WASHINGTON —
The Supreme Court on Tuesday effectively
struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4
vote, ruling that Congress had not provided adequate justification for
subjecting nine states, mostly in the South, to federal oversight.
Stephen
Crowley/The New York Times
Wade
Henderson, president and C.E.O. of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human
Rights, criticized the decision on Tuesday.
“In 1965,
the states could be divided into two groups: those with a recent history of
voting tests and low voter registration and turnout, and those without those
characteristics,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority.
“Congress based its coverage formula on that distinction. Today the nation is
no longer divided along those lines, yet the Voting Rights Act continues to
treat it as if it were.”
Chief
Justice Roberts said that Congress remained free to try to impose federal
oversight on states where voting rights were at risk, but must do so based on
contemporary data. When the law was last renewed, in 2006, Congress relied on
data from decades before. The chances that the current Congress could reach
agreement on where federal oversight is required are small, most analysts say.
Justices
Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.
joined the majority opinion. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, joined by
Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
The majority
held that the coverage formula in Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act,
originally passed in 1965 and most recently updated by Congress in 1975, was
unconstitutional. The section determines which states must receive preclearance
from the federal authorities.
The court
did not strike down Section 5, which sets out the pre-clearance requirement
itself. But without Section 4, which determines which states are covered,
Section 5 is without significance — unless Congress chooses to pass a new bill
for determining which states would be covered.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was
one of the towering legislative achievements of the civil rights movement. Its
central provision, Section 5, requires many state and local governments, mostly
in the South, to obtain permission from the Justice Department or a federal
court in Washington before making changes in laws that affect voting.
That means
jurisdictions covered by Section 5 must get federal approval before they make
minor changes to voting procedures, like relocating a polling place, or major
ones, like redrawing electoral districts.
The Supreme
Court had repeatedly upheld the law, saying that Section 5’s “preclearance
requirement” was an effective tool to combat the legacy of lawless conduct by
Southern officials bent on denying voting rights to blacks.
Critics of
Section 5 say it is a unique federal intrusion on state sovereignty and a badge
of shame for the affected jurisdictions that is no longer justified. They point
to high voter registration rates among blacks and the re-election of a black
president as proof that the provision is no longer needed.
Civil rights
leaders, on the other hand, say the law played an important role in the 2012
election, with courts relying on it to block voter identification requirements and cutbacks
on early voting.
Section 5
was originally set to expire in five years. Congress repeatedly extended it:
for five years in 1970, seven years in 1975, and 25 years in 1982. Congress
renewed the act in 2006 after holding extensive hearings on the persistence of
racial discrimination at the polls, again extending the preclearance
requirement for 25 years.
In 2012, a
divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the
District of Columbia rejected a challenge to the law filed by Shelby County,
Ala. Judge David S. Tatel, writing for the majority, acknowledged that “the
extraordinary federalism costs imposed by Section 5 raise substantial
constitutional concerns,” and he added that the record compiled by Congress to
justify the law’s renewal was “by no means unambiguous.”
“But
Congress drew reasonable conclusions from the extensive evidence it gathered,”
he went on. The constitutional amendments ratified after the Civil War, he
said, “entrust Congress with ensuring that the right to vote — surely among the
most important guarantees of political liberty in the Constitution — is not
abridged on account of race. In this context, we owe much deference to the
considered judgment of the people’s elected representatives.”
The
dissenting member of the panel, Judge Stephen F. Williams, surveyed recent
evidence concerning registration and turnout, the election of black officials,
the use of federal election observers and suits under another part of the law.
Some of that
evidence, he said, “suggests that the coverage formula completely lacks any
rational connection to current levels of voter discrimination,” while other
evidence indicates that the formula, “though not completely perverse, is a
remarkably bad fit with Congress’s concerns.”
“Given the
drastic remedy imposed on covered jurisdictions by Section 5,” he wrote, “I do
not believe that such equivocal evidence can sustain the scheme.”
The Supreme
Court had once before considered the constitutionality of the 2006 extension of
the law in a 2009 decision, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder.
But it avoided answering the central question, and it seemed to give Congress
an opportunity to make adjustments. Congress did not respond.
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