Many liberals are outraged over this week’s Supreme Court decision striking down parts of the Voting Rights Act. They’re accusing the Court’s conservative majority of dissing Martin Luther King, who 50 years ago this summer led the epochal March on Washington; burying the Great Society’s noble quest for racial justice; and, resurrecting the noxious old doctrine of “states’ rights.”
Of course, it’s galling to hear conservatives—who didn’t object much to the systematic violation of black citizens’ Constitutional rights in the bad old days—extol the ruling as a victory for “Constitutionalism” over federal meddling. And Republicans’ undiminished enthusiasm for “Voter ID” and other blatant voter suppression ploys shows that the battle to guarantee full and equal access to the ballot is far from over.
The ruling also makes a mockery of conservatives’ professed reverence for “judicial restraint.” In striking down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, the Roberts majority showed exactly zero deference to Congress, which in 2006 renewed the law for another quarter century by a 98-0 vote in the Senate and a 390-33 vote in the House.
Nonetheless, I confess to being torn by the ruling and finding the left’s indignation somewhat hyberbolic. Having grown up in the Jim Crow South, I know that the states covered by the 1965 Act richly deserved to have Washington supervise their voting procedures. Otherwise, they would have continued to use every scurvy trick in the book to prevent black citizens from exercising their right to vote.
Yet only a purblind ideologue would deny that the region and the nation have come a long way since the days of Bull Connor and the Montgomery church bombing. Progressives in particular ought to recognize and celebrate America’s racial progress, not least because it proves that politics can shape culture and speed up social evolution.
It makes sense to periodically reassess and update the means by which government protects citizens against injustice and discrimination, so that old policies don’t harden into dogma impervious to the changing realities of everyday life. Should Washington be on the lookout for signs that states and localities are raising new hurdles to minority voting? Absolutely, and that applies especially to GOP efforts to erect obstacles to Hispanics exercising their growing voting power.
Does my home state of Virginia, which elected the nation’s first black governor, and which Barack Obama carried twice, still need the Justice Department to micromanage its elections? That’s not so clear. If we are going to keep states under the strictures of the Act, we ought to have actual, here-and-now evidence of systematic wrong-doing. After all, the Act’s authors sold it as a temporary extension of federal power to remedy historic injustices, which means it is supposed to end sometime.
The ruling weakens but does not eviscerate the Act; minority voters can still file federal lawsuits challenging voting restrictions and redistricting plans under Section 2. And as Ezra Klein has noted, the Court didn’t actually bar Congress from continuing to subject states and localities to federal preclearance requirements, so long as it can produce recent evidence that they are disenfranchising minority voters. Where such evidence exists, Congressional Democrats should push legislation to bring violators under Section 4 coverage, and dare Republicans to block it.
Finally, there may be a silver lining for progressives in the Court’s decision—it could make Democrats more competitive in the South. During the 1990s, activists invoked the Act to create more “majority minority” districts in covered states. The theory was that racial and ethnic minorities need representation in legislatures in proportion to their share of the electorate; otherwise, their voting power would be diluted. Abetted by the Justice Department, a subsequent spate of “racial gerrymandering” did indeed increase the number of minorities elected to state legislatures and Congress. But it was a disaster for Democrats’ efforts to sustain biracial coalitions in the South.
By packing the most loyal Democratic voters into a smaller number of districts, it opened new fields of opportunity for Republicans peddling what Political Animal’s Ed Kilgore calls “white identity politics.” According to political scientists David Epstein and Sharyn O’Halloran, the creation of one majority-minority district increased the number of conservative-held seats by two. This is dumb electoral math, and it’s one reason why, while losing the overall House vote in 2012 by 1.5 million votes, Republicans still managed to win a lot more districts than Democrats.
If the Supreme Court’s decision permits legislative line-drawing that spreads Democratic voters across more districts, thus putting more seats in play, it could come back to haunt Republicans. Now that would be poetic justice.