After the Supreme Court struck down a critical provision of the Voting Rights Act this morning, several prominent conservative groups and writers tap-danced on the historic civil rights legislation’s grave.
Writing at National Review, a magazine that defended segregation and has more recently published pieces by white nationalists and “race realists,” John Fund suggested that “The Supreme Court’s decision today to overturn a small part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is actually a victory for civil rights.”
“As the court noted,” Fund continued, “what made sense both in moral and practical terms almost a half century ago has to be approached anew.” What Fund calls a “small” portion of the VRA, the “preclearance” power the Court severely limited, represented the sole stumbling block preventing several racially discriminatory laws from going into effect.
True the Vote, a conservative group that pushed for precisely these laws, also celebrated the Court’s ruling. “This is without doubt a step in the right direction for our Republic,” Catherine Engelbrecht, the group’s Vice-President, said. True the Vote has been instrumental in helping spread voter ID laws around the country, several of which have been preempted by the Section 5 powers the Court neutered today.
Erick Erickson, the Editor-in-Chief of RedState and a Fox News contributor, tweeted “YES! Pre-clearance unconstitutional.” While technically inaccurate — the Court did not rule that the Justice Department’s Section 5 power to prevent the implementation of racially discriminatory voting laws was unconstitutional, only that that the Section 4 formula for determining what jurisdictions were covered under Section 5 was — Erickson’s victory dance was right in effect, as the only path to restoring Section 5 is a highly unlikely Congressional rewrite of the Section 4 formula.
Yesterday, Erickson tweeted “Sitting at the dinner table. Realize its Paula Deen branded furniture. Quite nice. Seats ten.” Deen is currently under fire for using the word “nigger” and dreaming about a “southern plantation-style wedding” with black servers and white guests; National Review’s VRA piece had a banner link at the top to a piece titled “In Defense of Paula Deen.”