Law professor and former DOJ official John Yoo is interviewed by “Get Real” host David DesRosiers on Real America’s Voice and reacts to the Supreme Court’s decision on the Voting Rights Act. <\/p>\n
DAVID DESROSIERS, ‘GET REAL’ HOST: Joining us now with his perspective and insight is John Yoo. John is really one of my favorite constitutional scholars out there. We don’t always agree, but he had the distinction of actually holding a very real post in the Bush administration, W’s. I mean, we got to know each other when, like, I met him and we had a great conversation about a wonderful memo that he wrote on enhanced interrogation. That resulted, I think, in probably him having the longest picketing line outside his house while he was at Berkeley, at least living on campus. I hear you’re moving from Berkeley. You’re heading to Texas, like most people from California do. And again, I think you’ve joined a nice place, and I hope we can talk about that today. But the Supreme Court has kind of overturned the tables again. I mean, I think on an important, what people would think would be a forever decision of the Supreme Court. Justice Alito last week kind of wrote the opinion that no, and it’s like his doing so in advance of the election and the midterm elections and the future elections are, I think, quite big and profound. Would you do us the favor and kind of give us the schoolhouse rocks kind of reasoning behind the court and the decision that they’ve made? JOHN YOO, LEGAL SCHOLAR, BERKELEY LAW PROFESSOR: David, great to be with you. And if I’m your favorite constitutional law scholar, you’ve got to read more broadly. And I’m going to find more people to introduce you to who like you better than I do. DESROSIERS: Oh, I know. But it’s like you were on a show with us with Dershowitz. I love him, but he’s hard to love. YOO: That’s great. So what happened in this case? The simple bottom line answer is this is one of the court, the culmination of the court’s agenda to stop the government from using race. It’s been doing it in issue after issue. Don’t use race when you give out government contracts. Don’t use race when you decide who to let into your university. And now the court is saying don’t use race to you, the government, when you draw voting districts. That seems pretty straightforward. What had happened since 1965 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which implements the 15th Amendment’s prohibition on efforts to treat people differently because of their race and voting. What had happened is that that 15th Amendment, that Voting Rights Act had been distorted by states, by political parties, by lower court judges who said, oh, no, the way to correct for segregation, the way to undo racism is to actually compact minorities into voting districts so that hopefully they’ll elect a black congressman or an Asian congressman. And what the court said is that’s enough. That is over. The Constitution is colorblind and the government shall not use race in drawing districts just like it doesn’t use race in all these other areas. And this is a point that Justice Thomas first brought out in a concurrence 30 years ago when people thought he was crazy. Now the court’s come around to his view. The court said it’s racist and offensive to assume that blacks or Asians or Hispanics all want to vote for someone of their skin color, that they override all their other interests and beliefs and political preferences and party affiliations just to vote for someone who looks like them. Is it that the kind of racism we’re actually stereotyping, we’re trying to get away from with our Constitution? So that’s in brief what the court, you can have lots of complicated explanations, but that’s in brief what the court did. Stop using race, you, the government, when you treat people, when you consider people, when you’re drawing voting districts or any other kind of electoral process. [Speaker 1] Could you summarize quickly what you thought to be the best case from the dissenting opinion? [Speaker 2] So the dissenting piece says, but what if, and this is their prediction about how the sky is falling, what if state legislatures going forward now try to recreate the kind of rotten boroughs and strange districts, design them to try to suppress the influence of black voters or Hispanic voters or Asian voters and just never say so. So it’s a pretext. Instead they’ll say it’s for Democrats or Republicans or incumbents or challengers to protect them when secretly they still are doing it to say, I don’t know, increase white voting, white power. What Justice Alito in his majority opinion says is that might have been true before the 15th Amendment. That might’ve been true before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and maybe in the years after. But he said, look at the world we live in today. He said, in the world that we live in today, you look at voting patterns and blacks in the South, which was the place where this was happening the most, blacks in the South now register at the same or higher rates than whites. Blacks now vote at higher rates or the same as whites. And he said, this is a different world. Now you might have gerrymandering. And this is another thing that, this is another area where the court has been clear. The courts, the Supreme Court doesn’t want lower court, federal court judges intervening and forcing states how to draw districts. They basically, the Supreme Court has actually said, we’re pulling out. We’re not going to look at these anymore. If you have a wild redistricting like just went on in Texas here or California, or until today, Virginia, the court has said, we’re not going to review that. People can draw the craziest districts they want to advantage their own political parties, but not race. So this is another thing the court is saying here, too. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n