Is this a winning issue for Obama? And can he really make a difference?Īs we’ve seen from Obama’s belated but ultimately productive stand on same-sex marriage, his leadership can make a difference. President Obama has been criticized for falling well short on his environmental promises. On Tuesday, he announced he would use executive orders and the EPA to sidestep Congress and address climate change. Outraged Hispanic and Asian voters may well join black voters in both political activism and stepped-up Election Day turnout to counter a lily-white party’s last-ditch efforts to use anti-democratic stunts to thwart the tidal wave of demographic change that threatens it. Now that the Court has given state and local jurisdictions a green light to pursue even more egregious voter-suppression efforts, it has also given the right a gun with which to shoot itself. Why? Because the GOP was engaged in a nationwide voter-suppression effort last year, and outraged black voters were highly motivated to vote no matter how long the lines or other hoops they had to jump through. As Chief Justice Roberts himself wrote in yesterday’s decision, in the 2012 election, “African-American voter turnout exceeded white voter turnout in five of the six states originally covered” by the law. law, blocked by a federal court last year, will now go immediately into effect, potentially disenfranchising 800,000 voters, according to the best-versed analyst on voting-rights issues, Ari Berman of The Nation. But the long-term effect of the Court’s action, largely because of its political fallout, could be an anti-Republican backlash at the polls. To take just one example: The Texas voter photo- I.D. In the short - even the immediate - term, it is a real setback. So how big a setback is yesterday’s Court decision - the striking down of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act - for civil rights in this country? And how will it play out politically? It turns out that John Roberts’s famous laissez-faire mantra about racial animus also sums up his views about homophobia: “The way to end discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” This will be his epitaph, and not in a good way.
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The Roberts Court continues doing everything it can to permit the abridgment of the rights of minorities even as it strengthens the rights of corporations. I had thought Roberts might be movable, too, if only because he seems to care about being on the right side of history (e.g., his Obamacare decision), but I was wrong. But let us not forget that were it not for the expected swing vote of Anthony Kennedy, the court’s conservative contingent would have upheld DOMA.
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Though most Republicans and most Republican politicians still oppose gay marriage (among other gay rights), the conservative commentators Doug Mataconis and Josh Barro both noted last week that the right has increasingly grown silent on the issue everyone knows it’s a loser for the GOP if it wants voters under Social Security age. The narrow Prop 8 decision was largely viewed as inevitable, but the resumption of same-sex marriage in California, the biggest state, will have a snowball effect elsewhere, politically and with time legally, and I have little doubt that marriage will continue on a generally fast track as a national proposition. President Obama’s legal decision to halt the Justice Department’s defense of DOMA will prove an important historical marker for him and the country. The DOMA decision is momentous, broad, and moving, sending to a just oblivion one of the most bigoted laws in the country’s history, one that Bill Clinton never should have signed in the first place.
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How important are these decisions? And what lies ahead for the gay-rights movement? The result is that same-sex marriages will now resume in California and married gay couples everywhere can receive federal marriage benefits. The Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act this morning, while dismissing the case over California’s Prop 8. This week: SCOTUS defeats DOMA, the Voting Rights Act suffers a mortal wound, and Obama fights back on climate change.
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Every week, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich talks with contributor Eric Benson about the biggest stories in politics and culture.