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Somewhere a South Park writer is laughing:

The dissent also turns to the record to argue that, in light of voting discrimination in Shelby County, the county cannot complain about the provisions that subject it to preclearance. Post, at 23–30. But that is like saying that a driver pulled over pursuant to a policy of stopping all redheads cannot complain about that policy, if it turns out his license has expired. Shelby County’s claim is that the coverage formula here is unconstitutional in all its applications, because of how it selects the jurisdictions subjected to preclearance. The county was selected based on that formula, and may challenge it in court.

Update: I am the #1 hit on Google for “Ginger Discrimination Supreme Court.” I win (something)!

I went 2/3 today from my last prediction. Alito did have Koontz, but he also had Baby Girl. Based ont he allocations, it should have been Scalia or Kennedy. Maybe something weird happened, as this is a really odd lineup (Scalia dissenting with Sotomayor, Ginsburg, and Kagan). Roberts (as widely expected) had Shelby County.

What’s left? Sekhar, Perry, and Windsor. Assuming that Scalia lost a majority in Baby Girl (possible), I’ll give Kennedy Sekhar. As for Perry and Windsor, it’s a tossup. Check FantasySCOTUS.net for all predictions.

CJ Roberts wrote, “There is no denying, however, that the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions.” Justice Thomas wrote, “Today, our Nation has changed.” Justice Ginsburg disagrees, “In the Court’s view, the very success of §5 of the Voting Rights Act demands its dormancy.”

I’ll have more once I digest this opinion…

Update: More from Roberts’s opinion:

Nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically. …

There is no doubt that these improvements are in large part because of the Voting Rights Act. The Act has proved immensely successful at redressing racial discrimination and integrating the voting process. See §2(b)(1), 120 Stat. 577. During the “Freedom Summer” of 1964, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, three men were murdered while working in the area to register African-American voters. See United States v. Price, 383 U. S. 787, 790 (1966). On “Bloody Sunday” in 1965, in Selma, Alabama, police beat and used tear gas against hundreds marching in sup- port of African-American enfranchisement. See Northwest Austin, supra, at 220, n. 3 (THOMAS, J., concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part). Today both of those towns are governed by African-American mayors. Problems remain in these States and others, but there is no denying that, due to the Voting Rights Act, our Nation has made great strides.

Roberts includes a chart showing voter registration numbers from 1965 to 2004, to illustrate that the gap between white and black rates has dropped precipitously.

Roberts repeated the point over and over again that the country of today is not the country of 1965:

In 1965, the States could be divided into two groups: those with a recent history of voting tests and low voter registration and turnout, and those without those characteristics. Congress based its coverage formula on that distinction. Today the Nation is no longer divided along those lines, yet the Voting Rights Act continues to treat it as if it were.

This simmering debate has remained dormant since (by my count) November 23, 2012. It’s back!

In Slate’s Breakfast Table, Judge Posner took exception with Scalia’s opinions in Decker v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center:

 Justice Antonin Scalia dissented, saying that to defer to an agency’s interpretation of its own regulations “violate[s] a fundamental principle of separation of powers—that the power to write a law and the power to interpret it cannot rest in the same hands.” Scalia’s concern is that the agency will issue a vague regulation, intending to alter it by interpretation, thereby avoiding the required procedures (such as notice of a proposed regulation, and an opportunity for people who may be affected by it to comment).

That is a valid concern, but it doesn’t justify a blanket refusal to grant some deference, some leeway, to agency interpretations of their own regulations.

The Washington Post profiles the eponymous plaintiff in Gratz v. Bollinger:

For Gratz, it all started one day in the summer of 1997, when she came home to the Detroit suburbs from the Michigan summer camp where she’d been working. Her father had spotted a newspaper article about the use of affirmative action in University of Michigan admissions. He brought it up casually, Gratz recalls. He thought his daughter, who is white, had moved on from the pain of being rejected by the university two years earlier.

Wow, was he wrong.

Gratz, then 18, chased down the author of the article. She dug up contact numbers. She called lawyers and state representatives. She had to do something.

She fell in with attorneys who had been challenging affirmative action policies. “I thought I’d end up stuffing envelopes,” she recalls. She ended up becoming their star plaintiff.

While Gratz worked on a math degree at the University of Michigan at Dearborn, her real passions were directed toward her lawsuit. On campus, all her professors knew that she was at the center of a major legal fight — the camera crews that trailed her around the school might have been a tip-off.

There was a lower-court win, but on June 23, 2003 — almost exactly a decade ago — the Supreme Court had its say. And what it said filled her with pique.

Gratz was the winner, whose cause ended up being the loser. The court sided with Gratz, saying that she’d been discriminated against because the University of Michigan’s system of assigning bonus points in its ranking to minority applicants was too “mechanistic.” But Gratz’s case got lumped with another case — filed by Barbara Grutter, an applicant to the university’s law school.

…

By the time the court had ruled in their cases, Gratz had gotten married, moved to San Diego and launched her career as a computer software expert. Her wedding was just six months before the Supreme Court’s ruling, and she decided to keep her maiden name rather than put her attorneys through the considerable trouble of filing paperwork to reflect a name change. Later, once her name became associated with ballot campaigns against racial preferences in school admissions and government hiring, it made practical sense to retain the familiar moniker. To this day, she says, people sometimes unknowingly call her husband “Mr. Gratz.”

…

In the days after the court ruled in 2003, the sting of the decision was too much. She told her husband that she was quitting her job and going back to Michigan to work on the issue that consumed her so. Gratz was soon jetting around the country, pushing for state ballot initiatives to accomplish what her lawsuit could not.

It seems she has turned from brewing constitutional cases to brewing beer:

It will be easy for her to figure out how to celebrate her victories in years to come: with something cold. She and her husband just opened a new business near their home in southwest Florida: a microbrewery.