Voting rights update ordered
Supreme Court criticizes congressional inaction
WASHINGTON — A divided Supreme Court on Tuesday invalidated a crucial component of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, ruling that Congress has not taken into account the nation’s racial progress when singling out states for federal oversight.
The vote was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts and other conservative members of the court in the majority.
The court did not strike down the law itself or the provision that calls for special scrutiny of states with a history of discrimination. But it said Congress must come up with a new formula based on current data to determine which states should be subject to the requirements.
Proponents of the law, which protects minority voting rights, called the ruling a death knell. They said it will be almost impossible for a Congress divided along partisan lines to come up with such an agreement.
Hours after the ruling, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said his state will move forward with a voter-identification law stopped by a panel of federal judges and will carry out redistricting changes that had been mired in court battles.
The 1965 act covers the
Southern states of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia, as well as Alaska, Arizona and parts of seven other states. It requires them to receive “pre-clearance” from the U.S. attorney general or federal judges before changing election or voting laws.
Roberts said the court warned Congress four years ago, in a separate case, that its decision to continue using a formula based on “40-year-old facts” would lead to serious constitutional questions.
“Congress could have updated the coverage formula at that time, but did not do so,” Roberts wrote. “Its failure to act leaves us today with no choice but to declare the formula unconstitutional.”
He added, “Our country has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.”
He was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
One sign of racial progress has been the election of the nation’s first AfricanAmerican president, who said Tuesday that he was “deeply disappointed” in the decision.
“For nearly 50 years, the Voting Rights Act ... has helped secure the right to vote for millions of Americans,” President Barack Obama said in a statement. “Today’s decision invalidating one of its core provisions upsets decades of wellestablished practices that help make sure voting is fair, especially in places where voting discrimination has been historically prevalent.”
In Virginia, the state government presumably will no longer need approval from Washington for its new voter-ID law. The law could still be subject to a legal challenge, but the burden would be shifted to plaintiffs to show that the law would hurt minority voters.
Attorney General Eric Holder, who called the decision a “serious setback for voting rights,” said his department will “continue to carefully monitor jurisdictions around the country for voting changes that may hamper voting rights.”
“Let me be very clear,” Holder said. “We will not hesitate to take swift enforcement action, using every legal tool that remains available to us, against any jurisdiction that seeks to take advantage of the Supreme Court’s ruling by hindering eligible citizens’ full and free exercise of the franchise.”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg emphasized the liberals’ disagreement with the decision by reading her dissent from the bench. She said the majority not only misread the lessons of the nation’s racial progress but inserted itself into a decision that the Constitution’s Civil War amendments specifically leave for Congress.
“When confronting the most constitutionally invidious form of discrimination, and the most fundamental right in our democratic system, Congress’ power to act is at its height,” Ginsburg wrote in her dissent.
She noted that the 2006 extension of the Voting Rights Act, and the continued use of the formula in Section 4, was approved unanimously in the Senate and signed by President George W. Bush.
“What has become of the court’s usual restraint?” she asked from the bench.
She quoted the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the march from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama.
“‘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,” Ginsburg said. “That commitment has been disserved by today’s decision.”
She was joined in dissent by Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
In his opinion, Roberts noted that in 1965, white voter registration in Mississippi was nearly 70 percent and black registration stood at 6.7 percent. By 2004, a greater percentage of blacks than whites were registered to vote in the state, and that was true in five of the six states originally covered by Section 5.
“These are the numbers that were before Congress when it reauthorized the act in 2006,” he said.
Roberts cited the deaths of men registering others to vote in Philadelphia, Miss., and “Bloody Sunday” in Selma.
“Today both of these towns are governed by African-American mayors,” Roberts wrote.
Yet the “extraordinary and unprecedented features” of Section 5, along with the coverage formula, were reauthorized “as if nothing had changed.”
Ginsburg said the longtime formula Congress decided to continue using still identified the areas most in need of fed- eral oversight. From 1982 to 2006, she said, the Justice Department blocked more than 700 voting changes on the grounds that they would be discriminatory.
She said the court’s ruling does not accommodate the evidence Congress amassed to justify reauthorization.
“One would expect more from an opinion striking at the heart of the nation’s signal piece of civil rights legislation,” Ginsburg wrote.
Roberts countered: “Congress did not use the record it compiled to shape a coverage formula grounded in current conditions. It instead reenacted a formula based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relation to the present day.”
Edward Blum, who coordinated the current challenge to Section 5 and one in 2009, said the decision “restores an important constitutional order to our system of government which requires that all 50 states are entitled to equal dignity and sovereignty. Our nation’s laws must apply uniformly to each state and jurisdiction.” Civil rights groups were outraged. “I think we should not soft-pedal what is an egregious betrayal of minority voters,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, whose lawyers participated in the case.
In his opinion, Roberts noted that the decision “in no way affects the permanent, nationwide ban on racial discrimination in voting” found in another part of the Voting Rights Act.
The specific challenge before the court came from Shelby County, Ala., a mostly white suburb south of Birmingham.
A brief filed by the state of Alabama said bloody resistance to blacks’ voting rights was “particularly responsible” for making Section 5 necessary.
Alabama’s attorney general, Luther Strange, said in the brief that the state had a well-earned place among the covered jurisdictions when the act was passed in 1965 and reauthorized in 1970, 1975 and 1982. But he said the 2006 reauthorization, which extended federal control for 25 years more, went too far.