Legal News

Preclearance, Clarence? Scotus to Review Big Part of Voting Rights Act

By Ashby Jones

Getty Images

President Lyndon B Johnson discusses the Voting Rights Act with civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King Jr. The act, part of President Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ program trebled the number of black voters in the south. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The big news out of One First St., NE today: the Supreme Court decided to review a case called Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District v. Mukasey, in which it could review the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Here are stories from Scotusblog and the NYT.

Most of the time we find ourselves paying attention to the Voting Rights Act, it’s in the context of a redistricting challenge. But Northwest Austin involves something different — the section of the Act that requires nine mostly southern states and a host of jurisdictions in other states to receive “preclearance” with the Justice Department before making changes to voting procedures. The preclearance requirement, originally set to expire in five years after the law’s passage, has been repeatedly extended by Congress, most recently in 2006.

In Northwest Austin, the filings for which can be found here, a “municipal utility district” in Austin, Texas, is appealing a decision requiring it to seek federal permission to make changes to its voting procedures. The district argues first that it doesn’t qualify as a “political subdivision” under the Act, and that when Congress extended the provision in 2006 it lacked sufficient evidence of racial discrimination in voting to justify the provision’s continuation.

A special three-judge court in Washington upheld the constitutionality of the preclearance requirement in May, saying that Congress had acted reasonably in making the judgment that voting discrimination persists.

But the Court will examine this afresh. And the results could be big. “This could be the biggest election law case on the court’s docket since Bush v. Gore,” Richard L. Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, told the NYT.

Oh, and the title of the post? Yeah, we pushed it a little, but we really wanted to get in this classic clip from “Airplane,” which, in our opinion, should have won the 1980 Oscar for Best Picture over “Ordinary People.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 09, 2009 (boomark / email).