|
| Ryan P. Haygood, director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, talks outside the Supreme Court in Washington, Tuesday, June 25, 2013, about the Shelby County v. Holder, a voting rights case in Alabama. Charles White, the national field director for the NAACP is second from right and Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund is at right. The Supreme Court says a key provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act cannot be enforced until Congress comes up with a new way of determining which states and localities require close federal monitoring of elections. |
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- A deeply divided Supreme Court threw out the most powerful part
of the landmark Voting Rights Act on Tuesday, a decision deplored by the
White House but cheered by mostly Southern states now free from nearly
50 years of intense federal oversight of their elections.
Split
along ideological and partisan lines, the justices voted 5-4 to strip
the government of its most potent tool to stop voting bias - the
requirement in the Voting Rights Act that all or parts of 15 states with
a history of discrimination in voting, mainly in the South, get
Washington's approval before changing the way they hold elections.
Chief
Justice John Roberts, writing for a majority of conservative,
Republican-appointed justices, said the law's provision that determines
which states are covered is unconstitutional because it relies on
40-year-old data and does not account for racial progress and other
changes in U.S. society.
The decision
effectively puts an end to the advance approval requirement that has
been used to open up polling places to minority voters in the nearly
half century since it was first enacted in 1965, unless Congress can
come up with a new formula that Roberts said meets "current conditions"
in the United States. That seems unlikely to happen any time soon.
President
Barack Obama, the nation's first black chief executive, issued a
statement saying he was "deeply disappointed" with the ruling and
calling on Congress to update the law.
But in
the South, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley said that, while the requirement
was necessary in the 1960s, that was no longer the case. He said, "We
have long lived up to what happened then, and we have made sure it's not
going to happen again."
The advance approval,
or preclearance, requirement shifted the legal burden and required
governments that were covered to demonstrate that their proposed
election changes would not discriminate.
Going
forward, the outcome alters the calculus of passing election-related
legislation in the affected states and local jurisdictions. The threat
of an objection from Washington has hung over such proposals for nearly a
half century. Unless Congress acts, that deterrent now is gone.
That
prospect has upset civil rights groups which especially worry that
changes on the local level might not get the same scrutiny as the
actions of state legislatures.
Tuesday's
decision means that a host of state and local laws that have not
received Justice Department approval or have not yet been submitted can
take effect. Prominent among those are voter identification laws in
Alabama and Mississippi.
Texas Attorney
General Greg Abbott, a Republican, said his state's voter ID law, which a
panel of federal judges blocked as discriminatory, also would be
allowed to take effect.
Justice Ruth Bader
Ginsburg, dissenting from the ruling along with the court's three other
liberal, Democratic appointees, said there was no mistaking the court's
action.
"Hubris is a fit word for today's demolition" of the law, she said.
Reaction to the ruling from elected officials generally divided along partisan lines.
Mississippi
Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, said in a news release, "The
practice of preclearance unfairly applied to certain states should be
eliminated in recognition of the progress Mississippi has made over the
past 48 years."
But Democratic Rep. Bennie
Thompson, the only black lawmaker in Mississippi's congressional
delegation, said the ruling "guts the most critical portion of the most
important civil rights legislation of our time."
Alabama
Gov. Bentley, a Republican, pointed to his state's legislature - 27
percent black, similar to Alabama's overall population - as a sign of
the state's progress.
The court challenge came from Shelby County, Ala., a Birmingham suburb.
The
prior approval requirement had applied to the states of Alabama,
Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas
and Virginia. It also covered certain counties in California, Florida,
New York, North Carolina and South Dakota, and some local jurisdictions
in Michigan. Coverage was triggered by past discrimination not only
against blacks, but also against American Indians, Asian-Americans,
Alaska Natives and Hispanics.
Obama, whose
historic election was a subtext in the court's consideration of the
case, pledged that his administration would continue to fight
discrimination in voting. "While today's decision is a setback, it
doesn't represent the end of our efforts to end voting discrimination,"
the president said. "I am calling on Congress to pass legislation to
ensure every American has equal access to the polls."
Congress
essentially ignored the court's threat to upend the voting rights law
in a similar case four years ago.
Roberts said the "failure to act
leaves us today with no choice."
Congressional Democrats said they are eager to make changes, but Republicans were largely noncommittal.
Sen.
Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said he expects Republicans to block efforts
to revive the law, even though a Republican-led Congress overwhelmingly
approved its latest renewal in 2006 and President George W. Bush signed
it into law.
"As long as Republicans have a
majority in the House and Democrats don't have 60 votes in the Senate,
there will be no preclearance. It is confounding that after decades of
progress on voting rights, which have become part of the American
fabric, the Supreme Court would tear it asunder," Schumer said.
Attorney
General Eric Holder said the Justice Department "will not hesitate to
take swift enforcement action, using every legal tool that remains
available to us, against any jurisdiction that seeks to take advantage
of the Supreme Court's ruling by hindering eligible citizens' full and
free exercise of the franchise."
Those federal
tools include other permanent provisions of the Voting Rights Act that
prohibit discrimination and apply nationwide. But they place the burden
of proof on the government and can be used only one case at a time.
The
Obama administration and civil rights groups said there is a continuing
need for the federal law and pointed to the Justice Department's
efforts to block voter ID laws in South Carolina and Texas last year, as
well as a redistricting plan in Texas that a federal court found
discriminated against the state's large and growing Hispanic population.
The justices all agreed that discrimination in voting still exists.
But
Roberts said that the covered states have largely eradicated the
problems that caused them to be included in the first place.
"The
coverage formula that Congress reauthorized in 2006 ignores these
developments, keeping the focus on decades-old data relevant to
decades-old problems, rather than current data reflecting current
needs," the chief justice said.
Ginsburg countered that Congress had found that the prior approval provision was necessary "to prevent a return to old ways."
Instead,
"the court today terminates the remedy that proved to be best suited to
block that discrimination," she said in a dissent that she read aloud
in the packed courtroom.
Ginsburg said the law
continues to be necessary to protect against what she called subtler,
"second-generation" barriers to voting. She identified one such effort
as the switch to at-large voting from a district-by-district approach in
a city with a sizable black minority. The at-large system allows the
majority to "control the election of each city council member,
effectively eliminating the potency of the minority's votes," she said.
Justice
Clarence Thomas was part of the majority, but wrote separately to say
anew that he would have struck down the advance approval requirement
itself.
Civil rights lawyers condemned the ruling.
"The
Supreme Court has effectively gutted one of the nation's most important
and effective civil rights laws. Minority voters in places with a
record of discrimination are now at greater risk of being
disenfranchised than they have been in decades," said Jon Greenbaum,
chief counsel for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
The
decision comes five months after Obama started his second term in the
White House, re-elected by a diverse coalition of voters.
The
high court is in the midst of a broad re-examination of the ongoing
necessity of laws and programs aimed at giving racial minorities access
to major areas of American life from which they once were excluded. The
justices issued a modest ruling Monday that preserved affirmative action
in higher education and will take on cases dealing with
anti-discrimination sections of a federal housing law and another
affirmative action case from Michigan next term.
The
Alabama county's lawsuit acknowledged that the measure's strong
medicine was appropriate and necessary to counteract decades of
state-sponsored discrimination in voting, despite the Fifteenth
Amendment's guarantee of the vote for black Americans.
But
it asked whether there was any end in sight for a provision that
intrudes on states' rights to conduct elections and was considered an
emergency response when first enacted in 1965.
The
county noted that the 25-year extension approved in 2006 would keep
some places under Washington's oversight until 2031. And, the county
said, it seemed not to account for changes that include the elimination
of racial disparity in voter registration and turnout or the existence
of allegations of race-based discrimination in voting in areas of the
country that are not subject to the provision.
