I have written this piece for Slate. It begins:
In 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, one of the most important pieces of legislation in U.S. history. It contained key protections for minority voters, especially blacks, who had been effectively disenfranchised in the South. The act was a remarkable success, increasing minority voter registration and turnout rates within a few years. In 1982, an important amendment made it much easier for minority voters to elect candidates of their choice.
Then, following the contested 2000 elections, states started passing new voting rules along partisan lines. As part of these voting wars, conservative states began passing laws making it harder to register and vote, restrictions that seemed to fall most on poor and minority voters.
In the midst of all of this, the Supreme Court in 2013 struck down a key component of the Voting Rights Act. It had required states and jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting to get permission from the federal government before making a voting change by proving that the proposed change would not make it harder for minority voters to vote and to elect their preferred candidates.
Don’t worry, Chief Justice John Roberts assured the American public in that 2013 case, Shelby County v. Holder. Although states with a history of racial discrimination would no longer be subject to federal “preclearance” of voting changes because preclearance offends the “equal sovereignty” of states such as Texas, there’s always Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. That provision, Roberts explained, is available “in appropriate cases to block voting laws from going into effect. … Section 2 is permanent, applies nationwide, and is not at issue in this case.”
It concludes:
Let’s not mistake what Texas is doing here. To seem more moderate, it couches its constitutional arguments in the language of “constitutional avoidance,” not exactly saying that Section 2 is unconstitutional but saying that the courts should read it narrowly because otherwise the law would be unconstitutional. In practical terms, that’s a distinction without a difference. In either case, according to Texas, the result is that Section 2 cannot offer protection for racial minorities in vote denial cases.
If the argument succeeds, then Roberts’ promise in Shelby County that minority voters will be protected by Section 2 after the death of preclearance will prove to be tragically empty. And the Texas two-step will stomp out what remains of protections for minority voters from the new vote denial.