Justices voice skepticism of rights law

Corporations urge court to embrace gay marriage

WASHINGTON, Feb 28, (Agencies): The US Supreme Court’s conservative justices voiced deep skepticism Wednesday about a section of a landmark civil rights law that has helped millions of Americans exercise their right to vote.

In an ominous note for supporters of the key provision of the Voting Rights Act, Justice Anthony Kennedy both acknowledged the measure’s vital role in fighting discrimination and suggested that other important laws in US history had run their course. “Times change,” Kennedy said during the fastpaced, 70-minute argument.

Kennedy’s views are likely to prevail on the closely divided court, and he tends to side with his more conservative colleagues on matters of race.

The court’s liberals and conservatives engaged in a sometimes tense back-and-forth over whether there is still a need in 2013 for the part of the voting rights law that requires states with a history of discrimination against blacks, mainly in the Deep South, to get approval before making changes in the way elections are held.

Justice Antonin Scalia called the law a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, a vocal skeptic of the use of race in all areas of public life, cited a variety of statistics that showed starker racial disparities in some aspects of voting in the northeastern state of Massachusetts than in the southern state of Mississippi. Then he asked the government’s top Supreme Court lawyer whether the Obama administration thinks “the citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the North?”

The answer from Solicitor General Donald Verrilli was no.

The question, and others like it from the conservative justices, largely echoed the doubts they first expressed four years ago in a similar case that ended without resolving the constitutionality of the latest renewal of the voting rights law, in 2006. They questioned whether there remain appreciable differences between the locations covered by the law and those that are not.

They also wondered whether there was any end in sight for a provision that intrudes on states’ rights to conduct elections and which was regarded as an emergency response to decades of state-sponsored discrimination in voting, despite the US Constitution’s Fifteenth Amendment guarantee of the vote for black Americans.

Burden

The provision shifted the legal burden and required governments that were covered to demonstrate that their proposed changes would not discriminate. Another part of the voting rights law, not being challenged, allows for traditional, after-the-fact claims of discrimination in voting and applies across the country.

As his administration was defending the voting rights law, President Barack Obama was across the street at the Capitol unveiling a statue of civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, who in 1955 famously refused to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, to a white man. The court will have to decide whether the conditions that gave rise to that seminal event are, like the statue, a part of history, or whether they persist in parts of the nation.

The court’s four liberal justices, including Obama appointees Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, appeared uniformly to be willing to defer to the decision by Congress that more progress needs to be made before freeing states from the special federal monitoring.

Questioned

Those justices aggressively questioned Bert Rein, the lawyer representing Shelby County, Alabama, a southern state, in its challenge to the law.

Sotomayor acknowledged some parts of the South had changed, but she asserted that recent voting rights lawsuits in Alabama suggested that Shelby County, near Birmingham, has not made sufficient progress.

“Why would we vote in favor of a county whose record is the epitome of what caused the passage of this law to start with?” Sotomayor asked.

Kagan chimed in that any formula devised by Congress “would capture Alabama,” where she said certain discriminatory voting practices have persisted.

But Rein said the issue was whether the formula in place, using statistics that are at least 40 years old, remains a valid way to determine which locations have to ask for permission to make voting changes.

Debo Adegbile, a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, argued to the court on behalf of local Alabama elected officials and civil rights leaders. He sought to show the justices that there is a current need for the law, an effort to counter the court’s admonition four years ago that current conditions, not history alone, must justify the continuing application of the law. The NAACP is a leading civil rights organization.

In 2011, Adegbile said, a judge in Alabama cited state lawmakers’ derogatory references to AfricanAmericans as a reason to continue to protect minority voters through the Voting Rights Act.

But Roberts challenged the lawyer. “Have there been episodes, egregious episodes of the kind you are talking about in states that are not covered?” the chief justice asked.

Also: WASHINGTON: More than 200 businesses on Wednesday urged the US Supreme Court to strike down a federal law that restricts the definition of marriage to heterosexual unions, in one of corporate America’s most prominent efforts to support same-sex marriage.

The companies signed on to a friendof-the-court brief in Windsor v. United States, a high-profile case challenging the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). They ranged from technology giants Microsoft Corp and Google Inc to Wall Street financiers such as Citigroup Inc and Goldman Sachs Group Inc to vineyards and yogurt makers in California.

Thomson Reuters Corp, which owns the Reuters news agency, also supported the submission.

The companies want the Supreme Court to void a key provision in the federal law that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman. They largely stayed away from constitutional arguments attacking the law and instead focused on the business nuisance the law created.