Justices Question Voting Rights Act
O'BRIEN:  BERMAN: Welcome back to STARTING POINT everyone. Some stories we're following at this hou: the late General Norman Schwarzkopf, Stormin' Norman, he will be laid to rest today at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, his alma mater. He became a household name after the first Gulf War. Schwarzkopf died December, 27 from pneumonia complications. He was 78 years old. How about a honeymoon on Mars? Multimillionaire space tourist Dennis Tito wants to send a couple, preferably a married U.S. couple, to Mars and back in 2018.</s>O'BRIEN: I could do that.</s>BERMAN: That seems awfully soon. Tito is the first space tourist visiting the International Spacestation aboard a Russian rocket in 2001 at a reported cost of $20 million.</s>O'BRIEN: Would you do that?</s>BERMAN: No. What are you asking?</s>O'BRIEN: I've been fighting with him all morning. I don't want to marry him.</s>BERMAN: That would be weird.</s>O'BRIEN: No, I meant my husband. Would you take your wife?</s>BERMAN: I would not take your husband. This is all very confusing. I don't think I want to go to Mars anyway, but I have one more story here. Pandora is going to limit how much free music you can listen to, capping free listening to 40 hours per month.</s>O'BRIEN: Wow.</s>BERMAN: Once you hit that limit you can pay 99 cents for unlimited music for the rest of the month. Pandora says it's because of rising royalty costs. It's not much money but I do suspect that anyone who listens to Pandora will have to pay the 99 cents. Forty hours is not that much.</s>O'BRIEN: Right. Not at all.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A buck a month.</s>O'BRIEN: I'm going to Mars, but not with you. The vice president says that he cannot believe the country is reliving a civil rights battle from the 1960s. That's what's happening before the Supreme Court. Conservative justices suggest that a key piece of legislation that was born out of the struggle might be unnecessary and unfair today. Here's CNN's justice correspondent Joe Johns.</s>JOE JOHNS, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: While supporters of the Voting Rights Act rallied outside, conservatives on the court were picking the law apart led by Justice Antonin Scalia, he produced audible gasps when he suggested the law's repeated renewal since 1965 might be the perpetuation of racial entitlement. He called it not the type of question you can leave to Congress. Scalia's turn to of phrase galled civil rights advocates. But is it a racial entitlement?</s>DEBO ADEBGILE, NAACP LEGAL DEFENSE: It is a racial entitlement, it is an American entitlement, it's a birthright to cast your right to vote.</s>JOHNS: The court is hearing a challenge to the portion of the law that gives the federal government the power to pre-approve any voting changes in nine southern states and parts of seven others. A power some see as a violation of states' rights.</s>BERT REIN, ATTORNEY FOR SHELBU COUNTY ALABAMA: If it wasn't a direct infringement on the sovereign states, that might be an argument. But here we're in a very different situation.</s>JOHNS: Conservatives on the court also ask why the law allows the federal government to treat states in the south differently from the rest of the country. Chief justice John Roberts asked the Obama administration, "is the government submission that the citizens in the south are more racist than the citizens in the north?" Liberals pushed back. Justice Sonia Sotomayor asking the lawyer for Shelby County, Alabama, which brought the case, why the court might rule in a favor of a county whose record is the epitome of what caused the passage of the law to start with. The county argues things have changed in the south.</s>FRANK ELLIS, SHELBY COUNTY ATTORNEY: We've made great strides over the years. We have minority participation at record levels. We have minority candidates elected by 90 percent white populations.</s>JOHNS: Many at the proceeding were already bracing for the very real possibility that part of the law could be ruled unconstitutional.</s>REV. JESSE JACKSON, RAINBOW/PUSH COALITION: We stand challenged in this court to do the right thing. I hope it does. But if it does not, we will not go back. We've come too far. Marched too much, bled too profusely. We will not go back.</s>JOHNS (on camera): Among the civil rights leaders at the court on Wednesday Congressman John Lewis who was beaten in Selma, Alabama in 1965 in a march for voting rights. Joe Johns, CNN, Washington.</s>SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Coming up next, she landed a vault that will go down in Olympic history, helped her team win the gold, U.S. gymnast McKayla Maroney is here, find out just how impressed she is with her new job.