First, the Republican party, which “routinely gets 90 percent of its presidential votes from white America,” will come to an end, especially since crucial GOP states like Texas are “hispanicizing.” Second, the “millions of immigrants, legal and illegal” who “do not bring the academic or professional skills of European-Americans” will replace actual “taxpayers” and suck the government dry. Finally, test-scores will nose-dive because “more and more children taking those tests will be African-American and Hispanic”:

Third, the decline in academic test scores here at home and in international competition is likely to continue, as more and more of the children taking those tests will be African-American and Hispanic. [...] Can the test-score gap be closed? With the Hispanic illegitimacy rate at 51 percent and the black rate having risen to 71 percent, how can their children conceivably arrive at school ready to compete?

Given that minorities are bad at school, Buchanan goes on to warn that the “burden” of academic excellence thus “falls almost entirely on white males.” This is, of course, just the latest attempt of the MSNBC contributor to pass off derogatory, bigoted, and ignorant racialism as analysis. Some low-lights from Buchanan’s long and distinguished history in bigotry:

-Christian Terrorist Was ‘Right’: Buchanan wrote that while the right-wing Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik was a “calculating killer,” he “may be right” about “a climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world that is growing in numbers and advancing inexorably into Europe for the third time in 14 centuries.”

-No Help For White Males: In August, Buchanan complained that President Obama hadn’t hired enough white males to the civil service, saying there is “affirmative action for women, for Hispanics, and for blacks, but none for white males.”

-Too Many Jews: Last year, Buchanan argued that now-Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan’s nomination meant there would be too many Jews on the High Court bench. “Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats. Is this the Democrats’ idea of diversity?”

-Legal Immigration Is An Invasion: The Virginia Tech shooting in 2007 spurred Buchanan to declare that the shooter, Korean student Cho Seung-Hui, got into the country because legal immigration is “the greatest invasion in history.” We shouldn’t be surprised that “some are going berserk here,” he said.

-Slave Descendants Should Be Grateful: In 2008, asserting that “no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans,” Buchanan says because it was here that 600,000 slaves eventually learned of “Christian salvation” and got “affirmative action,” black people should stop complaining. “We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?”

-Hitler Was Courageous: In 1977, Buchanan wrote that while Hitler was “indeed a racist and anti-Semitic to the core,” Americans overlooked the fact that he “was also an individual of great courage, a soldier’s soldier in the Great War, a leader steeped in the history of Europe.”

-MLK Was A Fraud: In 1969, while Buchanan was working as President Richard Nixon’s speechwriter, he urged Nixon not to visit King’s widow on the first anniversary of his assassination. The visit “would outrage many, many people who believe Dr. King was a fraud and a demagogue, and perhaps worse,” Buchanan wrote, before proceeding to call King “one of the most divisive men in contemporary history.”

-KKK Has Winning Issues: In 1989, Buchanan urged conservatives to examine Duke, a former Grand Wizard in the Ku Klux Klan, and his “portfolio of winning issues.” Dismissing Duke’s history as insignificant, Buchanan praised Duke for taking on affirmative action in “hiring, scholarships, and promotions” and for denouncing “social engineers.” Buchanan said the GOP was “throwing away a winning hand” by embracing Jesse Jackson after the 1988 election, and Duke was “the first fellow to pick up the discards.”

-Gays Are Satanists: In 1990, Buchanan said the AIDS epidemic proved “our promiscuous homosexuals appear literally hell-bent on Satanism and suicide.” He still views homosexuality as “unnatural and immoral” and marriage equality as “an Orwellian absurdity.”

-The Dishwasher Liberated Women: In another book, he wrote “the real liberators of American women were not the feminist noise-makers; they were the automobile, the supermarket, the shopping center, the dishwasher, the washer-dryer, the freezer,” which all freed up “Mom” to spend more time reading.

And yet, Pat Buchanan is still a contributor for MSNBC — the same network that suspended another contributor for calling the president a “dick.” It begs the question, just what exactly does Buchanan have to say to make him too toxic for TV?

The latest attack came this morning from MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan, who bizarrely suggested that Buffett should pay his secretary’s taxes:

BUCHANAN: I tend to think he’s a bit of a hot dog, Joe. You know, I really want to pay more taxes, and my secretary pays more than I do. Why doesn’t he pay her taxes? And why doesn’t he himself pay at the rate he should be?

Watch it:

Of course, the point Buffett is trying to make when he speaks about his secretary is that there is a fundamental problem with the tax code that lets people like him exploit the system to pay less than middle-class Americans. Host Joe Scarborough and Buchanan sort of make this point, ironically, when they attack Buffett and other “super rich” people for using lawyers and accountants to exploit loopholes to pay less in taxes. As long as the opportunity exists, people will continue to take advantage of it.

Conservative responses like Buchanan’s completely ignore this systemic problem. Volunteering to pay more or paying a secretary’s taxes won’t solve anything. One in four millionaires has a lower tax rate (accounting for federal income and payroll taxes) than the median middle-class households. Buffett’s effective federal tax rate of around 17.4 percent is not unusual for investors at his income level, as Citizens for Tax Justice point out, as the average effective tax for people with $10 million or more in investment income is just over 17 percent. Moreover, tax rates have fallen 25 percent since 1995, when the economy was doing just fine.

In fact, racial minorities and women are underrepresented in the federal civil service.

“[The] radicalization of the working and middle class, such as occurred in the Truman-McCarthy era, during the George Wallace campaigns, and in the anti-amnesty firestorm that killed the Bush-Kennedy-McCain push for a path to citizenship for illegal aliens.”.

To Buchanan — a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans — these “movements” shared a “populist rage” and a “sense that they are losing their country. And they are right.” George Wallace, of course, was the stauchly pro-segregationist former governor of Alabama and presidental candidate, know for his most famous quote: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Other chapters of Buchanan’s book include, “The Death of Christian America,” which explains President Obama’s “campaign to expel Christianity;” and “Demographic Winter,” which links the West’s downfall to the fact that “children are no longer desirable” here.

Offering his take on the horrendous terrorist attacks in Norway, Buchanan joined the Wall Street Journal and the Jerusalem Post in arguing that the far-right extremist perpetrator Anders Breivik may have had a valid point. Arguing that Breivik was bringing attention to his cause, “a Crusader’s war between the real Europe and the ‘cultural Marxists’ and Muslims,” Buchanan declares that, on the “climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world…Breivik may be right“:

But, awful as this atrocity was, native-born and homegrown terrorism is not the macro-threat to the continent.

That threat comes from a burgeoning Muslim presence in a Europe that has never known mass immigration, its failure to assimilate, its growing alienation, and its sometime sympathy for Islamic militants and terrorists.

Europe faces today an authentic and historic crisis.

With her native-born populations aging, shrinking and dying, Europe’s nations have not discovered how to maintain their prosperity without immigrants. Yet the immigrants who have come – from the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia – have been slow to learn the language and have failed to attain the educational and occupational levels of Europeans. And the welfare states of Europe are breaking under the burden.[...]

As for a climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world that is growing in numbers and advancing inexorably into Europe for the third time in 14 centuries, on this one, Breivik may be right.

The sad reality is that Buchanan helps mainstream anti-Muslim intolerance. A regular MSNBC contributor and frequent guest on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Buchanan once invoked the Nazis’ attempt to march in Skokie, Illinois as an argument against the Islamic Center proposal in New York. He also used this platform to defend Rep. Peter King’s (R-NY) “McCarthyesque hearings” on the threat of terrorism from American Muslims, saying American Muslims are “most susceptible or vulnerable to the recruitment” by terrorists who will “radicalize them and make them enemies of America.”

Of course, Muslims are just the most recent group of people on Buchanan’s enemies list, which already includes Latinos, African-Americans, and gay people. As Buchanan said, he “prefers the old bigotry.” And he’s bringing it back to the mainstream.

Conservatives like Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin have tried to muddy the waters by claiming that the left has employed violent rhetoric as well. While this may be true for rank-and-file activists on both sides, there is no question something much more disturbing has happened on the right over the past two years, with conservative leaders — including sitting lawmakers and leading political candidates — employing violent rhetoric to an alarming degree. While there is no evidence to suggest that this conservative rhetoric directly influenced Loughner, the incident should nonetheless serve as moment for all leaders to be mindful of the potential consequences of their words.

Some conservatives understand this. An unnamed “senior Republican senator” told Politico yesterday that “there is a need for some reflection here — what is too far now?” And on MSNBC this morning, former GOP congressman Joe Scarbrough and conservative stalwart Pat Buchanan agreed that right-wing firebrands like former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) should “apologize” for their violent rhetoric — not to assume any culpability for the tragedy, but to simply acknowledge that “they’ve been irresponsible in their rhetoric”:

SCARBOROUGH: So Pat, is this not a time for people, like Sarah Palin, who have used violent imagery – she just has. I know some of my conservative friends and family members won’t like that reality. Or, Michele Bachmann, who said she wants Minnesotans armed and dangerous. Isn’t this an opportune time for them to apologize -– not saying that it led to anything — but just saying that they’ve been irresponsible in their rhetoric and they’re going to be more careful moving forward? […]

I am just saying though, I mean, God, you’ve worked for two presidents. Would you not be in there if you were working for Sarah Palin right now, saying, go out and say it had nothing to do with this shooting, but you understand that it was irresponsible, and you’re going to be more careful moving forward. Wouldn’t you give her that advice if you were her aide?

PAT: Well, I certainly would. I would give everybody the advice to tone down the rhetoric and get away from military and the armed metaphors and things that a lot of us have used in campaigns, especially at a time like this. You know, I sure would Joe.

Watch it:

Still, there is danger of overcorrecting. Rep. Robert Brady (D-PA) has said he will introduce a bill that would make it a federal crime to use rhetoric or symbols — such as Palin’s infamous gun sights — that could be perceived as a threat to a member of Congress. While Brady’s intentions are laudable, as legal blogger Jonathan Turley notes, Brady’s legislation is “short-sighted” and would likely infringe on First Amendment rights. Brady’s efforts might be better directed as a Congressional resolution expressing strong disapproval of violent political speech and symbols, but stopping short of criminalizing such speech. (HT: GOP 12).

– PAT BUCHANAN: “Barton made a very courageous statement in my judgment. … To have anyone stand up and even indirectly defend [BP] and say that they were a victim of a shakedown shows some political courage.”

– INGRAHAM: “I think Joe Barton, before he apologized, had a legitimate point.”

– NAPOLITANO: “That is a classic shakedown. The threat to do something that you don’t have the authority to do. ”

– KILMEADE: “One Congressman calling the BP compsensation fund a ‘shakedown,’ but does he have a point?”

– GINGRICH: “The president is directly engaged in extorting money from a company.”

– VARNEY: “It is Hugo Chavez-like, is it not? To sieze a private company’s assets.”

Watch a compilation of conservative pundit Pat Buchanan, Fox News analyst Laura Ingraham, Fox News Business host Andrew Napolitano, Fox and Friends host Brian Kilmeade, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Fox News Business host Stuart Varney, and right-wing radio host Mark Levin:

Levin went on to say that GOP leadership’s treatment of the Barton incident made him fear the “Republican party in the House will not have the courage to do what needs to be done should it win the majority in November” to resist the “increasingly tyrannical administration.”

I think we’d have a big shortage of workers out there and I think as we move through this decade, we’re going to see people retiring from different types of jobs…so who is going to help fill those positions?

You would probably see towns shutting down, communities shutting down. You’d see second and third industries being affected – restaurant industries, service sectors industries where immigrants tend to work and be found. It would also impact the current ability to put food on your table because if you don’t have a certain number of people out there doing jobs that others wouldn’t want to do, then how are we going to provide the sustenance we need for all our American families?

Watch it:

What Buchanan, Goode, and all the others advocating an immigration moratorium fail to note is that, because of the recession, both legal and undocumented immigration are at record lows. And while it’s true that many immigrants work side-by-side American workers, that doesn’t serve as credible evidence that there is a significant number of American workers who have pursued those jobs and lost a job opportunity to an immigrant. In fact, the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), has found that “despite the controversy it generates, illegal immigration has no significant impact on the overall U.S. economy.” MPI has also pointed out that, as of November 2009, immigrants are facing higher unemployment rates than American-born workers due to the fact that they are more likely to work in sectors that rise and fall with the business cycle.

As Solis points out, immigration policies should also take into account the future needs of an aging population. University of Southern California professor Dowell Myers recently pointed out that “as baby boomers become seniors, immigrants can fill the roles vacated by boomers shifting modes within the economy.” If the U.S. cuts future immigration, it could be in for a rude awakening when the recession is finally over. In an event at the Center for American Progress yesterday, Solis and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said today that comprehensive immigration reform would do a better job of strengthening the U.S. economy by improving pay, benefits, and working condition for all workers, along with adding billions of new tax dollars to the nation’s coffers.

Unemployment probably isn’t Goode and Buchanan’s only concern. In 2006, Buchanan called for an immigration moratorium to preserve the dominance of the white race in America. “If we do not get control of our borders, by 2050 Americans of European descent will be a minority in the nation their ancestors created and built,” wrote Buchanan. That same year, Goode also warned that “we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States.”

Pat Sees White People (wikimedia)

A provocative article by Pat Buchanan argues that contrary to conventional wisdom, Republicans shouldn’t worry about alienating Hispanic voters, they should just focus on getting white people to like them more:

In 2008, Hispanics, according to the latest figures, were 7.4 percent of the total vote. White folks were 74 percent, 10 times as large. Adding just 1 percent to the white vote is thus the same as adding 10 percent to the candidate’s Hispanic vote.

If John McCain, instead of getting 55 percent of the white vote, got the 58 percent George W. Bush got in 2004, that would have had the same impact as lifting his share of the Hispanic vote from 32 percent to 62 percent.

And he sees race-baiting attacks as the way to do it:

Had McCain been willing to drape Jeremiah Wright around the neck of Barack Obama, as Lee Atwater draped Willie Horton around the neck of Michael Dukakis, the mainstream media might have howled.

And McCain might be president.

His specific argument about Sonia Sotomayor is that Republicans need to get more explicit about the idea that, as a Latina, she will make rulings that disadvantage white people and that white America ought therefore band together to stop her. This is already the subtext of their arguments but I guess he feels it’s not close enough to the surface.

At any rate, while Buchanan is being repugnant, I do think this is something conservatives are going to want to think about. Consider the case of Jeff Sessions (R-AL). We’re talking about a guy who’s too racist to get confirmed as a judge, but just racist enough to win a Senate seat in Alabama. And it’s not because Alabama is a lilly white state. With 65 percent of its electorate white, and 29 percent of its electorate African-American, Alabama is much more demographically favorable to the Democrats than is the country at large. But while McCain pulled 55 percent of the white vote nationwide he scored 88 percent of white vote in Alabama. And this is what you tend to see in the Deep South, white Americans exhibiting the kind of high levels of racial solidarity in voting behavior that you normally associate with African-Americans in the US political context.

Consequently states with small white populations like Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi can be solid GOP territory. Under the circumstances, it’s not entirely crazy for Republicans to believe that the right way to respond to shifting American demographics is by just trying to amp-up the level of racial anxiety in the shrinking white majority. An analogy might be to religion. When the country was overwhelmingly Christian, Christianity didn’t play much of a role in our politics. But as the Christian majority shrank it became more and more viable to explicitly mobilize Christian identity for political purposes.

BUCHANAN: “Well, first, with regard to Levi, I think First Dude up there in Alaska, Todd Palin, ought to take Levi down to the creek and hold his head underwater until the thrashing stops.“

Time’s Mark Halperin then quipped: “That’s a reality show, right there.” The macabre humor was dark enough that MSNBC felt the need to follow-up with a disclaimer from Mika Brzezinski: “Just to clarify Pat’s incredible statement about Levi: Morning Joe does not advocate any violence against Levi Johnston, nor anyone else related to the Palin story.” Watch it:

Johnston, the 19-year-old father of Palin’s grandson, said in an interview this morning on NBC’s Today Show that he probably wouldn’t vote for Palin if she ran for president. (HT: Media Matters)

One salient feature of the event was the banner hanging over the English-only advocates. The word conference was spelled “Conferenece.” View it here:

The panelists pressed on with their anti-bilingualism diatribe without noting the irony of the obvious misspelling on the banner:

PAT BUCHANAN: Judge Sotomayor is up there at school in New York, she gets a scholarship to Princeton, she’s graduated with all these big honors and awards they said she never won. What’s she doing there in the summer? They said her adviser told her to read children’s classics so she can learn English better. How do you graduate number one in Princeton if you’re in the summer and you’re reading Rumpelstiltskin and Snow White? [laughter] [...]

PETER BRIMELOW: I really do recommend the language issue because you know that polls better than immigration and affirmative action. Eighty-five percent of Americans say they would favor official language policy. The wonderful thing about this issue if you look at what’s going to actually happen here is you’re going to find that the Obama administration is going to gradually institute institutional bilingualism in the country. It’s going to be required to speak Spanish in key positions, the police force and so on. This is a direct attack on the American working class because they are not going to be bilingual.

ThinkProgress attended the event and obtained audio of the panel. Listen here:

Mocking Sotomayor’s struggle to learn English has become a habit for Buchanan. On CSPAN a few weeks ago, Buchanan tried to undermine Sotomayor’s qualifications by saying she had read Pinocchio as a part of her “college work.” Buchanan was referencing a New York Times article, which talked about how hard Sotomayor had to work to graduate at the top of her class from Princeton. The article stated that she “spent summers reading children’s classics she had missed in a Spanish-speaking home and ‘re-teaching’ herself to write ‘proper English’ by reading elementary grammar books.” Sotomayor never read children’s books as part of her “college work” and the books consisted of classics such as “Huckleberry Finn” and “Pride and Prejudice” — not Snow White, as Buchanan contends.

Peter Brimelow, one of the panelists to the event, is the editor of Vdare.com. He has written extensively against immigration and has long advocated that the GOP must “appeal to its base: white Americans.” Brimelow has defended accusations that he writes and publishes white supremacist material by declaring his content to be merely “white nationalist.”

Thus, Sotomayor got into Princeton, got her No. 1 ranking, was whisked into Yale Law School and made editor of the Yale Law Review — all because she was a Hispanic woman. And those two Ivy League institutions cheated more deserving students of what they had worked a lifetime to achieve, for reasons of race, gender or ethnicity.
This is bigotry pure and simple. To salve their consciences for past societal sins, the Ivy League is deep into discrimination again, this time with white males as victims rather than as beneficiaries.

One prefers the old bigotry. At least it was honest, and not, as Abraham Lincoln observed, adulterated “with the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

This is the newest in a series of racist comments made by Buchanan since Sotomayor’s nomination. He has told senators to oppose Sotomayor’s nomination and “stand up for the white working class.” He even went so far as to assert that, because of affirmative action, “what is happening now to white men right now is exactly what was done to black folks for years.”

– Claire Teitelman

Peter Brimelow, editor of VDARE.com, has written numerous tracts railing against immigration. He has said that the Republican party must “appeal to its base: white Americans,” and noted that John McCain “easily carried the white a.k.a. American vote.” Hitting back at critics of his website, he defended the site’s “white nationalist” writers:

We also publish on VDARE.COM a few writers…whom I would regard as “white nationalist,” in the sense that they aim to defend the interests of American whites. … Get used to it. As immigration policy drives whites into a minority, this type of interest-group “white nationalism” will inexorably increase.

Other writers on the site are even more outspoken in their racism, particularly Steve Sailor:

[W]hat if there is disparate impact for a good reason that is unmentionable: that blacks, on average, aren’t as smart as whites? We are supposed to constantly act as if the racial gaps seen on the New Haven firefighters’ written test were surprising when they are exactly the same as those seen on, say, graduate and professional school exams. [LINK]

In other words, what Obama hasn’t figured out yet…is that Better Teachers means Whiter Teachers. [LINK]

It’s no surprise that Buchanan would invite such a hatemonger to his conference. Buchanan himself has appeared at least twice on a neo-Nazi radio show; one appearance was streamed live on Stormfront, one of the most prominent white supremacist online forums. More recently, Buchanan has led the far-right attack against Sonia Sotomayor and in supposed defense of white men, going to far as to claim that “what is happening now to white men right now is exactly what was done to black folks for years.”

As Media Matters’ Jamison Foser asked, what exactly would Pat Buchanan have to say or do to get himself fired from MSNBC?

As I think everyone knows, Pat Buchanan became pretty estranged from mainstream conservatism over the past few years. On the one hand, the conservative mainstream spent some time trying to distance itself from its historical embrace of white pride politics. On the other hand, Buchanan doesn’t really share conventional conservative views about Iraq, Iran, or Israel. But with the Sonia Sotomayor nomination, there’s been a real Pat Buchanan renaissance where he’s everywhere, loud and proud, standing up for the white man. And as Eric Alterman and Danielle Ivory point out, everything’s coming up racialism these days on the right:

For once, Foxnation.com got it right. “Dems Now Get Taste of Being Called ‘Racist,’” said a screaming headline, and there’s no denying it was true. How else to characterize a story in which ex-Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo and radio host Rush Limbaugh compared Sonia Sotomayor’s opinions on race to those of the Ku Klux Klan.

David Duke found this to be a bit much. After all, he wrote, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, while Hispanic, was actually part and parcel of a Jewish conspiracy. Subsequently, Tancredo was asked if he wished to reconsider his KKK analogy. Alas, he declined. He also mentioned that he wasn’t sure if the Obama administration hated white people.

I was going to say something about the political consequences of all this, but actually Obama’s approval rating is frighteningly stable which reminds me that probably normal people are paying no attention and are basically unfazed by all of this.

Buchanan’s attack echoes a claim by the conservative Washington Times that “[t]here is growing evidence that Judge Sotomayor believes some races are more equal than others,” in part because Sotomayor voted to allow a challenge to New York’s felony disenfranchisement law to move forward:

In Hayden v. Pataki, a number of inmates in New York state filed suit claiming that because blacks and Latinos make up a disproportionate share of the prison population, the state’s refusal to allow them ballot access amounts to an unlawful, race-based denial of their right to vote. [...]

Yet, operating on a dubious and extremely broad reading of the Voting Rights Act, Ms. Sotomayor dissented from the decision. In a remarkably dismissive, four-paragraph opinion, she alleged that the “plain terms” of the Voting Rights Act would allow such race-based claims to go forward.

These attacks misrepresent Sotomayor’s decision. First of all, Sotomayor did not “tr[y] to overturn” anything. The majority in Hayden voted to toss several inmates out of court before they could be given a trial to determine whether New York engages in race discrimination. Judge Sotomayor’s dissent—and the 20 page dissent by Judge Parker which Sotomayor joined—said nothing about whether New York violated the Voting Rights Act; the dissents merely argued that the inmates should be given the opportunity to prove their discrimination claims at trial.

More importantly, Judge Sotomayor based her dissent, not on the notion that “some races are more equal than others,” but instead on the radical notion that judges should follow the law as it is written.

The plaintiffs in Hayden claimed that New York systematically discriminates against people of color by incarcerating them at higher rates than white New Yorkers. Although only 31% of New Yorkers are racial minorities, the plaintiffs claimed that 86% of the prison population are non-white. Moreover, the Voting Rights Act provides that no state may impose any voting restriction which sorts its citizens by race:

No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision in a manner which results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color . . . .

In a case called Chisom v. Roemer, the Supreme Court held that a state law violates the Voting Rights Act even if it unintentionally causes people to lose their right to vote on account their skin color. So if New York actually does systematically disenfranchise minorities by overincarcerating them, the Voting Rights Act forbids New York from continuing this practice.

Nevertheless, a majority of the court held that felony disenfranchisement laws are immune to scrutiny under the Act. Essentially, the court said that Congress did not really mean it when it enacted a law providing that “no voting qualification” may discriminate.

This is why Sotomayor dissented from the majority’s decision. As she explained in dissent, “[t]he duty of a judge is to follow the law, not to question its plain terms. I do not believe that Congress wishes us to disregard the plain language of any statute or to invent exceptions to the statutes it has created.” This textualist approach to the law is exactly the same approach advocated by conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Judge Sotomayor did nothing more than insist that judges cannot second-guess Congress—by its express terms, the Voting Rights Act applies to felony disenfranchisement laws. Perhaps this explains why 19 state governors, including conservatives like Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and then-Texas Governor George W. Bush “have either restored voting rights to people in the criminal justice system or eased the restoration process.”