A week later, the performance of the Supreme Court in the case of Shelby County v. Holder, the case challenging Section V of the Voting Rights Act and, therefore, due to Section V's place as the primary enforcement mechanism, the act itself, still resonates through the politics of the moment. Last weekend, there was a re-enactment of the Bloody Sunday march in Selma after which, in an extraordinary moment, Congressman John Lewis accepted an apology — and his badge — from the present chief of police in Montgomery. Unfortunately, for people like Chief Justice John Roberts, this moment likely confirms his argument that we've solved all the problems and that Section V is not needed any more because, after all, do you think people in the South are more racist than people in other parts of the country?

(Actual answer: I have no idea. I cannot look into their hearts and neither can the law. But I can say that history, ancient and recent, proves that the people in the jurisdictions covered by Section V are predisposed to write racism into their governmental institutions, and to do so by restricting the franchise. Why do you ask?)

Adam Serwer did a fine job pointing out how Roberts originallyhad made his bones in conservative legal circles by finding ways to undermine the VRA as a young lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department.

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.

But the simple fact is that the conservative campaign to roll back voting rights didn't begin last week, or last year, or even when John Roberts was trying to curry favor with William French Smith. Opposition to extending the franchise among minority voters has been the ticket to the bigs for Republican lawyers ever since the Civil Rights Movement was catching fire. In fact, Roberts is the second consecutive chief justice whose career was jump-started by his willingness to involve himself in voter-suppression. In 1964, as part of a voter-suppression campaign that came to be called Operation Eagle Eye, a cadging systemspecifically targetingHispanic voters was put in place in Arizona. (Plus ca change, plus ca meme wingnut.) One of its central figure was an ambitious lawyer named William Rehnquist.

A series of caging incidents occurred in black and Latino precincts in Phoenix, Arizona, during the 1950s and 1960s. Republican operatives, primarily lawyers, were involved, although there was at least one case of Democrats responding to these operations by targeting Republican precincts. Concomitant with the caging were intimidation of minority voters, scuffles between challengers and voters, and failure of the challengers to comply with the law governing Election Day procedures. These incidents in Phoenix received nationwide attention in 1971 and 1986 when senatorial hearings were held on the confirmation of William Rehnquist to the Supreme Court and then as chief justice, inasmuch as Rehnquist, a young lawyer in the early 1960s, had played an important role in his party's caging efforts directed toward minority voters.

Rehnquist and Roberts don't share this peculiar entry on their respective CV's by accident. They share it because, ever since it decided to ally itself with the forces of racial reaction and to give the spirit of the Wallace campaigns a respectable home, the Republican party has committed itself to keeping black and brown people from voting. As their careers prove, it was the way to get ahead as a conservative lawyer. It has been a very long march to undo that for which John Lewis and the rest of the people who marched with him risked their lives.

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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