[EL] Do different Michigan voters have different voting rights protections?

[Lorraine Minnite]

In /Schuette/, Justice Kennedy says that the question before the Court 
"...is not how to address or prevent injury caused on account of race 
but whether voters may determine whether a policy of race-based 
preferences should be continued."  A few people on the list have 
commented that this decision is a victory for voter sovereignty.  I 
couldn't help but wonder how Justice Kennedy would rule if /Detroit 
Branch NAACP v. Snyder/ were ever to reach the Court.

The complaint in this case, filed last year in the Eastern District of 
Michigan, challenges Michigan's Local Financial Stability and Choice 
Act, which allows the state to practice voter nullification in 
municipalities or school districts that experience financial 
difficulties.  (As I understand it, the case was administratively closed 
when Detroit went into bankruptcy and the bankruptcy judge refused to 
lift an automatic stay.)  With the city of Detroit now ruled by an 
unelected emergency manager, according to the complaint, more than half 
of the state's 1.4 million African Americans live in municipalities in 
which their elected local leadership has been effectively replaced by 
state fiat.  Moreover, the complaint alleges that the emergency manager 
law has been applied in a discriminatory manner, noting that there are 
cities in Michigan with white majorities and the same or worse "Fiscal 
Health Scores" as the majority or near-majority black cities put under 
receivership, and yet these white cities were not taken over by the 
state or their local elected leadership replaced by an unelected manager.

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the idea that the statewide 
majority white electorate of Michigan can vote to eliminate the use of 
race-conscious admissions policies in higher education, while voters 
living in majority black cities can have their votes for mayor 
nullified.  While these are different sorts of issues, I think one could 
easily argue that deciding who the mayor of one's city will be is at 
least as important to the voter as higher education admissions 
policies.  So, how might Justice Kennedy rule if the /Detroit Branch 
NAACP /case ever made it to the Supreme Court?  I find the argument some 
make that the statewide electorate voted for representatives and 
governors who passed the various iterations of the emergency manager law 
unconvincing as evidence that somehow nullifying the election of local 
officials is constitutional because the majority white statewide 
electorate picked the state leaders who did it.  I'm also not moved by 
the "cities are creatures of the state" defense of this policy.

Lori Minnite
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