In my mind the Supreme Court is at the precipice.  A majority of the court has come to personate Mitt Romney’s lack of understanding of the new world around us.  In deciding to accept a case out of Alabama in order to rule on the constitutionality of critical parts of the Voting Rights Act, the court is placing itself in judgment.  No one with a pip of integrity can believe that changes in election laws leading up to the 2012 presidential election had any other purpose – and their authors any other motivation – than to suppress the constitutional rights of certain American citizens whose ballots were to be denigrated if possible.

The willingness on the part of many citizens – and state attorneys general – to engage and use anti-Constitutional means to limit the rights of voters persists, and it can be found in almost any part of the Union.  The most blatant example this year occurred not in the southern states and other localities specifically covered by the Act but in Pennsylvania, which is barely included in provisions related to Spanish-speaking citizens.  The law that sought to thwart better the rights of voters was enacted in Harrisburg, 100 miles from Philadelphia, the cradle of this country’s liberties, and 40 miles from Gettysburg, where the most anti-democratic force ever organized on American soil was defeated, marking a turning point in the civil war between North and South.  To that same Gettysburg did Abraham Lincoln lumber to dedicate a shrine to the fallen of that battle but where, in fact, he rededicated America to the justness of the war and to itself.

Now comes a tiny army of justices and anti-democrats who want to undo Lincoln.  In so doing, these uncommon men threaten the Constitution itself and, of course, our system of government and the people’s governance.

If the court thinks that it is somehow vouchsafing the future of the Republic by sanctioning the power of states and local governments to devalue parts of the nation’s citizenry, it is delegitimizing itself.  The notion that the country has gotten over its disgraceful racial past is evidently false, else there would be no new Pennsylvania-like laws springing up across the land.  The fact that the nation elected an African American to the Presidency is testament to its promise.  His re-election testifies the grit of voters determined to overcome prejudicial election laws echoing the days preceding Gettysburg.

In taking the Shelby County, Alabama, case, the court seems to signal its belief that the country’s changed demography alone remonstrates the need to pay close attention to the disposition of anti-democratic sentiment in American politics.  The founders long after they wrote the Constitution continued to fear a return of the British, who in fact did try to make a monarchial comeback.  The new Republic had to be on guard.  America was not safe then and it is not safe now.  It never is.  Citizens must uphold always with avowed constancy the arc of freedom over which the nation passes in its constant journey into the future.  And someone should let the court in on a little secret:  Real anti-democratic tendencies pervade parts of the new demography, including its largest component, the Hispanic/Latino population.

Would that we could have Lincoln reincarnated as he has been on the silver screen of late and join the conferences of the Supreme Court as it debates the Alabama case.  Lincoln, who himself unconstitutionally suspended the right of habeas corpus during the war, would probably express some contrition in retrospect but on Shelby be antagonistic.  Few would doubt he would back down from the likes of Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas, in whom Lincoln no doubt would find great personal irony.  What arguments could Scalia or John Roberts or Anthony Kennedy or Samuel Alito make to Lincoln in a day when some of these same jurists would tolerate other citizens, still, imposing their religious rights on others – and argue with a straight face that they are defending religious liberty in general.  In the same way, they appear ready to argue that to defend democracy they must somehow neuter the Voting Rights Act. Burning a village in order to save it remains, it seems, plausible for this court.

The court will have us believe that instead of helping protect the voting rights of millions the contested sections of the Act somehow threaten everyone else’s rights and privileges.  The Act represents something larger than the court itself.  And thus Lincoln for himself would see – as the nation is fast understanding – the danger the court is becoming:  Nothing more than another way station in the transparent push by a plutocratic few to retain and concentrate their power.

The court behaves as if the country is not aware on a daily basis of the heavy price it is paying for the incompetent President it ramrodded down the throat of the country in 2000.  Even at his lowest jurisprudential point, Lincoln was able to hold together a Union against armed anti-democrats who sought to pull under an infant nation.

The court, only 85 miles from Gettysburg, seems not to understand that it faces the same challenge Lincoln did.  Perhaps a road trip is in order.

Jesse Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.