Will Blacks Still Have the Right to Vote?

While Congress debates the third iteration of the fiscal psychodrama, last Wednesday a matter of much greater importance for millions of minorities was before the Supreme Court. Depending on the decision of nine justices, the voting rights of blacks, which had been trampled for over 100 years, could once again be threatened. What alerted Supreme Court observers was the aggression with which the Court’s conservative majority questioned the attorneys opposing the change in the law.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 provides that in nine states, including Southern states that have a particularly violent history of discrimination, any change in their voting laws is subject to the approval of the Department of Justice. This provision of the voting rights law, passed in 1965, was renewed by Congress in 2006. The approval was nearly unanimous: a unanimous vote in the Senate and a huge majority in the House of Representatives. Out of 100 representatives from Southern states, 90 supported the extension of this legal provision.

Despite these votes from citizens’ representatives, the Supreme Court today assumes the right to re-examine this decision. Antonin Scalia, one of the Court’s most conservative justices, awkwardly implied that for blacks voting was an entitlement. This seemed like a Freudian slip, revealing Scalia’s deepest thoughts on ethnic minorities’ right to vote.

The debate over keeping this provision is particularly timely when one sees the electoral tampering that has been attempted in order to “deliver” some states, notably in the South. It’s thanks to the Voting Rights Act that the Department of Justice was able to oppose attempts at vote tampering in Florida and Texas. A study by Morgan Kousser, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology, shows that five out of six discrimination cases between 1957 and 2013 took place in states subject to Section 5 of the civil rights law. More than ever, the Supreme Court is trying to put America back in the 1950s, when the country was overwhelmingly white and blacks “stayed in their place.”