The case that struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act was called Shelby County v. Holder. You are Holder. Do you think the Administration in retrospect could have done anything differently in arguing that case?

No, I don’t think so. I was one of the few people in the department that thought there was no way the Supreme Court was going to go against the record Congress had established. Folks in the Solicitor General’s office predicted the result.

With all due respect to the Chief Justice, this was the culmination of an effort he began many years before, when he was a young person in the Reagan Justice Department. He now had the ability to do what he was unable to do before. He had four votes in addition to his own and it really didn’t matter what we did, they were going to get to the result he desired.

As a young lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department, John Roberts wrote memo after memo arguing that violations of the Voting Rights Act “should not be made too easy to prove.” He was writing not about Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act but about Section 2, which has been used by DOJ to challenge laws in Texas and North Carolina. How concerned are you that one of these cases is going to go before the Supreme Court and the Court is going to overturn the constitutionality of Section 2?

Unlike what you hear in law school, the Supreme Court is a political institution and the reality is they can only go, I think, so far. Maybe I’m being exceedingly naïve, but I think that even for this Supreme Court, that’s a bridge too far. You gutted the act in the Shelby County decision and now to take out the remaining part, which we are now using to protect the right of people to vote, to knock that down or weaken that would subject the court to the kind of criticism that at least a couple of those justices would say ‘we can’t go that far.’

2016 is the first presidential election in 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. What should we be doing now to both protect voting rights in the short term but also in the longer term to reframe this discussion so that voter suppression is not the new normal?

Well, I think in the short-term voter suppression is the new normal.