Voting Rights Act: Dying a slow death

Together, Republicans and the Supreme Court are conspiring to "all but destroy the remaining protections of the law."

(Image credit: Apu Gomes / Getty Images)

The 1965 Voting Rights Act, which turned 60 on Aug. 6, is "being attacked from every angle," said Ari Berman in Mother Jones. The biggest assault is coming from the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts, who "worked strenuously to weaken the law" as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration and has been at war with it ever since. The VRA successfully stopped Southern states from using poll taxes, literacy tests, and other discriminatory tactics to block Black people from voting. But the high court gutted "the heart of the VRA" in 2013, when it ruled that "states with a long history of discrimination no longer needed" federal approval to change their voting laws. A few years later, a Roberts-led majority found that federal courts had no authority to stop states' partisan gerrymandering. Now Texas' GOP-controlled legislature is pursuing a racist effort to eliminate House districts in which people of color are in the majority. Together, Republicans and the Supreme Court are conspiring to "all but destroy the remaining protections of the law."

It may soon get worse, said Stephen L. Carter in Bloomberg. Historically, individual plaintiffs have sued under the VRA to overturn discriminatory local voting laws. But an appeals court ruled this year that only the Justice Department can bring such lawsuits. That decision is on hold while the Supreme Court weighs it, but if the conservative majority upholds it, the protection of voting rights would "rest upon the accident of who holds power" in Washington. Those now in power are openly hostile to voting rights, said Allegra Lawrence-Hardy and Joyce White Vance in Slate. President Trump's Justice Department has gutted its Voting Rights Section and threatened to prosecute local election officials for failing to stop "fraud." Meanwhile, congressional Republican lawmakers hope to pass the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship when registering to vote, such as passports and driver's licenses, which many low-income people lack.

The VRA transformed the U.S. into a "republic built on multiracial pluralism," said Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times. "The law demolished the architecture of Jim Crow disenfranchisement" and cleared a path for "millions of Black Americans living in the South" to vote and have a voice in their country's present and future. With the help of the Supreme Court, "it's this America that Donald Trump and his movement hope to condemn to the ash heap of history."