There’s a bleak irony in the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court striking down one of the highest points in American democracy, argued New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie.
The conservative majority severely weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in a 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, ruling that protecting minority representation in congressional maps is unconstitutional, and Bouie argued in a new column titled “the law they hate was a high point in our history” that they had betrayed democratic values.
“The Voting Rights Act of 1965 wasn’t the top-down dictate of a rogue, liberal Supreme Court — if such a thing has ever existed,” he wrote. “It wasn’t the brainchild of out-of-touch bureaucrats in Washington, nor was it some kind of martial settlement imposed on the states of the former Confederacy.”
“It was, instead, an achievement of the most effective social movement of the postwar United States,” the columnist added. “The Voting Rights Act revitalized American democracy and stands as one of its great achievements.”
The swift response to the ruling by Republican state legislatures made the landmark law appear to have been an imposition by an outside force, but Bouie said it was instead the years-long work off grassroots activists who risked their lives to secure their fundamental rights, and the act was signed into law by a president elected in one of the largest landslides in U.S. history and reauthorized by Congress over and over.
“If there is any single law that you could plausibly say represents the general will of the American people, it might be one that was reaffirmed nearly every decade for 40 years by the people’s representatives,” Bouie argued. “This isn’t just a historical point or a piece of idle trivia. It is essential. And it gets to what is so egregious about the court’s campaign against the law.”
The Voting Rights Act was an effort to fulfill the promise of the Constitution’s 15th Amendment, itself the result of the sacrifices made in the Civil War, to make democracy real for all Americans, Bouie argued, and he bitterly noted the irony of this particular court undoing those hard-won gains.
“The Voting Rights Act has more — much more — democratic legitimacy than this Supreme Court has ever enjoyed,” Bouie wrote. “After all, most of this court’s conservative majority was appointed by presidents who entered office as winners of the Electoral College but not the popular vote.”
“It is that relative difference in democratic legitimacy that makes this court’s voting rights jurisprudence so offensive,” he added.
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