Antonin Scalia made his feelings on the Voting Rights Act, which took a beating during Supreme Court oral arguments this week, pretty clear, calling it a "perpetuation of racial entitlement." But as Roosevelt Institute Fellow Dorian Warren explained on MSNBC's The Last Word, he's not alone -- nor is his line of thinking unique. Attacks on the Voting Rights Act are part of "a long-term, more than 30-year effort to chip away at most of the civil rights victories." Which is ironic, given that the arguments came on the same day the U.S. Capitol unveiled its new statue of Rosa Parks, "who led the Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, the very state challenging the most significant and important civil rights victory of the movement," he said.

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The argument against the Voting Rights Act is basically that we've moved beyond racism, so targeting certain states for their histories of discrimination is out of line. But impulses to morph the law in ways that would discriminate against black people "have always been there, from the founding and especially through the '60s, until we had an effective legislation measure to deal with it," Dorian said. That's a lot of history to have already overcome.

So what do we do if the Supreme Court strikes down this law? There could be one upside. "In response we can then make a demand for some kind of national voting reform," he concluded. We'll have to wait and see.

Roosevelt Institute Fellow Susan Crawford appeared on MSNBC's Up with Chris Hayes last weekend to discuss the problem with patents in our modern intellectual property-based economy. In the clip below, Susan explains that "the expensive, loony unreality" of many tech companies is that "all they're doing is inventing patents, not patenting inventions. It seems backwards, and it's actually frustrating for the inventors involved and for everybody."

On the growth of so-called "patent troll" litigation, Susan notes that there are two major problems: "One is that you could box out your competition with the threat of this lawsuit, but also you're making it very difficult for anybody else to invent something new... everybody's afraid, and that's no good for innovation." So what's the answer? Susan suggests that it's time to get really creative and "start over," eliminating software patents entirely. 

Captive Audience, Susan's new book on the telecom industry and its growing monopoly power, hits shelves January 8.

In the latest episode of the Roosevelt Institute's Bloggingheads series, Fireside Chats, Fellow Mike Konczal talks to Yale JD/PhD candidate Jeremy Kessler about the intersection of the law and the left and about leftists who dissent from mainstream progressivism. In the clip below, they discuss whether the Occupy movement, which Mike says has "made a comeback recently" with Strike Debt and Occupy Sandy, represents a libertarian rejection of the state rather than a progressive revolution.

Mike notes that despite Occupy's renewed vigor, some progressives continue to write "quasi-obituaries" that paint it as an aimless anarchist movement. Critics argue that "when you think of them creating a whole new world in Zuccotti Park" it sounds like "the gulches of Ayn Rand novels," and that "a lot of this focus on mutual aid essentially fills in for a rapidly receding government presence under neoliberalism." Mike says this can be seen with Occupy Sandy, which essentially serves as a replacement for FEMA, or the push for homeschooling, which is "just amplifying the way the state is privatizing and dismantling public education." But while Jeremy admits "there is a lot of allergy to the idea of centralized power" in the movement, he and Mike agree that it advances the left's cause by highlighting the failure of the neoliberal state and the "zones of privation" that the shrinking of government has created.

For more, including their discussion of the changing politics of the Supreme Court and the conservative police state, check out the full video below:

It may be hard to imagine, but (we all hope, anyway) some day the recession and meager recovery period will come to an end. At that point, will the debates we're having now about the economy become completely irrelevant? What will we have to fight about? Roosevelt Institute Fellow Mike Konczal and EPI's Josh Bivens took this question on in the latest Fireside Chats episode on Bloggingheads:

As Mike points out, "Right now the debates seem very focused on things very specific to this recession," such as what the Federal Reserve could do to make things better or whether we should reduce mortgage burdens to boost consumption. Those are "very technical and very important debates to be having," he points out, "but they’re very narrow to the moment we’re in right now." Once we one day leave these issues behind, what will liberals decide to promote? And will we all be able to get on board?

The first issue Josh sees rearing its head is what we consider the "natural" rate of unemployment to be. Right now it's pretty obvious that unemployment is too high. At what point does it fall so much that some people, including the Fed, start to say it shouldn't go any lower? This question will have larger implications as well. As Mike says, "You see policy experts running around trying to figure out how to boost the wages of the lower quintile, but we know what has done it in the past 30 years, and it’s when unemployment is below 5 percent for a sustainable period of time." In fact, he says, a low unemployment rate "is the ultimate jobs program, it is the ultimate policy solution," and boosts wages for everyone -- not just those at the bottom.

What else will we squabble over when the economy once again booms? Bivens predicts social insurance programs -- Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare -- will have to be on the agenda. And related to that will be just how high we can go with tax rates on the rich. "Obviously you can have a fairness argument and a just deserts argument, but the economic case is pretty clear that [tax] rates [on the wealthier] could go much higher," Mike says. "But we’re seeing resistence to just getting to near 40 percent at this point." Brace yourself, political battles are coming.

Watch the full episode below, in which Mike and Josh discuss how little we all take home and whether inequality and the social safety net have anything to do with it: