With attribution to James Taranto of the Best of the Web at The Wall Street Journal, we refer you to an adult discussion of the decision from the Supremes striking Section IV of the Voting Rights Act of 1965:  Note the cynical abuse and how “Progressives” prey upon ignorance, Black Americans as their sharp instruments:

If you are a well-informed observer of the U.S. Supreme Court, here’s what you probably know about yesterday’s ruling in Shelby County v. Holder: Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits discriminatory voting practices and authorizes private parties and the Justice Department alike to challenge them in court, remains the law of the land.

The ruling affected Section 5, which forbids certain states and localities from making any changes in electoral rules–including but not limited to legislative redistricting, changes in voting machines and establishment of identification requirements–without prior approval from the Justice Department or a panel of federal judges.

If you’re following very closely, you know that Section 5 also remains the law of the land. The provision the high court held unconstitutional was Section 4, which establishes a formula for determining which jurisdictions are covered under Section 5. The problem with Section 4 was that its factual findings were ridiculously outdated. It mandates discrimination against states and local jurisdictions based on registration and turnout statistics from 1972 and earlier years.

Congress could enact a law replacing Section 4 and bringing the preclearance criteria up to date. The conventional wisdom is that that won’t happen any time soon, since Republicans have the majority in the House and Democrats in the Senate.

Roll Call’s Emma Dumain notes that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has expressed interest in rewriting Section 4. Even so, this column is in agreement with the conventional wisdom. Democrats, as cynical exploiters of black racial fear, have no interest in constructive action here.

Parochial concerns as well as partisan ones could make compromise difficult. “As the Chief Justice noted in oral argument in Shelby County, the state with the largest gap between white and black voter turnout is Massachusetts,” The Wall Street Journal observes in an editorial. Would Elizabeth Warren vote for a new definition that stigmatized the Bay State as a practitioner of Jim Crow?

But even if you’ve been following the matter closely, there’s something you probably think you know that isn’t so: that by striking down Section 4, the court has effectively abolished preclearance. “The decision did not strike down Section 5, but without Section 4, the later section is without significance,” writes Adam Liptak, the New York Times’s Supreme Court correspondent. “So pre-clearance of voting rights changes is still constitutional–but right now no jurisdiction is subject to it,” claims Salon’s Joan Walsh. National Review’s John Fund agrees that Shelby County means “the demise of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.”

While Liptak and Fund are technically correct, Walsh is dead wrong. Let’s let Lyle Denniston of ScotusBlog.com set the record straight:

There is another provision of the law, potentially a back-up (Section 3), that allows the government to go to court to ask that a new state or local government be put under Section 5 because of its more recent history in dealing with minority voters. Two states have been brought under Section 5 that way–Arkansas and New Mexico–along with several county governments, including Los Angeles County in California. The Court’s main opinion did not even mention Section 3, but the dissenters referred to it briefly as a “bail-in mechanism” that has worked. If a challenger now seeks to employ that provision, it presumably will have to show that bias is still a present-day problem there.

In a 2010 Yale Law Journal article, Travis Crum called Section 3 “The Voting Rights Act’s secret weapon,” one that “the academic literature has ignored”:

Commonly called the bail-in mechanism or the pocket trigger, section 3 authorizes federal courts to place states and political subdivisions that have violated the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments under preclearance. . . . Designed to trigger coverage in “pockets of discrimination”21 missed by section 5’s formula [sic; the formula is actually defined in Section 4], section 3 was included in the original Voting Rights Act.

Preclearance under Section 3 does not suffer from the constitutional infirmity that doomed Section 4. It requires a contemporary factual finding of discrimination, either a decision by a judge or an acknowledgment by the defendant jurisdiction. That is to say that even absent congressional action, preclearance remains among the tools available to the Justice Department and voting-rights advocates. They just have to prove their case before using it.