On Monday, two conservative judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit voted to gut what is left of the Voting Rights Act. If the decision stands, it will eviscerate the ability of minority voters to vindicate their right to vote — and signal open season on judicial precedent.
The VRA is a landmark piece of civil rights legislation. Passed in 1965, it guards against voting practices and procedures that deny or dilute the right to vote on the basis of race. President Lyndon B. Johnson and members of Congress who supported the act understood that it was necessary to prevent states and localities from discriminating against minorities exercising their right to vote. There can be no doubt of the act’s impact, it is the most important piece of federal legislation aimed at protecting voting rights.
The divided panel’s ruling would eliminate the ability of individuals and groups, who bring the overwhelming majority of Section 2 cases, to sue.
Despite the law’s importance and effectiveness, in 2013, five conservative Supreme Court justices gutted key portions of the act. Since that ruling, Section 5, the portion of the act that required cities, counties and states with a history of discrimination to check in with the federal government before making changes to their voting rules and practices, has been effectively a dead letter. As the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg decried in her dissent, eliminating this preclearance requirement “when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
But in that ruling, the majority of the court’s conservatives told us not to worry: that minority voting rights could still be vindicated by bringing suit under Section 2 of the act. That section has allowed private individuals, groups and the federal government to sue states and localities over laws that deny or abridge the right to vote on the basis of…
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