Georgia Voter Suppression Laws

At left is a reference to the new voter suppression laws in Georgia making it a crime to bring water for people standing in line waiting to vote.  Gotta love this guy.

Here’s a discussion I’m having with a couple of old friends.  “David” was the dean of the Columbia Law School and is now the president of Rice University.  “Gregg” is a professor of law at Georgetown.

Craig: May I ask one of you Constitutional scholars to explain why what’s going on with the Georgia voting laws isn’t a clear violation of the 14th and 15th Amendments?

David:  If there is no explicit racial discrimination, and no other proof of intentional discrimination, it’s very hard to prove a violation of the constitution or relevant statutes, especially after the Supreme Court decided in Shelby that the southern states could no longer be subjected to special procedures and scrutiny of their voting laws.

Disparate impact alone generally is not sufficient.

Any more info and my hourly rates kick in.

Craig: I just can’t understand how a deliberate and wide-spread attempt to disenfranchise a certain class of voters isn’t wildly unconstitutional.  And that the southern states are allowed to behave differently??!! But I’ll leave it at that.  I don’t want those hourly rates to kick in.  I’m sure I’d have to remortgage my house to cover them.

Gregg: I’ll defer to David’s wisdom on this (what I do, in the law-&-medicine/health policy/science realm, is usually pretty far removed from what SCOTUS does, though SCOTUS has found its way into the science-trashing business in recent months).  What David says about Shelby is consistent with my close-to-lay understanding and with what my con law colleagues say.

That, of course, doesn’t make this any less outrageous.  Those who’re calling this a return to Jim Crow, voting-rights-wise, are, I think, not exaggerating.  Sure, southern sheriffs aren’t beating black folks when they come to city halls to register, but the electoral impact is analogous.  The big story here, I think, is that Republicans have a powerful toolkit for staging a slo-mo political Dunkirk in the face of demographic change.  We’re projected to become a white-minority country over the next several decades.  But suppressing the African-American vote, locking in control of SCOTUS and the circuit courts, making much more aggressive use of the filibuster, aggressive gerrymandering, and preserving the electoral college (which now requires a Dem to win the popular vote by 3% to have a 50-50 chance at the presidency) make for a potent program of white minority rule.

So, though I confess I’m usually the cautious sort re ideas like ending the filibuster, I’ve come to favor a filibuster carve-out for the voting-rights legislation (“HR 1”) now before Congress.  That’s our best chance for putting a stop to this.

Craig:  Given David’s stature, I’m sure he’s right, but I can’t for the life of me see why.

Obviously, I have no training in law.  That said, I can read English, which is why I’m so astonished that the 14th and 15th Amendments don’t make this blatant voter suppression of black people totally illegal.  “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” What else can that mean?

David may say that there is no “explicit racial discrimination,” and perhaps this whole thing turns on how one defines “explicit.” But other than arresting black voters, it’s hard, for me at least, to imagine anything more explicit.