They are always “up in arms” over something.
‘Demeaning insult’ in John Roberts’s Voting Rights Act decision
One of the enduring mysteries of Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion striking down part of the Voting Rights Act is which part of the Constitution the landmark civil rights law actually violated.
Roberts argued that the Voting Rights Act violated the “tradition†of “equal sovereignty†of the states. That concept is far more dubious than it might seem at first glance, according to a legal paper published by two longtime voting rights experts.
“The ‘equal sovereignty’ principle is not in the Constitution,†said James Blacksher, an Alabama attorney with a long career in Voting Rights. “It is, as the Chief Justice says, a ‘historical tradition.†Go straight past the penumbras, hang a right at the emanations.
Blacksher’s paper, co-authored with Harvard law professor Lani Guinier, argues that Roberts’s opinion in the Voting Rights Act case is a descendant of what is widely regarded as the worst Supreme Court decision in American history: The 1857 Dred Scott case, in which the high court held that blacks, slave or free, could never be citizens of the United States. That case is the “origin story†of the “equal sovereignty†principle, the authors argue, because the opinion by Chief Justice Roger Taney held that it would violate the sovereignty of the slave states to recognize blacks as American citizens. By invoking that principle, the authors write in Free at Last: Rejecting Equal Sovereignty and Restoring the Constitutional Right to Vote, Roberts was reviving “the oldest and most demeaning official insult to African-Americans in American constitutional history.â€
While the Dred Scott decision is the origin of the phrase “equal sovereignity”, the idea behind it is at least 70 years older.
So, essentially, Blacksher and Guinier are idiots with an agenda.