7. IT WORKED ON A WHOLE BUNCH OF LEVELS.
In 2010, Republican legislators propelled by Tea Party anger, new sources of outside conservative money and a precision plan devised by the strategists Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie increased the number of statehouses they fully controlled to 25 from 14. In 2011, Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin passed new voter-ID laws. The North Carolina General Assembly passed one that year as well but could not overcome a veto by Gov. Bev Perdue, a Democrat. In 2012, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Virginia followed with their own. The laws were strikingly similar. Its really, really unheard-of, or really rare, to have states move en masse all of the sudden to pass photocopied laws all at once without a national crisis, said Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, which has kept careful track of the new laws. There had not been this many restrictive voting laws in the states, Waldman said, since the Jim Crow era.
But by Election Day of 2012, most of the laws had been temporarily suspended, and some were blocked outright. In Texas, a federal court, quoting an earlier case, ruled that the states harsh voter-ID law was likely to lead to a retrogression in the position of racial minorities with respect to their effective exercise of the electoral franchise. Section 5, once again, had worked, and in 2012, for the first time in American history, the black turnout rate exceeded the white turnout rate, by two percentage points.
Three days after Obamas re-election, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to the constitutionality of Section 5, this time on behalf of Shelby County, Ala., one of whose hamlets the Department of Justice had blocked from eliminating the seat of its sole black lawmaker. The suit came from none other than Edward Blum.
Blum had moved on from challenging districts to challenging Section 5 itself. In 2006, he filed his first suit, on behalf of a small utility board in Austin that had no real effect on minority voting rights but, because it had a publicly elected board and was located in Texas, fell under Section 5 provisions. The suit failed to draw the Supreme Court into the question, though John Roberts Jr., now chief justice, had left the door open to doing so: Whether conditions continue to justify such legislation is a difficult constitutional question we do not answer today, he wrote.
His Shelby decision, rendered on June 25, 2013, answered that difficult constitutional question in the negative, striking down the formula for Section 5 coverage contained in Section 4. Echoing the language of his Reagan Justice Department memos from more than 30 years earlier, Roberts called Section 5 a drastic departure from basic principles of federalism that had since served its purpose. History did not end in 1965, Roberts wrote. Largely because of the Voting Rights Act, voting tests were abolished, disparities in voter registration and turnout due to race were erased and African-Americans attained political office in record numbers.
When Blum heard about the decision, he was overjoyed. I wept, he said.
Robertss decision prompted an unusually fiery response from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In her dissent, she noted that in studying the laws reauthorization in 2006, Congress found there were more D.O.J. objections between 1982 and 2004 (626) than there were between 1965 and the 1982 reauthorization (490). She noted that in a majority of those objections, the Justice Department cited calculated decisions to keep minority voters from fully participating in the political process. She pointed to a study that found that covered states and counties accounted for 56 percent of all successful discrimination cases brought under Section 2 of the law which applies equally in all states though they contained 25 percent of the nations population. And she read from F.B.I. transcripts involving a case in Alabama regarding a possible ballot proposition on gambling that some Republican lawmakers worried would cause a spike in the turnout of blacks, whom they referred to as aborigines who would arrive at polls in HUD-financed buses.
These conversations occurred not in the 1870s or even in the 1960s they took place in 2010, Ginsburg wrote. Hubris is a fit word for todays demolition of the V.R.A.
