The Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the landmark Voting Rights Act yesterday — and Americans should celebrate.
The Court ruled that Congress must now take account of modern racial conditions in America when rewriting its decades-old legislative formula to determine which states are required to receive ‘preclearance’ for voting law changes.
The 5-4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder affirms the simple fact that 1960s America and the America of today are radically different places.
As Chief Justice John Roberts put it in his opinion, “The [Fifteenth] Amendment is not designed to punish for the past; its purpose is to ensure a better future.”
When the VRA was passed in 1965, the use of literacy tests and other devices designed to prevent African Americans from voting were widely used. Today, such tests have been banned for nearly 40 years, African American turnout in several states originally covered by the VRA actually exceeds white turnout and historically discriminatory states like Virginia, South Carolina, Louisiana and Texas have all elected minority candidates for statewide or federal office.
Based on this and other modern data, Roberts stated the obvious: “The conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions.” A rudimentary comparison of state practices in 1965 no longer justifies the presumed guilt of those states in 2013.
In typical fashion, the Democratic National Committee dramatically called the ruling an “injustice” in a fundraising email to supporters shortly after the decision was released.
But reactionary critics like the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who yesterday claimed that the ruling will destroy gains in “inclusion and expansion” of voting rights, probably aren’t familiar with either the text of the VRA or the actual ruling made by the Supreme Court. Congress may still combat voting discrimination under the VRA.
The Court correctly concluded that “any racial discrimination in voting is too much,” and that’s precisely why the Court’s opinion did not overrule Section 2 or Section 5 of the VRA.
Section 2 permits the Department of Justice to sue any jurisdiction that is engaging in voter discrimination, while Section 5 requires identified jurisdictions to receive “preclearance” before making any changes to voting laws.
All the Court did was require Congress to create a new formula for identifying jurisdictions requiring preclearance based on modern conditions rather than conditions existing in 1965. If states covered under the current 1960’s formula will truly revert to their old racist ways as some detractor’s allege, the Justice Department remains free to sue the offending state and Congress remains free to update its coverage formula to require preclearance for that jurisdiction.
Thus, the Court didn’t force Congress to “gut” the Voting Rights Act, it forced Congress to improve it, and it did so without arbitrarily demanding its own set of activist judicial rules. In recognizing America’s racially problematic past while also acknowledging the spectacularly improved conditions of today, Shelby is a decision Americans should be proud of.
