As legal news goes, it doesn’t get much bigger than what transpired in the U.S. Supreme Court this week. Legal pundits went ballistic when the politically partisan wing of SCOTUS decimated Martin Luther King’s dream by killing key elements of the venerable and still sorely-needed Voting Rights Act.
In effect, the court’s Republican retrograde jurists Alito, Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Kennedy gave GOP-dominated state legislatures a green light to erect hurdles to thwart Democratic-leaning minority populations from exercising their most important Constitutional right as Americans. In fact, within a day of the Roberts-driven ruling, the wacky state of Texas moved to make government-issued voter IDs mandatory in order to vote, in spite of no proven existence of voter fraud in Texas or anywhere else for that matter.
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| Justice Alito Rolls Eyes at Justice Ginsburg |
This SCOTUS ruling was clearly an insidious and un-American ploy to disenfranchise Democrats – one that would invariably engender public outrage. Anticipating this impending media firestorm, the U.S. Supreme Court’s public affairs department very likely orchestrated the release of an antidote to quash the pain.
It came a day after the VRA ruling in two parts: a repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act and an affirmation that Proposition 8 in Calfornia was illegal. Guess what? The SCOTUS PR scheme worked! Today, media coverage of the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act was knocked out of the headlines by the (also) historic DOMA/Prop 8 decisions.
The public outcry against the VRA ruling had a short shelf life indeed. But, make no mistake about it, the court’s public affairs department did have a say in the timing for release of these blockbuster rulings. And in this case, it determined that the conservative backlash to the gay marriage rulings was a small price to pay in order to give the GOP and its conservative agenda an advantage in future elections