The Ridiculous Twelfth North Carolina Congressional District and the Defense of the Voting Rights Act of 1965

This is the first illustration of why the passing of Justice Scalia (bless his soul!) is big, especially for Chief Justice Roberts, who, apparently, maintains a principled opposition (if not a personal animus!) to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as thoroughly demonstrated in the Shelby County case.  Sadly, the Chief Justice can no longer muster a majority to run around invalidating the substance of Constitutional protection to the suffrage rights of minorities.  Instead, he has to rely on the honor of lower federal courts to respect his broader vision of a democratic system that will allow state legislatures carte blanche in determining how legislative districts will be constructed to reflect the democratic will of the electorate, on the principle of one person, one vote, with absolute racial and ethnic neutrality.  In this case, a district court judge in North Carolina failed to respect his wishes, invalidating a geographically attenuated Congressional district as an impermissible case of racial gerrymandering, crowding in African-American votes in order to ensure a Republican majority in the state's Congressional delegation.  There will be no Supreme Court injunction invalidating the demand that North Carolina redraw its Congressional district mappings to fairly incorporate racial population distributions without regard to the broader strategic objectives of the state's Republican Party.  In conjunction with a range of other issues (e.g. voter identification procedures) addressing "voter fraud," guaranteed to challenge the suffrage rights of a wide range of emerging populations based on race and income, North Carolina deserved excessive scrutiny from the federal courts, and without Justice Scalia's conservative intervention, existing precedents on voting rights, challenging the actions of the North Carolina legislature will, invariably, stand.  I will not, in this respect, state that I was happy to greet Justice Scalia's passing - he was a proud and principled standard bearer of the conservative stance within the Supreme Court.  On the other hand, I am glad that his passing will ensure that voting rights, which I consider most highly as a fundamental right of human beings in community above every other freedom, get maximum protection at the highest levels of the federal judiciary.