“If the Court struck down or weakened Section 5, it would lead to the largest rollback of American democracy since the end of Reconstruction,” Wade Henderson, the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told reporters recently in advance of the ruling.
Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act requires that certain jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination, including most southern states, submit any changes to their election systems to the U.S. Justice Department for “pre-clearance.” The Justice Department is empowered to block changes that could reduce minority voting power. In the decision announced Thursday, Shelby County v. Holder, the court ruled that the formula used by Congress to decide which jurisdictions are covered under the law, known as Section 4b, violates the Constitution.
That means that if Congress were to pass new legislation changing the formula, Section 5 could be revived. And voting-rights advocates inside and outside Congress told MSNBC before the ruling that they’ve already begun discussions toward that goal. But given the partisan nature of the issue, and the current level of congressional gridlock, it figures to be a very heavy lift.
The court’s four other conservative justices, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Anthony Kennedy, joined Roberts in the majority.
Lawyers for Shelby County, Ala. argued that the south has made progress on race relations since the 1960′s, meaning Section 5 in its current form is no longer needed, and violates the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. But in 2006, Congress overwhelmingly reauthorized the Voting Rights Act, finding that voting discrimination remains a problem in covered areas. And as the Justice Department noted, in recent years the provision has been used to block a slew of election changes in covered areas—including strict voter ID laws passed in 2011 by Texas and South Carolina, a Texas statewide redistricting plan that was found to have intentionally discriminated against minorities, and cutbacks to early voting in several Florida counties. And North Carolina—much though not all of which is covered under Section 5—passed a voter ID bill in April, which had appeared likely to be challenged under Section 5. All those measures were pushed by Republicans, and opposed by Democrats.
