OH, AND BY THE WAY, LIBERTARIANS CAN BITE ME, TOO

The New York Times gets the libertarian take on today's odious Votiong Rights Act decision:

Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute and editor in chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. He filed an amicus brief supporting Shelby County's challenge to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

Q. How would you summarize the decision in a single sentence?

A. The Supreme Court restored a measure of constitutional order by recognizing that the exceptional conditions that justified the extra-constitutional federal oversight of state election laws no longer exist, thankfully.

... Q. How will the ruling affect elections and voting? How will it affect minority turnout and representation?

A. It won't affect elections much other than that the time and money previously spent by local, state and federal officials on Section 5 compliance will now be freed up for constructive purposes....

Q. What's next for the Voting Rights Act?

A. Resources will be shifted to enforcing Section 2, which covers individual instances of racial discrimination in voting.

More from Ilya Shapiro at theCato at Liberty blog:

Of course, the Court really should've gone further, as Justice Thomas pointed out in a concurring opinion. The Court's explanation of Section 4's anachronism applies equally to Section 5. In practice, however, Congress will be hard-pressed to enact any new coverage formula because the pervasive, systemic discrimination in voting that justified such an exceptional intrusion into the normal constitutional order is now gone.

And that's a good thing. Today's ruling underlines, belatedly, that Jim Crow is dead.

So, to sum up the libertarian position: there's no racism anymore, eviscerating the VRA "restored a measure of constitutional order," no one is going to lose any voting rights, enforcement of the VRA cost too darn much, and now all that money will be spent rooting out real voting injustices, -- which, it should be noted, don't actually exist, or, y'know, not really. Oh, and yay Clarence Thomas.

Hemp! Hemp! Hemp!