EP 794 Voting Rights Limits May Be the Supreme Court’s Most Enduring Legacy

EP 794 Voting Rights Limits May Be the Supreme Court’s Most Enduring Legacy

There is a disturbing history of a fifty-year plan to hijack voting rights in America.  Despite Chief Justice John Roberts’ reputation as an institutionalist trying to steer the Supreme Court in a measured fashion, our guest says he’s not a deliberate incrementalist but rather a patient bulldozer.  In his first fourteen years as the nation’s chief jurist he overturned precedents in 21 cases.  And while we have recently focused on Supreme Court limits on abortion, gun laws, and affirmative action, perhaps the action taken in 2013, in the Shelby County v. Holder case will have the most long lasting effect.  It gutted a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act on the basis of the flawed notion that racism in America, and particularly in the South, was a thing of the past.  This was the culmination of an effort John Roberts began as a young lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department where he contested voting rights cases and the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act.  David Daley, our guest, and author of the new book “Undemocractic: Inside the Far Right’s 50 Year Plot to Control American Elections” joins us to discuss.


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