Is U.S. voting rights law outdated?
‘Times change,’ justice argues
WASHINGTON The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative justices voiced deep skepticism Wednesday about a section of a landmark civil rights law that has helped millions of Americans exercise their right to vote.
In an ominous note for supporters of the key provision of the Voting Rights Act, Justice Anthony Kennedy both acknowledged the measure’s vital role in fighting discrimination and suggested that other important laws in U.S. history had run their course.
“Times change,” Kennedy said during the fast-paced, 70-minute argument.
Kennedy’s views are likely to prevail on the closely divided court, and he tends to side with his more conservative colleagues on matters of race.
The court’s liberals and conservatives engaged in a sometimes tense back-and-forth over whether there is still a need in 2013 for the part of the voting rights law that requires states with a history of discrimination against blacks, mainly in the Deep South, to get approval before making changes in the way elections are held.
Justice Antonin Scalia called the law a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” Chief Justice John Roberts, a vocal skeptic of the use of race in all areas of public life, cited a variety of statistics that showed starker racial disparities in some aspects of voting in the northeastern state of Massachusetts than in the southern state of Mississippi.
Then he asked the government’s top Supreme Court lawyer whether the Obama administration thinks “the citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the North?”
The answer from Solicitor General Donald Verrilli was no.
The question, and others like it from the conservative justices, largely echoed the doubts they first expressed four years ago in a similar case that ended without resolving the constitutionality of the latest renewal of the voting rights law, in 2006. They also wondered whether there was any end in sight for a provision that intrudes on states’ rights to conduct elections and that was regarded as an emergency response to decades of state-sponsored discrimination in voting, despite the U.S Constitution’s Fifteenth Amendment guarantee of the vote for black Americans.