Andrew Cohen, at The Atlantic
Eric Posner, at Slate
On the narrow point that maybe coverage decision rules aren't optimal perhaps Roberts has a point, but it seems like an awful reason for the court to step on legislative prerogative. There was no argument that I'm aware of (I haven't read the decision - just characterizations of it by people smarter than me) that says the VRA itself is unconstitutional. But by stepping in on a legislative task in a Congress that is not inclined to pass anything they've effectively destroyed the principal guarantor of the fifteenth amendment.
Could it be remedied in the future? Sure, perhaps. We could get new decision rules and everything could be fine. But a lot of damage could be done in the interim and it still doesn't justify a terrible ruling.
So here's the 15th amendment, in its entirety:
ReplyDeleteSection 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
The VRA was passed by Congress to enforce Article 1 of the amendment. So any argument that the VRA is unconstitutional amounts to an argument that the 15th Amendment is unconstitutional, which is an obvious category error.
~But by stepping in on a legislative task in a Congress that is not inclined to pass anything they've effectively destroyed the principal guarantor of the fifteenth amendment.~
ReplyDeleteThis is just non-sense on stilts. The principal guarantor in legislation is Article 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The only way that the pre-clearance procedures of the VRA make any sense is to claim that the United States is exactly the same country as it was in 1965 - a fact that was no longer case by the mid-1970s when black and white participation in voting were roughly on par.