“Our research shows that, over the half-century period in which this section of the Voting Rights Act was in effect, thousands of racially discriminatory voting policies were stopped before they could go into effect.
But no longer.”
Tomorrow marks the 61st anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama. It also marks the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court first upholding the Voting Rights Act.
We have gotten so, so far away from a Court that cares about democracy.
New from me at @brennancenter.org:
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(Also: I don't cover this in the piece, but it's worth remembering that CJ Roberts cut his teeth in the Reagan DOJ trying to kill the Voting Rights Act. This has been the central throughline of his career)
As we all remember the marchers in Selma tomorrow, let's also remember the era when we had a Supreme Court that cared about building up our democracy. We had a Court like that once; we can't give up on the fight to get one once again.
Sixty years ago, the Supreme Court upheld the Voting Rights Act to protect Americans of all races, ethnicities, and language backgrounds from discriminatory election rules. Even if today’s justices refuse to do the same, we must continue the fight to protect the vote.
bit.ly/4lagoMy
Someone should write a book about this!
Exactly right.
The Civil Rights Division was able to show that it took exhaustive (and exhausting) work to litigate even the most obvious violations of the voting rights protections in the 1957 and 1960 acts, which ultimately convinced Congress and then SCOTUS that a much broader law was needed.
Sad news
As we all remember the marchers in Selma tomorrow, let's also remember the era when we had a Supreme Court that cared about building up our democracy. We had a Court like that once; we can't give up on the fight to get one once again.
In our book coming out in Sept, Mike Miller and I document how SCOTUS was, for a while, a great ally in building up the Voting Rights Act. Of course, over the past 15 years, it has instead turned into the VRA's fiercest opponent
His take on how the legal system can be weaponized was especially insightful:
"After enduring nearly a century of systematic resistance to the Fifteenth Amendment, Congress might well decide to shift the advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of the evil to its victims."
Writing for the majority, CJ Earl Warren acknowledged the law “create[ed] stringent new remedies for voting discrimination,” but they were needed “to banish the blight of racial discrimination in voting, which has infected the electoral process in parts of our country for nearly a century.”
The Court upheld preclearance by an 8-1 vote. SCOTUS gave Congress great latitude, as the 15th Amendment clearly directs them to (some current justices would do well to re-read Sec 2: "The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.")
Arguing for GA before SCOTUS (and against the VRA), E. Freeman Leverett admitted that the state had committed offenses in the past, but that was over by now (sound familiar??). Instead, he argued, the VRA was enacted after a "mob" in Selma was "threatening revolution and rebellion in the streets"
It was a game of legislative whack-a-mole. When one law or policy was struck down, another arose. By requiring some jurisdictions to "preclear" changes to their elections before they went into effect, the VRA tried to get around this
AG Katzenbach testified that it took thousands of hours to argue a single voting rights case --- at which point, vote suppressors, "even after apparent defeat in the courts, to devise whole new methods of discrimination. And often that means beginning the whole weary process all over again."
The whole point of the VRA was to fight back against the "systematic and ingenious discrimination" plaguing elections in the South. As LBJ argued before passage, "No law that we now have on the books... can ensure the right to vote when local officials are determined to deny it."
Tomorrow marks the 61st anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama. It also marks the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court first upholding the Voting Rights Act.
We have gotten so, so far away from a Court that cares about democracy.
New from me at @brennancenter.org:
Warren clearly understood how the legal system can be weaponized by people intent on doing harm. Lots of echos today
This line from the majority opinion always sticks with me:
"After enduring nearly a century of systematic resistance to the Fifteenth Amendment, Congress might well decide to shift the advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of the evil to its victims."
I'm back on this hobbyhorse and have cleaned up the resentment models. But look at this: while resentment cleanly predicts timing in uptake of the Big Lie, ideology / PID / education / income don't. At all.
Next scheduled decision day is 3/20, so our hearts can get a little break from this 10AM ritual
No Callais this morning.
Methinks the Court likes the drama a little too much. We know what DAYS decisions will come, but not WHICH ONES?
Even by his standards Alito’s opinion in NY redistricting case last night was totally unhinged. If he’s writing majority opinion in Voting Rights Act case that’s very very bad news www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
The advocacy around the SAVE Act was frankly really inspiring. Ordinary people care about democracy, and working together to tell our leaders (and, especially, senators) that bringing back the VRA is something else demand is critical
It's an important question. I don't think it happens without major court reform. But there are substantive legislative options out there; in 2022, we came 1-2 votes away from convincing the Senate to go back to the talking filibuster for the bill to restore the VRA
The way Alito's concurrence was written tonight was focused on the illegality of typical remedies of using race to draw fair maps
This is actually interesting. Depending on how the decision comes down, it could still allow courts to order moving from at-large to districted plans, since that is a race-blind remedy. Now, those districts could still be gerrymandered, but...
So many cities are going to adopt at large schemes
