The Great Debate

This is part of the Reuters series on the future of the Voting Rights Act’s Section 5, which the Supreme Court may strike down this year. You can read other pieces in the series here.

We celebrated Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday last week in the shadow of a fight over the constitutionality of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court will soon hear arguments in Shelby County v. Holder, raising the question whether Section 5 of the act, which requires that states and localities with a history of racial discrimination in voting get permission from the federal government before making any changes in election procedures, is now unconstitutional. The smart money is on the court striking down the law as an improper exercise of congressional power, although Justice Anthony Kennedy or another justice could still surprise.

If the court strikes Section 5, the big question is: What comes next? Reuters has invited a number of leading academics, who focus on voting rights and election law, to contribute to a forum on this question. In this introductory piece, I sketch out what may happen and what’s at stake.

One possibility is that nothing happens after Section 5 falls and minority voters in covered jurisdictions lose their important bargaining chip. Then, expect to see more brazen partisan gerrymanders, cutbacks in early voting and imposition of tougher voting and registration rules in the formerly covered jurisdictions.

The fight over these rules will be mostly political, not legal. I do not expect many successful constitutional cases or cases under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act – a different provision which applies nationwide but is harder for plaintiffs to win.

The first months of President Barack Obama’s second term promise to be full of big political fights on issues ranging from comprehensive immigration reform to the problem of gun violence to addressing America’s fiscal woes. Last week’s decision on recess appointments by three Republican-appointed judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, however, proves there’s another battle worth waging: over the confirmation of judges to that court.

In invalidating Obama’s recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the three-judge panel issued a troubling decision. And one that should spark a response. For it shows us, yet again, that it matters who sits on our courts.

First, this decision flies in the face of 150 years of practice by presidents of both parties. It represents the judicial overreach that Republican politicians usually decry. There were a total of 260 intra-session recess appointments made between 1867 and 2000, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. President George W. Bush made 141 intra-session recess appointments, and Obama has now made a total of 26.

Syria, chemical weapons and the United States. If nothing else, President Barack Obama last month was emphatic. “I want to make it absolutely clear to Assad,” Obama declared at the National Defense University in early December, “….The world is watching. The use of chemical weapons is…totally unacceptable….[T]here will be consequences and you will be held accountable.”

But what a difference a New Year makes. At a January 10 news conference, the administration’s senior security officials, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff head Martin E. Dempsey, recoiled: Consequences won’t involve the Pentagon. Better wait to secure the arsenal after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad falls, Panetta said. Dempsey stated: “Preventing the use of chemical weapons would be almost unachievable.” The result, as Panetta explained: “We’re not working on options that involve boots on the ground.”

Assad must have smiled. Washington had gone wobbly on chemical weapons. With the deterrent value of the president’s remarks in question – and one unconfirmed report that Syria used a chemical agent in Homs on December 23 – the chemical specter remains. This raises the key question: Would Obama really stand by if the Syrian government gassed thousands of its citizens?

Heeding the Obama administration’s call for immigration reform, a bipartisan group of eight senators Monday released a proposal they plan to introduce as legislation. They wisely included legalization for current undocumented immigrants, but their plan will likely come up short on a guest-worker program for legal migrant workers.

While legalization is a good step, lack of a comprehensive guest-worker program only perpetuates the problem many immigration critics cite as their biggest concern: unauthorized immigration. Yet guest-worker measures have worked in this country before, so it is pure politics, rather than substance, that prevents officials from crafting one now.

Unauthorized immigrants who are not violent or criminals should indeed be legalized. They came here for economic security, and many are on their way to achieving it. So many of their offspring, the so-called “DREAMers,” who were brought here as children, know nothing but the United States and speak only English. They are Americans in all the ways that count — except a law that now says they aren’t. It’s time for the law to accept them.

As the Oscars approach, two of the most ambitious and remarkable Best Picture nominees — Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty — are reeling from criticisms that they are historically inaccurate. Though both are fiction, audiences, critics, commentators, scholars and even politicians are troubled that the movies don’t meet the standards of documentary or reported journalism.

The role of great works of drama, however, is to compress a larger national narrative into a clear dramatic arc. The facts are transformed, and a single event or character becomes the vehicle by which a larger truth is revealed.

The history presented in each film is about the achievement of a long-fought, hard-won goal. In Lincoln, it is the fight to pass the 13th Amendment, ending slavery; in Zero Dark Thirty, it is the killing of Osama bin Laden.

In 2005, Nicholas Negroponte announced an audacious goal: He was going to put a laptop in the hands of every child in developing countries. With his “One Laptop Per Child” project, the futurist and marquee Wired magazine columnist was looking to close the widening gap between the world’s haves and have-nots. His underlying premise: In the computer age, there should be none of the latter, because the PC was the ultimate equalizer.

OLPC was greeted with great acclaim among the Internet’s 1 percent, many of who were highly motivated to empower the other 99. It was backed by a host of blue-ribbon tech companies and got the perfect coming-out party at the 2006 World Economic Forum in Davos, where the UN Development Program announced it too would support the project. OLPC’s machine, the XO, was tailor-made for the developing world: It had a hard plastic shell to survive outdoors, where it would see a lot of use, and a screen that could be read in direct sunlight. It used 1/10th the power of contemporary laptops and could be recharged with solar energy. And at $200, it was incredibly cheap by laptop standards back then.

Seven years later, OLPC is still grinding away—by the end of 2011 it had given away 2.4 million XO laptops—but to say that the program hasn’t changed the world would be a kind understatement. The irony is that Negroponte’s project didn’t fail because the world was resistant to change. It failed because the world changed too quickly. OLPC was a well-intentioned moon shot that fell short because it solved a hardware problem that all but evaporated. The seemingly quixotic XO had only a two-year head start on the greatest leap forward in mobile computing, the iPhone.

Lance Armstrong’s world-class abilities – as an athlete, manipulator, liar, and bi-pedal pharmacological wonder – are well-documented. What shouldn’t be overlooked, though, is that Armstrong also excelled at capturing his regulators, the same way banks and other industries capture theirs. His undetected doping fueled success, and Armstrong deployed that success better than anyone in the sport as a tool to continue doping.

At his peak, Armstrong was the biggest star in cycling, and a bigger star than any cyclist before him. He needed cycling, but cycling officials and race organizers, not to mention sponsors and manufacturers, needed him too. Here’s his former teammate Frankie Andreu:

He owned the cycling industry. Whatever he said, happened. He had a ton of money and money can buy a lot of things that other people can’t get. He knew who did what, because he was the ringleader.

President Barack Obama emphasized the need to modernize the U.S. election system in his Inaugural Address. One bill to do just that is set to be introduced Wednesday by the civil rights hero Representative John Lewis (D-Ga.) — who knows a thing or two about how to expand democracy.

Under his reform plan, states would have to take responsibility to make sure that every eligible voter is on the rolls. How? By taking existing computerized voter rolls, and expanding them with names voluntarily collected when citizens deal with government — including the Department of Motor Vehicles for drivers’ licenses, the Social Security Administration or other agencies. Any voter could opt in with the click of a mouse.

The proposed bill would bring our antiquated system into the 21st century. The  “Voter Empowerment Act,” introduced by Lewis with Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), could transform the way we choose our leaders.

In the welter of comment on President Obama's second term, one remarkable feature seems to have slipped under the radar. This has been a presidency blessedly free of scandal. When last did the White House remain more or less scandal-free for as long as four years? His predecessor, George W., had the average scandal quotient (Halliburton contracts, the Abramoff affair among others). Before him, there was Clinton, who seemed to clock up a scandal a week – we all remember the sex, but there was also Whitewater, which involved money, allegations of graft and ultimately suicide. Under Bush Senior and Reagan we had the Iran contra affair. As for Nixon, the less said the better. Even the saintly Jimmy Carter had a problem brother and some rather loose cannons among the pals he shipped in from Georgia to staff his administration.

What makes Obama's record all the more remarkable is that he emerged from the mire of the Chicago Democratic Party, a bye-word for corruption for decades past, and in fact the Governor of Illinois was accused of trying to "sell" the new President's abandoned senate seat only a few weeks after the election. Moreover, you can be quite sure that this administration's many enemies will have subjected its dealings to the most microscopic scrutiny in search of even the tiniest flaws, misjudgements and personal peccadilloes. It is truly amazing that they have found so few.

All in all, Barack Obama seems to be a man of outstanding integrity, decency and intellect, a truly uplifting speaker and an inspiring leader.

A victory in Tuesday’s Israeli elections by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Yisrael Beiteinu alliance and the ascent of even more extreme parties are indications of Israelis’ continued move to the right.

It is also an indication of the limits and the challenges faced by the Obama administration in its relationship with Israel. Despite Netanyahu’s obvious preference for President Barack Obama’s Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, in the U.S. presidential elections — and a sense that he was intervening through proxies — Obama’s ability to influence the outcome of the Israeli elections has been negligible.

The Obama administration’s situation underscores the need for a quick decision about its policy toward whatever type of governing coalition emerges in Israel after the election. If Netanyahu forges a government with parties to his right, the White House should drop the pretense of possible peace negotiations and formulate policy accordingly: It can either produce a detailed peace plan or fall back on highlighting international law and human rights and the obligations of the parties that they entail.