By John Kruzel
WASHINGTON, April 30 (Reuters) – The Voting Rights Act of 1965 has often been called the crown jewel of the U.S. civil rights movement. But under a U.S. Supreme Court led for two decades by conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, experts said, that jewel has lost its luster.
In a 6-3 ruling on Wednesday powered by its conservative justices, the court gutted what scholars said was the last remaining pillar of the landmark law enacted after the “Bloody Sunday” march in Selma, Alabama with the aim of preventing racial discrimination in voting.
“The metaphor is a wrecking ball,” said Rick Hasen, an election law expert at UCLA, describing the Roberts Court’s approach to the Voting Rights Act, or VRA. “There are still parts of the VRA that are operative, but the two main pillars are now virtually dead letters.”
Those provisions include Section 2, the subject of Wednesday’s court ruling. The decision, which blocked an electoral map that had given Louisiana a second Black-majority U.S. House of Representatives district, will make it harder for minorities to challenge electoral maps as racially discriminatory under the landmark civil rights law.
The ruling was issued with congressional elections looming in November, as President Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans fight to maintain control of both the House and Senate. Trump hailed Wednesday’s ruling and said he thinks Republican-led states would now want to reconfigure their voting maps.
‘A COLOR-BLIND CONSTITUTION’
Supporters of the ruling, including John Yoo, who served as a Justice Department lawyer under Republican President George W. Bush, said it “continues the court’s campaign to ensure that the government obeys a color-blind Constitution.”
A sharp dissent authored by Justice Elena Kagan and joined by her two fellow liberals cast the ruling as the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”
Kagan pointed to another ruling involving Section 2 in which the conservative-majority court in 2021 endorsed Republican-backed measures in Arizona that a lower court said would disproportionately burden Black, Latino and Native American voters.
Kagan also cited a 2013 ruling authored by Roberts in a case involving Alabama’s Shelby County that gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, a provision that had required states and locales with a history of racial discrimination to get federal approval to change voting laws.
Wednesday’s ruling, Kagan wrote, “is part of a set.”
“For over a decade,” Kagan added, “this court has had its sights set on the Voting Rights Act.”
‘EFFECTIVELY DEAD’
The Voting Rights Act emerged in the aftermath of a pivotal 1965 voting rights march in which hundreds of Black people crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma and were met by state troopers who waded into the crowd swinging billy clubs.
Days after the incident now called “Bloody Sunday,” President Lyndon Johnson demanded that Congress approve voting rights legislation. Lawmakers passed the Voting Rights Act to broadly prohibit poll taxes, literacy tests and other racially motivated policies that had been implemented by white leaders in certain states to prevent Black voters from casting ballots.
The Voting Rights Act’s Section 5 required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to get federal approval to change voting laws, and provided a formula for determining which states and locales were subject to this “preclearance” provision.
In 2013, the Supreme Court upended these legal protections in a 5-4 ruling powered by the conservative justices in favor of officials from Alabama’s Shelby County. The court held that Congress had used outdated facts in continuing to force Alabama and eight other states, mainly in the South, to get federal approval for rule changes affecting Black and other minority voters.
The ruling left open the possibility of Congress devising a replacement formula for deciding which jurisdictions should be subjected to the preclearance requirement, though that never happened.
It also left the Voting Rights Act’s Section 2 untouched – for the time being.
The law’s Section 2 was amended by Congress in 1982 to prohibit electoral maps that would result in undermining the clout of minority voters, even absent direct proof of racist intent.
For more than four decades, plaintiffs could win a Section 2 claim by showing, among other things, that a voting map had a racially discriminatory impact under this legal standard, known as the “results test.”
The court’s decision on Wednesday, however, effectively turned Section 2 into an “intent test,” experts said.
The ruling was authored by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by Roberts and the four other conservative justices. It said the focus of Section 2 must center on the Constitution’s prohibition on intentional racial discrimination under its 15th Amendment.
Ratified in 1870 following the U.S. Civil War that ended slavery, the 15th Amendment authorizes Congress to pass laws ensuring that the right to vote not be denied “on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.”
Interpreting Section 2 to “outlaw a map solely because it fails to provide a sufficient number of majority-minority districts would create a right that the amendment does not protect,” Alito wrote.
‘IMPOSSIBLE TO SATISFY’
Harvard Law School Professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos said Wednesday’s ruling means the results test is “effectively dead.”
“It’s there in theory but now impossible to satisfy in fact,” said Stephanopoulos, who filed a brief in the case defending the Voting Rights Act.
Press Robinson, an activist and one of the Louisiana residents who brought a legal challenge that led to the creation of the second Black-majority district in the state, said the Supreme Court decision would echo throughout the country at all levels of government, and that he feared that soon elected Black officials would “disappear.”
“We’ll be back where we were at the time that slavery was declared illegal in this country,” Robinson said on a call with reporters. “This country doesn’t seem to want to advance beyond that time.”
(Reporting by John Kruzel; Additional reporting by Brad Brooks; Editing by Will Dunham)
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