In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has ruled Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional. Justice Ginsburg dissented along with Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan. The Voting Rights Act was put into motion in 1966 as part of a cornerstone legislation to curtail discriminatory voting practices in the U.S. Chief Justice Roberts delivered the opinion of the Court.
According to SCOTUS Blog, the issue at hand was in regards to:
“Whether Congress’ decision in 2006 to reauthorize Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act under the pre-existing coverage formula of Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act exceeded its authority under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and thus violated the Tenth Amendment and Article IV of the United States Constitution.”
The decision drastically scales back the federal government’s power to reject state laws it believes are prejudiced against minority voters, which include some efforts to fortify identification requirements such as bringing a drivers license to the ballot box. The Obama administration has fought Section 4 vigorously over the past few years as at least 30 states have adopted more secure measures, as noted by Yahoo.
In 2006, Congress authorized Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act which gave the federal government “the ability to pre-emptively reject changes to election law in states and counties that have a history of discriminating against minority voters” with those states and counties identified by a formula based on past voter turnouts and registration data. Essentially, if a state wants to enact some kind of security measure for voting, they have to go through the federal government first.
Chief Justice Roberts noted in his opinion that “This was strong medicine, but Congress determined it was needed to address entrenched racial discrimination in voting, ‘an insidious and pervasive evil which had been perpetuated in certain parts of our country through unremitting and ingenious defiance of the Constitution.'”
The American public is still waiting for Court rulings on the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s state amendment Proposition 8, the former being a 1996 ruling that federal marriage benefits are only applicable to opposite-sex couples and the latter being that same-sex marriages are illegal in California.
The Supreme Court will make its rulings tomorrow, June 26, at 10am ET.
