Voting justice may rest with justices
Eyeing Supreme Court fight, Democrats craft voting bill
WASHINGTON — As congressional Democrats gear up for another bruising legislative push to expand voting rights, much of their attention has quietly focused on a small yet crucial voting bloc with the power to scuttle their plans: the nine Supreme Court justices.
Democrats face dim prospects for passing voting legislation through a narrowly divided Congress, where an issue that once drew compromise has become an increasingly partisan flashpoint. But as they look to reinstate key parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark civil rightsera law diminished over the past decade by Supreme Court rulings, they have accepted the reality that any bill they pass probably will wind up in litigation — and ultimately back before the high court.
The task of building a more durable Voting Rights Act got harder when the high court’s conservative majority on July 1 issued its second major ruling in eight years narrowing the law’s once robust power.
“What it feels like is a shifting of the goal posts,” said Damon Hewitt, the president and executive director of the left-leaning Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
Sparring in Congress for months has focused on a different Democratic bill overhauling elections, known as the For the People Act, which Republican senators blocked from debate on the chamber’s floor last month.
Separately, however, Democrats have held a marathon series of low-key “field hearings” to prepare for votes on a second measure, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which could come to the House floor for a vote in September. The bill would allow courts and the Department of Justice to once again police changes to voting rules in places with a history of electoral discrimination against minorities, a practice the Supreme Court put on hold in 2013.
Democrats hope the hearings they have conducted with little fanfare will help build a legislative record that could withstand a court challenge. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Friday the process will document what he called “the disgraceful tactics that Republican-led state legislatures are using across the country to keep people from voting.”
That’s criticism that Republicans reject, arguing that the courts and Democratic administrations have selectively enforced the law in the past.
“It’s not a coincidence that a decade of court cases were only focused on Republican states,” said Rep. Rodney Davis, an Illinois Republican who sits on a committee that conducted the field hearings.
Pressure has built for months on congressional Democrats to counteract a concerted state-level Republican push to enact new voting restrictions, inspired by President Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen 2020 election. But there is a new sense of urgency among the party’s activist base following the Supreme Court ruling in the case of Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, which upheld two restrictive Arizona laws and will limit the ability to challenge voting restrictions in court.
While the specifics of the legislation have not yet been released, it would develop a new formula for determining which states and local governments would be subject to a review process known as “preclearance.” The court blocked the practice in 2013, reasoning that the formula used to determine which places are subjected to it was outdated and unfairly punitive. But the court also ruled that Congress could develop a new formula.
Yet serious questions remain about whether the Supreme Court, which has a new and expanded conservative majority, would still be receptive to a new preclearance formula.
There’s also been a major shift in the Republican Party.
The Voting Rights Act enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress for decades. But the bipartisan support eroded dramatically after the court’s first ruling, in 2013, in the case of Shelby County, Alabama, v. Holder.
Republicans say vast strides have been made in ballot access since the civil rights era, which is when the law’s preclearance formula was first established. The initial law targeted states and localities with low minority turnout and a history of using hurdles such as literacy tests and poll taxes to disenfranchise minority voters.
Such barriers are no longer used, and Republicans point to a swell of minority turnout in the last election as proof that many conservative-leaning states, particularly in the South, should not be subjected to preclearance.Regardless, Democrats have a difficult climb to enacting their new bill under current Senate filibuster rules, which require 60 votes to advance legislation in a chamber that is split 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has made clear his opposition. He said last month that Democrats were aiming to achieve through the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act what they couldn’t through their other elections bill
“It’s against the law to discriminate in voting on the basis of race already,” he said. “It is unnecessary.”