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" (Optional Video Accompaniment To This Post) I&amp;#039;d like to thank the folks at the National Journal for giving me the best belly-laugh of a fine morning. They&amp;#039;ve produced a story about the terrible dilemma in which the congressional Republicans will find themselves if, as expected, the Supreme Court guts the enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act and tosses the whole thing back to Congress to reboot the law. And, I am sorry, but there has not been a funnier paragraph of political analysis than this one written in English anywhere on the planet this century. It&amp;#039;s particularly heavy baggage for Republicans. While Democrats and civil rights groups stand largely united behind the broadest interpretations of the Voting Rights Act, for Republicans it&amp;#039;s a trickier matter. On one hand, they are eager to reach out to minority voters. They eagerly tout their charismatic, high-profile minority officeholders like Sens. Tim Scott or South Carolina and Ted Cruz of Texas, Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana. If Congressional Republicans seem unwilling to rebuild the Voting Rights Act should the court curtail it, they risk being seen as indifferent or even hostile to minorities. On the other hand, the party&amp;#039;s Tea Party wing is likely to revolt if the Republican House they elected tries to re-establish what many see as a federal overreach. Already, Cruz has offered an amendment to address the Supreme Court&amp;#039;s decision in an Arizona voting rights case earlier this week that struck down a proof-of-citizenship requirement.  No. Stop. Seriously. You&amp;#039;re killing me. And you keep using this word, &amp;quot;eager.&amp;quot; I do not think it means what you think it means. The Republican party wants to appear to be reaching out to minority voters without actually having to change its nature in order to do so. (Ted Cruz, by the way, is already proposing amendments that would reinstate the Arizona voter-ID law that the court struck down earlier this week. Outreach!) is now run by the elements of the conservative movement empowered by the party&amp;#039;s adoption into itself in the mid-1960&amp;#039;s of the remnants of the American apartheid state.This has not changed. The VRA is in peril at all because Republicans out in the states want the enforcement provisions gutted so that they can enact even more voter-suppression laws than they have already. (And does anybody seriously believe that the national party isn&amp;#039;t behind this phenomenon? Not me.) Nikki Haley&amp;#039;s not going to get in the way of this, nor is &amp;quot;Bobby&amp;quot; Jindal. Tim Scott at least will get to vote on whatever comes up in the Congress to remedy an adverse decision by the Court, which won&amp;#039;t be much, and probably won&amp;#039;t pass anyway. (And Scott will front for the effort, thereby ascending to the J.C. Watts Memorial Chair Of Imminent Irrelevance.) The obvious remedy, which even came up during the oral arguments before the Court, is to extend Section V, the enforcement provision requiring pre-clearance of any changes in local voting regulations in several Southern states, to cover the entire country. Good luck with that one. The Court is going to gut the law, and kick this back to Congress, which is going to do nothing -- or, at least, nothing good. Republicans are going to line up, probably unanimously, in favor of doing nothing. But thanks to the National Journal for lightening up my morning. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a18834/republicans-voting-rights-act-dilemma-062013/?src=rss>