As we have been doing with some regularity these days, we return to the newly insane state of North Carolina, which wasted no time in celebrating John Roberts's day of jubilee.

The moves are only the first indication that the ruling will have "a demonstrably negative impact on voters of color," said Riggs, staff attorney with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. The group already has a 2-year-old lawsuit pending that alleges racial discrimination in the 1st District and three dozen other North Carolina districts redrawn by Republicans. Apodaca said the previous requirements for federal preclearance caused "legal headaches" in passing such measures as voter ID in response to legitimate concerns over voter fraud. It's time, he told reporters, to bring the Voting Rights Act "into this century, not the last century." North Carolina NAACP President William J. Barber II, who has seen generations of black candidates elected thanks to the landmark civil rights-era law, objected to Apodaca's dismissal of federal protections that had become part of the civil rights fabric of the South. "He refers to a law to undo 250 years of slavery and another 100 years or more of Jim Crow ... as a headache," Barber said.

And, of course, it is important to remember, especially in the light of these developments, what the Chief Justice maintained was the basis for his highly principled decision.

But preclearance, he wrote, was "based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day."

Nothing in there about what would happen in the future day, after Roberts did his Sweeney Todd on the enforcement provisions. Truthiness!

It is most important to remember that, on this issue in particular, John Roberts is being an incredible bullshit artist. He never liked the Voting Rights Act. He made his bones as a young lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department -- Thanks again, Ronnie! -- by devising clever ways for the federal government to bail out on its responsibility to protect minority voting rights under the act.

Roberts was a major player in the Reagan administration's VRA policy, drafting numerous op-eds and memos for top Justice Department officials that argued for a weaker version of the law. At the time, crucial parts of the VRA were due to expire, but congressional Democrats and moderate Republicans weren't just trying to renew the law-they were also trying to strengthen the law. After the VRA was enacted, it was interpreted as barring all discriminatory voting practices. In 1980, however, the Supreme Court, in a case involving the election rules in Mobile, Alabama,weakened the law by ruling that, except in those jurisdictions with a sordid history of blocking minority voters, the VRA only forbadeintentional discrimination. Civil rights activists wanted to fix that by modifying the law to make it crystal clear that all discrimination in voting practices, not just intentional discrimination, was illegal.Roberts wasn't having it. Voting rights violations, according to one memo he helped draft in 1981, "should not be too easy to prove since they provide a basis for the most intrusive interference imaginable." If Roberts and the Reagan administration had gotten their way, discriminatory voting systems in most of the country could only be barred when discrimination could be shown to be intentional. That would make it much tougher for the feds to intervene in states and localities and guarantee equal voting rights. The Reagan administration argued that they were just trying to preserve the Voting Rights Act, but it was really attempting to preserve a Supreme Court ruling neutering the law.

These guys don't believe that the VRA is unfair to the South in 2013. They believe it was unfair to the South in 1981 and (probably) in 1965, when it was enacted in the first place. This has been a long march.

Roberts also is joined in his day of jubilee by writers in the employ of the National Review, which has had its doubts about Negro Suffrage from the moment of its founding.Now, though, the jackboot of federal oversight has been removed and it's time to party like it's 1897.

Where did the media elite's sense of outrage come from? It's simple, actually. To admit that the South had changed would mean letting go of their own cultural and moral superiority, of their sense of regional superiority with respect to the issue of race. Media and academic elites believe that, but for proper adult supervision, the South will return to its racist roots and that they alone can protect helpless black southerners from the perfidy rooted in white southerners' DNA.

Crap. The South could have removed itself from the restrictions of the Voting Rights Act simply by not discriminating any more. This is a region that fought (successfully) the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution for nearly a century. Do you think it was going to come to Jesus over a simple act of Congress without an awfully big stick swung over its head? As Ed Kilgore points out today, while parking the NR guy deep into the cheap seats:

The entire history of race relations in the South has been a story of racists taking the long view and outlasting the wandering attention span of those demanding change-who out of fatigue or competing priorities or their own prejudices "got over it" and left the South to its own devices.

(Of course, Habeeb's "own" Mississippi was right at the head of the line at the punchbowl for the picnic celebrating the day of jubilee.)

But the day of jubilee has arrived. John Roberts says so. Look at the way they're celebrating in North Carolina. And, of course, it's Not About Race because it's Never About Race.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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