In voting rights fight, Dems eye top court

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 rights-era 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 court.

The task of building a more durable Voting Rights Act got harder July 1, when the court’s conservative majority 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.

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 that 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 many in the party’s activist base after the 2013 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.

“We cannot wait until October or November,” said Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus.

While the specifics of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act 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.

Republicans say vast strides have been made in ballot access since the civil rights era, which is when the Voting Rights Act’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.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has made clear his opposition.