“Hubris is a fit word for today’s demolition of the Voting Rights Act,” Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg declared in dissenting from the Supreme Court’s decision gutting the Act.
Ironically, the statute the court found unconstitutional was named the “Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act.” Certainly these women will not rest until this misguided decision by the court is corrected.
The opinion by Chief Justice Roberts reflects judicial activism – which conservatives purport to loathe – at its worst.
The court went out of its way to take up the issue by ruling on what legal scholars call a “facial challenge” to a statute (a rarity for the court). It also dissed the 15,000 pages of the legislative record compiled by Congress in 2006, which detailed both flagrant individual voting discrimination situations and systemic discrimination. This demonstrated that the Voting Rights Act was still very much needed.
While the court’s decision rests on the notion that race discrimination in voting has all but been eliminated since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, as Ginsburg pointed out, we are dealing today with “second generation” discrimination barriers.
The first generation barriers that directly blocked blacks from voting, such as literacy tests, have been replaced by indirect measures, she noted, that dilute or marginalize the impact of the minority vote, such as incorporating majority white areas into city limits.
In her powerful and poignant dissent, Ginsburg tells the story of the “Bloody Sunday” that caused Martin Luther King, Jr. to lead a march from Selma, the site of the protesters bloodshed, to Montgomery, Alabama’s capital, to call for passage of the Voting Rights Act. And she also tells the story of how race discrimination in voting still infects our democracy.
She points to a recent case involving an FBI investigation that “provides a further window into the persistence of racial discrimination in state politics.” FBI wiretaps of some white state senators revealed them making racial slurs – calling fellow black legislators “Aborigines” – which, Ginsburg observed, led the judge who presided in the case to conclude that racist sentiments “remain regrettably entrenched in the highest echelons of state government.”
If there is any redeeming value to the court’s decision, it is that it leaves the door open to Congress to fix the court’s clear setback to democracy. We urge the Congress to immediately act to reinstate the voting rights stripped by the court’s decision. For as Ginsburg pointed out in citing a 1886 Supreme Court case, the right to vote is the “preservative of all rights.”
