Aren’t Senator Durbin’s pieties, er, crashing into each other just a bit here? According to my history book, the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870. The Nineteenth took another half century. That is, to borrow the senators lingo, “person[s] of color” who were men actually had a 50-year head start on more than half of “white Americans.”

I guess the message here is that white men suck, and that’s why we need Section 5. According to Senator Durbin, a white man.

Will there ever be a time when this kind of idiocy is no longer part of our politics?