The Supreme Court’s conservatives struck down a key plank in the Voting Rights Act, but still left an opening for Congress and the president to rewrite the law and restore its general intent. Will they?
The Court’s opinion argues that Section Four of the law as currently written unfairly targets nine states, all but two in the South, many of which clearly discriminated against black voters in the 1960’s but have improved since then. (The court’s conservatives and liberals differ sharply on the level of improvement.)
The opinion allows Congress to write a different formula to target states likely to discriminate in their voting laws and then subject those laws to pre-clearance from the Justice Department. President Obama has already said he would support such an effort, and it’s highly likely Democrats in Congress would as well, in part because the VRA is so strongly backed by African-American political voices like Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) who are influential figures in the party.
A chance for bipartisanship?
Would Republicans join the Democrats? In theory, they strongly support the law.
When the Voting Rights Act was up for renewal in 2006, it was approved in the GOP-controlled House by a 390-33 vote. All 197 Democrats who voted approved the provision, as did 192 Republicans, while just 33 dissented. In the Senate, which was also controlled by Republicans at the time, the VRA was approved 98-0.
But the conservatives on the Supreme Court, during oral arguments on this case, suggested politicians will always have trouble voting against something called the Voting Rights Act, even if they actually don’t support its provisions. In 2006, the question for Republicans was effectively if they would affirmatively end the Voting Rights Act.
Republican reluctance
Some members at the time, including Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, one of the states covered by Section 5, expressed reluctance about pre-clearance even though they ultimately backed renewing the law.
“Other states with much less impressive minority progress and less impressive minority participation are not covered, while Georgia still is,” Chambliss told the New York Times back then. ”This seems both unfair as well as unwise.”
Now, the Supreme Court has struck down the part of the Voting Rights Act that made Republicans uneasy. Democrats will put pressure on the GOP to live up to its previous votes on VRA and are likely to use the issue to portray the Republicans as unfriendly to minority voters at a time when the GOP is more than ever trying to expand its coalition.
On the other hand, adapting the VRA to the Roberts Court would require Republicans to identify areas of the country they believe specifically have a record of discriminating against minority voters, write a law saying those places need to have all of their voting laws overseen by the Department of Justice and get that passed through a House of Representatives dominated by highly-conservative members.
A party opposed to federal power
Even if House Speaker John Boehner himself strongly supports the Voting Rights Act, this would be a tall order.
The modern Republican Party is strongly opposed to expanding federal power, which would complicate a new version of a law that allows the federal government to overrule states and localities in their voting provisions. Creating a new grouping of places whose voting laws deserve heightened scrutiny would require singling out places and casting them as having racial challenges.
And many of the most controversial voting laws are being passed by Republican legislatures in the South, the region where many Republican members of Congress and the party’s voters are also based. Chambliss is not the only Southern Republican politician who will be defensive of his state and skeptical of specifically including it in an updated Voting Rights Act.