Court upholds restrictions
Biden renews call for Congress to pass reforms
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority Thursday cut back on a landmark voting rights law in a decision likely to help Republican states fight challenges to voting restrictions they’ve put in place following last year’s elections.
The court’s 6-3 ruling upheld voting limits in Arizona that a lower court had found discriminatory under the federal Voting Rights Act. It was the high court’s second major decision in eight years that civil rights groups and liberal dissenting justices say weakened the Civil Rights-era law that was intended to eradicate discrimination in voting.
The decision fueled new calls from Democrats to pass federal legislation, blocked by Senate Republicans, that would counter the new state laws.
“The court’s decision, harmful as it is, does not limit Congress’ ability to repair the damage done today: it puts the burden back on Congress to restore the Voting Rights Act to its intended strength,” President Joe Biden said in a statement.
Republicans argue that the state restrictions are simply efforts to fight potential voting fraud and ensure election integrity.
In an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, the court reversed an appellate ruling in deciding that Arizona’s regulations on who can return early ballots for another person and on refusing to count ballots cast in the wrong precinct are not racially discriminatory.
Alito wrote for the conservative majority that the state’s interest in the integrity of elections justified the measures and that voters faced “modest burdens” at most.
In a scathing dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the court was weakening the federal voting rights law.
“What is tragic here is that the Court has (yet again) rewritten — in order to weaken — a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses. What is tragic is that the Court has damaged a statute designed to bring about ‘the end of discrimination in voting.’ I respectfully dissent,” Kagan wrote, joined by the other two liberal justices.