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Volume 60, Issue 7
High court shows skepticism Mark Sherman
The Associated Press WASHINGTON — The U.S. 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 U.S. history had run their course. “Times change,” Kennedy said during the fast-paced, 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
Evan Vucci/AP Photo Debo Adegbile, special counsel, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, speaks with reporters outside the Supreme Court in Washington, Wednesday, after arguments in the Shelby County, Ala., v. Holder voting rights case. The justices are hearing arguments in a challenge to the part of the Voting Rights Act that forces places with a history of discrimination, mainly in the Deep South, to get approval before they make any change in the way elections are held. 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 U.S Constitution’s Fifteenth Amendment guarantee of the vote for black Americans. 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.
See Voter Rights page 3
First lady highlights obesity progress in Miss. Darlene Superville The Associated Press
CLINTON, Miss. — Michelle Obama on Wednesday congratulated this Southern state for a more than 13 percent drop in its child obesity rates and said its example should inspire the rest of the country. It’s the reason the first lady made Mississippi the first stop on a two-day tour to promote her signature effort, the antichildhood obesity campaign she launched three years ago called “Let’s Move.” In remarks at an elementary school near Jackson, Mrs. Obama cited new research showing that
childhood obesity rates among elementary school pupils in the state had declined by more than 13 percent between 2005 and 2011. “What’s happening here in Mississippi is really what ‘Let’s Move’ is all about,” she told an audience of state officials, school nutrition professionals and parents. She urged them to keep on doing what they’ve been doing. “It’s the story of what you all have achieved here that we want to tell. It’s the story we want to be telling in every state all across this country,” the first lady said. When she visited Mississippi three years ago, she said, it had
just been declared the most obese state in the nation. Mrs. Obama attributed the decline in childhood obesity rates here to efforts by state lawmakers, the Board of Education and individual school districts, which she said took such steps as setting new standards for food and drinks in school vending machines, serving more fruits, vegetables and whole grains, and replacing food fryers with steamers, to which she exclaimed, “Hallelujah.” Some churches even declared “no-fry” zones for their congregations, where only healthy food and nothing fried was allowed.
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“So there’s no reason why this success can’t happen in cities and states all across the country — if we’re willing to work for it,” Mrs. Obama said. “So now is the time for us to truly double down on these efforts. We know what works. We’re seeing it right here. We know how to get results. Now we just need to keep stepping up.” The first lady said Mississippi, and other parts of the country that also have seen their childhood obesity rates come down — including California and New York City and Philadelphia — are showing others what works.
See Talking Obesity page 3