Ruth Bader Ginsburg Saw the Future When It Came to Voting Rights

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://time.com/5890983/ruth-bader-ginsburg-voting-rights/

Justice Ginsburg’s dissents were often even more powerful than her voice when she was in the majority. She described them as “appealing to the intelligence of a future day.” She never stopped believing in that better future or that the law provided a vehicle for moving the country forward.

This was never truer than when she found herself in the minority in the voting rights case, Shelby County v. Holder, joined by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan. The majority opinion rolled back the 1965 Voting Rights Act’s protections and permitted states, including those with histories of racially motivated voter suppression, to change their voting procedures without any outside oversight. Justice Ginsburg knew what that meant and refused to pretend it wouldn’t erode the advances made under the act.

The case’s legal underpinnings are somewhat complicated but worth tracing. Shelby County, Ala., just south of Birmingham, sued then-Attorney General Eric Holder in federal court in the District of Columbia in April 2010, arguing parts of the Voting Rights Act were unconstitutional. The district judge disagreed, ruling that the act would stay in force. The Court of Appeals affirmed.

The Voting Rights Act was enacted to ensure no citizen would be denied the right to vote because of race or color. It created a “coverage formula” that applied to states and political subdivisions with a history of significant discrimination against Black voters in the 1960s and 1970s. This discrimination included impossible literacy tests, administered only to Black people and poor white people and devices like Mississippi’s notorious soap-bubble test, which required Black voters to correctly guess the number of bubbles in a bar of soap in order to vote. The act prohibited the old discriminatory tests and devices and required those jurisdictions to submit any new changes in their voting procedures—closing or moving polling places, requirements for more and more limited forms of identification, reduction in early voting days, purges to voter rolls—to either the Justice Department or the district court in the District of Columbia for approval before they enacted them, a process called preclearance.

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