ACSblog symposium on Shelby County v. Holder

by Justin Levitt. Professor Levitt, on loan from Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, is a visiting associate professor of law at Yale Law School. He focuses on constitutional law and the law of the political process. This post is part of an ACSblog symposium on Shelby County v. Holder.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear Shelby County v. Holder, a challenge to part of the Voting Rights Act.  The case touches on enormously important, vigorously contested, issues: federalism, race, voting rights, political power, Congressional authority.  Amidst all of this big stuff, the Court must make sure it keeps its eye on the heart of the case.

The fight is about a particular part of the Voting Rights Act, with special rules for much of the South (and a few other jurisdictions).  It requires these states (and counties, and towns) to run any election-related changes by the Department of Justice or a federal court, to make sure that the changes won’t leave minorities politically worse off. 

The process of DOJ or court review is called “preclearance” – and in 1966, and again in 1980, the Supreme Court firmly validated the concept for the parts of the country with the most troubled voting rights history.  Preclearance is special medicine, which the Court has already approved for the sickest patients.

In 2006, Congress essentially renewed the prescription as is. And the plaintiffs now challenging the law say that the patient list is out of date. It’s a 1965 take, they say, on a 21st century world: the list is no longer sufficiently tailored to where the problems are.

So who is on the list, needing federal approval for new election rules? It starts with a formula: areas where less than half of the eligible population registered or voted in the presidential elections of the 60s. These are the parts of the country where democracy was broken. We talk about majority rule: in these areas, a majority wasn’t even able to participate.

Shelby County, Alabama, was on the list in the 60s. And it’s still on the list now. But that doesn’t mean the list is static.  Quite the contrary: change was built into coverage from the get-go. 

by Ryan P. Haygood, Director of LDF’s Political Participation Group, and part of LDF’s litigation team in Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder. LDF Special Counsel Debo P. Adegbile will present oral argument on behalf of defendant-intervenors in this case, including LDF’s clients, five Black ministers and Councilman Ernest Montgomery. In 2006, the City of Calera, which lies within Shelby County, enacted a discriminatory redistricting plan that was rejected by the Department of Justice under Section 5, leading to the loss of the city’s sole Black councilman, Mr. Montgomery.  Because of Section 5, however, the Department of Justice required Calera to redraw its electoral boundaries in a nondiscriminatory manner and conduct another election in which Mr. Montgomery regained his seat. This post is part of an ACSblog symposium on Shelby County v. Holder.

The United States Supreme Court will hear oral argument tomorrow in Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, one of the most important voting rights cases of our generation. 

In the case, Shelby County seeks to tear out the heart of the Voting Rights Act, Section 5. The Voting Rights Act is widely regarded as the most successful piece of civil rights legislation -- if not any legislation -- ever passed. It is for this reason that the Supreme Court, through an unbroken line of cases, has four times over four decades upheld the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act.

At oral argument, the Court will focus on two key questions: (1) whether voting discrimination persists to a degree that Section 5 is still needed; and, (2) whether that discrimination remains concentrated in the places covered by Section 5.

The answer to both queries is yes for two reasons.

First, in reauthorizing Section 5 in 2006, Congress identified the areas of the country with the worst histories of voting discrimination -- those places where persistent and adaptive discrimination has continued from the past through to the present and, which has proven particularly difficult to dislodge over time through case-by-case litigation. 

During the 2006 reauthorization review, Congress assembled a virtually unprecedented legislative record that closely examined the evidence to determine whether Section 5 is still needed. This analysis was careful, detailed, and included a wide range of views.  Congress received more testimony and information about the voting experience, both in and outside the places covered by Section 5, than it had during any of the previous reauthorizations. Over 10 months in 2005-2006, the House and Senate Judiciary Committees held a combined 21 hearings, received testimony from more than 90 witnesses—including state and federal officials, litigators, scholars, and private citizens—both for and against reauthorization, and compiled a 15,000 page record.  Representative James Sensenbrenner, then-Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, described the record as “one of the most extensive considerations of any piece of legislation that the United States Congress has dealt with in the 27 ½ years” that he had served in Congress.