While you are at it, you should also read the opinion -- issued almost exactly one year ago -- by another panel of federal judges who determined that Florida's partisan plan to shorten early voting days constituted evidence of racial discrimination. Or if that doesn't rise to your level of "objective evidence" read what U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, an appointee of President George W. Bush, wrote last fall in a voting-rights challenge in South Carolina. Section 5 of the federal law, he wrote, acted as a vital deterrent forcing recalcitrant lawmakers to enact less discriminatory voting measures.

Now, you may disagree with what all of these federal judges (Republican appointees as well as Democratic ones) concluded about the discriminatory nature of these laws, after they heard sworn testimony and read the voluminous records in these cases. But you can't say they offered "no objective evidence" for the conclusions they reached. Your conclusion, on the other hand, directly contradicts the experiences of countless citizens, in and out of the South, who have been victimized by the new generation of voter-suppression efforts.

Surely you aren't saying that all of these people are just making it up. Or maybe you are. Last week, you said: "There is no greater defender, truly, of minority rights, if you consider minorities to be the color of your skin or the color of your ideology, than myself." Many people initially took that as an attempt to portray yourself as a supporter of minority rights. Fair enough, and good for you. But in light of your statements on voting rights, that old comment now suggests the only minority rights you are wiling to defend are for those defined by "the color of their ideology," whatever that means.

But back to your task. Don't just stop with the court rulings. Read some of the briefs filed earlier this year in Shelby County v. Holder, the case in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the "coverage formula" of Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. Those court documents chronicle dozens of proven instances of racial discrimination in voting. Read this brief, for example, filed by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Read this report by the Brennan Center for Justice on more recent examples of voter suppression. Tell me what parts of these documents do not constitute "objective evidence" to you?

You also should read the Shelby County ruling itself. If you do, you'll notice that none of the justices -- not even the five conservative ones who ignored precedent to limit the Voting Rights Act -- concluded, as you have, that there is "no objective evidence that we're precluding African-Americans from voting any longer." On the contrary, even Chief Justice John Roberts, the architect of the law's demise, wrote this on page 2 of his opinion, "voting discrimination still exists; no one doubts that." So tell me, what do you know that Chief Justice Roberts doesn't know about racial discrimination in voting practices?