Neo-Dixiecrat Push to Scrap Section 5

This is the key paragraph from Adam Liptak's story today about Wednesday's arguments on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 before the Supreme Court:

Should the court strike down the law’s central provision, it would be easier for lawmakers in the nine states [now covered by a federal preclearance requirement] to enact the kind of laws Republicans in several states have recently advocated, including tighter identification standards. It would also give those states more flexibility to move polling places and redraw legislative districts.

The conservative justices indicated by their questions that they were in favor of scrapping Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The problem that they're grappling with is how to turn a neo-Dixiecrat GOP into a majority party. Their first bold move was the fast-tracked Citizens United ruling equating money with speech. Conservatives were frightened by the amount of money Obama raised in small amounts online during the 2008 campaign. But the Super PACs, which resulted from Citizens United, spectacularly underperformed for the neo-Dixiecrat GOP in 2012. Large swaths of the citizenry are immune to attack ads. Certain kinds of people have to be kept from voting. There are various ways to do this -- identification requirements, moving polling locations and limiting their hours of operation -- which were tried by Republican-controlled states. But the Department of Justice intervened in those states covered by Section 5 and told them to stop. This from today's unsigned editorial in the New York Times, Congress’s Power to Protect the Vote:

Congress found that, in general, the problems of voting discrimination were much worse in the covered areas than elsewhere in the United States. A recent study by Morgan Kousser of the California Institute of Technology confirms that: “five-sixths or more of the cases of proven election discrimination from 1957 through 2013 have taken place in jurisdictions subject to Section 5 oversight.” The Justice Department used Section 5 last year to block and change discriminatory voter ID laws in Texas and South Carolina, for example, and to block a discriminatory Florida law that limited early voting.

If the conservative majority votes in a bloc to strike down Section 5 it would do so on the basis that the formula used to determine covered jurisdictions is out of date. Congress would be tasked with updating the formula. This, as Liptak points out, will not happen; hence, a de facto ban:

Should the court strike down the coverage formula when it decides the case, Shelby County v. Holder, No. 12-96, Congress would be free to take a fresh look at what jurisdictions should be covered. But Congress seems unlikely to be able to agree on a new set of criteria, given the current partisan divide, meaning the part of the law requiring federal pre-approval of election changes would effectively disappear.

This is Republican road map for neo-Dixiecrat domination: massive amounts of corporate cash, a gerrymandered permanent majority in Congress and restrictive voting laws.