Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Monday accused Chief Justice John Roberts of deciding in 2013 that voting discrimination against blacks no longer exists, even though Roberts wrote explicitly at the time that it “still exists.”
The Democratic New York lawmaker was on the Senate floor speaking against Thomas Farr, a North Carolina lawyer who is President Trump’s pick to be a district court judge in his home state.
Schumer said on the Senate floor that Farr “stands for the disenfranchisement of voters,” then raised the 2013 Supreme Court case Shelby County v Holder. That case ended in a Roberts opinion that said a key part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is outdated and needs to be modernized.
Schumer said that opinion showed that Roberts believes voting discrimination no longer exists.
“Justice Roberts will go down in history as one of those who worked to take away voting rights when he authored the Shelby decision and stated that he didn’t believe that … more or less, he stated that he didn’t believe that discrimination existed any longer, so we wouldn’t need Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act,” Schumer said.
But Roberts never wrote that voting discrimination no longer exists and, in fact, said explicitly that it does still exist.
“At the same time, voting discrimination still exists; no one doubts that,” Roberts wrote at the time.
Shelby v. Holder dealt with Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. That section required certain states and districts with a history of discrimination to get permission from the federal government before changing their voting rules.
Roberts’ majority opinion said the list of states and districts covered by Section 5 was antiquated and that Congress needed to update the list before applying the section again, to make sure it reflects areas that are still struggling with discrimination.
“There is no denying, however, that the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions,” Roberts wrote. He said black voter turnout is much higher now and, in some areas, exceeds white voter turnout.
“The question is whether the Act’s extraordinary measures, including its disparate treatment of the States, continue to satisfy constitutional requirements,” he wrote. “As we put it a short time ago, ‘the Act imposes current burdens and must be justified by current needs.'”
“Congress — if it is to divide the States—must identify those jurisdictions to be singled out on a basis that makes sense in light of current conditions,” Roberts added. “It cannot rely simply on the past.”
