an old disease; it's gotten better," Breyer said, "but it's still there."
Scalia worried that Section 5, and its unjustifiable discrimination against states, would continue in "perpetuity." But with the bailout provision, it's a relatively simply matter to escape the Section 5. To quote Roberts in a case striking down a school integration program, "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
Maybe instead of trying to gut the Voting Rights Act, Shelby County should try that.
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