Key Part of Voting Rights Act Invalidated
Justices, 5-4, Curtail U.S. Oversight of 9 States’ Ballot Laws
By ADAM LIPTAK
The Supreme Court split along ideological lines with its ruling that
Congress had not provided adequate justification for subjecting the
states, mostly in the South, to federal oversight.
J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
Court Rules on Voting Rights Act:
The Times's David Leonhardt talks about the implications of the Supreme
Court's decision to strike down a key part of the Voting Rights Act of
1965.
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: June 25, 2013
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday effectively struck down
the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, ruling
that Congress had not provided adequate justification for subjecting
nine states, mostly in the South, to federal oversight.
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Wade Henderson, president and C.E.O. of the
Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, criticized the decision
on Tuesday.
“In 1965, the states could be divided into two groups: those with a
recent history of voting tests and low voter registration and turnout,
and those without those characteristics,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts
Jr. wrote
for the majority. “Congress based its coverage formula on that
distinction. Today the nation is no longer divided along those lines,
yet the Voting Rights Act continues to treat it as if it were.”
The court divided along ideological lines, and the two sides drew
sharply different lessons from the history of the civil rights movement
and gave very different accounts of whether racial minorities continue
to face discrimination in voting.
President Obama, whose election as the nation’s first black president
was cited by critics of the law as evidence that it was no longer
needed, said he was “deeply disappointed” by the ruling. “Today’s
decision invalidating one of its core provisions upsets decades of
well-established practices that help make sure voting is fair,
especially in places where voting discrimination has been historically
prevalent,” he said.
The decision will have immediate practical consequences. Changes in
voting procedures that had required advance federal approval, including
voter identification laws and restrictions on early voting, will now be
subject only to after-the-fact litigation.
“With today’s decision,” said Greg Abbott, Texas’ attorney general, “the
state’s voter ID law will take effect immediately. Redistricting maps
passed by the Legislature may also take effect without approval from the
federal government.”
Chief Justice Roberts said that Congress remained free to try to impose
federal oversight on states where voting rights were at risk, but must
do so based on contemporary data. When the law was last renewed, in
2006, Congress relied on data from decades before to decide which states and localities were covered.
The chances that the current Congress could reach agreement on where
federal oversight is required are small, most analysts say.
Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel
A. Alito Jr. joined the majority opinion. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
dissented, joined by Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and
Elena Kagan.
The majority held that the coverage formula in Section 4 of the Voting
Rights Act, originally passed in 1965 and most recently updated by
Congress in 1975, was unconstitutional. The section determines which
states must receive preclearance from the Justice Department or a
federal court in Washington before they make minor changes to voting
procedures, like relocating a polling place, or major ones, like
redrawing electoral districts.
The current coverage scheme, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, is “based on
40-year-old facts having no relationship to the present day.”
“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,” he wrote. “It cannot simply rely on the past.”
The decision did not strike down Section 5, which sets out the
preclearance requirement. But without Section 4, which determines which
states are covered, Section 5 is without significance — unless Congress
chooses to pass a new bill for determining which states would be
covered.
It was hardly clear, in any event, that the court’s conservative
majority would uphold Section 5 if the question returned to the court in
the unlikely event that Congress enacted a new coverage formula. In a
concurrence, Justice Thomas called for striking down Section 5
immediately, saying the majority opinion had provided the reasons and
merely left “the inevitable conclusion unstated.”
The Supreme Court had repeatedly upheld the law in earlier decisions,
saying that the preclearance requirement was an effective tool to combat
the legacy of lawless conduct by Southern officials bent on denying
voting rights to blacks.
Critics of Section 5 say it is a unique federal intrusion on state
sovereignty and a badge of shame for the affected jurisdictions that is
no longer justified.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965
was one of the towering legislative achievements of the civil rights
movement, and Chief Justice Roberts said its "strong medicine" was the
right response to "entrenched racial discrimination." At the time it was
first enacted, he said, black voter turnout in the South stood at 6.4
percent in Mississippi.
In the most recent election, by contrast, “African-American voter
turnout has come to exceed white voter turnout in five of the six states
originally covered by Section 5.”
The chief justice recalled the Freedom Summer of 1964, when the civil
rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were
murdered near Philadelphia, Miss., while working to register black
voters. He mentioned Bloody Sunday in 1965, when police officers beat
marchers seeking the right to vote in Selma, Ala.
Multimedia
Related in Opinion
-
Editorial: An Assault on the Voting Rights Act (June 26, 2013)
“Today,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “both of those towns are governed
by African-American mayors. Problems remain in these states and others,
but there is no denying that, due to the Voting Rights Act, our nation
has made great strides.”
In summarizing her dissent
from the bench, an unusual move and a sign of deep disagreement,
Justice Ginsburg called on the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr. to make a different point.
“The great man who led the march from Selma to Montgomery and there
called for the passage of the Voting Rights Act foresaw progress, even
in Alabama,” she said. “'The arc of the moral universe is long,’ he
said, but ‘it bends toward justice,’ if there is a steadfast commitment
to see the task through to completion.”
“That commitment,” she said, “has been disserved by today’s decision.”
She said the focus of the Voting Rights Act had properly changed from
“first-generation barriers to ballot access” to “second-generation
barriers” like racial gerrymandering and laws requiring at-large voting
in places with a sizable black minority. She said Section 5 had been
effective in thwarting such efforts.
In any event, she said, Congress, which reauthorized the law by a large
majority in the House and unanimously in the Senate, was the right body
to decide whether the law was needed and where.
The Supreme Court had once before considered the constitutionality of the 2006 extension of the law in a 2009 decision, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder.
But it avoided answering the central question, and it seemed to give
Congress an opportunity to make adjustments. Congress, Chief Justice
Roberts noted on Tuesday, did not respond.
Justice Ginsburg suggested in her dissent that an era had drawn to a
close with the court’s decision on the Voting Rights Act, or V.R.A., in
Shelby County v. Holder, No. 12-96.
“Beyond question, the V.R.A. is no ordinary legislation,” she wrote. “It
is extraordinary because Congress embarked on a mission long delayed
and of extraordinary importance: to realize the purpose and promise of
the Fifteenth Amendment,” the Reconstruction Era amendment that barred
racial discrimination in voting and authorized Congress to enforce it.
“The court errs egregiously,” she concluded, “by overriding Congress’s decision.”
Prelinger Archives
A HISTORY OF VOTING RIGHTS
Voting was a contentious issue for much of the 20th century. Tuesday’s
ruling suggested that conditions had changed since the Voting Rights Act
of 1965.
Guide to the Shelby County vs. Holder Ruling
Decision Criticized
Graphic: Formula Behind the Voting Rights Act
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