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State of the Discipline
INTRODUCTION
Voting Rights and America's Racial Policy Alliances
The U.S. Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder that found Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) unconstitutional was the first substantial invalidation of any of the major civil rights laws of the 1960s.1It reinforces modern Republican efforts to make voting more difficult, which will inevitably impose a disproportionate burden on Democratic constituencies such as the poor and racial and ethnic minorities. The Court enfeebled the most interventionist egalitarian power asserted by Congress in the twentieth century: the requirement of federal preclearance of changes in voting rules in certain jurisdictions. Under the VRA's Section 5, a number of states identified by the formula in Section 4(b), whose voting systems have posed barriers to full participation, have long been required to obtain permission from the U.S. Department of Justice or the District Court for the District of Columbia before making any changes to laws which impact voting. Even before the ruling, GOP-controlled state legislatures were changing voting laws energetically. In Shelby's wake, many of these new restrictive laws went into effect. With Republicans winning nationwide in the 2014 elections and the Shelby ruling in place, further restrictive initiatives are on the rise.
The nullification of Section 4(b) is clearly part of partisan struggles. But partisan struggles today are also racial policy struggles. The abolition of preclearance approval was a major triumph for what we call the modern "color blind racial policy alliance" over its rival, the "race conscious policy alliance" (King and Smith, 2011, pp. 9-10). The fifty-eight amicus briefs in the case, twenty-five urging invalidation of Section 4(b), thirty-three favoring upholding it, represented a virtual who's who of the affiliates of the modern racial alliances, from the Cato Institute and the Pacific Legal Foundation on the one hand to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on the other.
Section 4(b) of the VRA specified the criteria for identifying the jurisdictions subject to preclearance. The Court ruled that the formula defining these criteria--whether less than 50% of persons of voting age were registered to vote in 1964, or whether less than 50% voted in the 1964 presidential election--is no longer...