Fourteenth Amendment

By Mark Posner, Senior Counsel, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law

Recently, Judge John Bates of the U.S. District Court in Washington, DC, ruled that a core provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – the Section 5 “preclearance” requirement – remains a constitutional exercise of Congress’ anti-discrimination authority under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. This was a major victory in our nation’s ongoing efforts to “banish the blight of racial discrimination in voting.”

This challenge to the constitutionality of Section 5 was brought by Shelby County, Ala., a largely white suburb of Birmingham. In rejecting the County’s arguments, Judge Bates agreed with an earlier unanimous decision, by a three-judge panel of the D.C. District Court (Nw. Mun. Util. Dist. No. One v. Holder, 573 F. Supp. 2d 221 (D.D.C. 2008)), which likewise upheld the constitutionality of Section 5, in a case brought by a local Texas utility district. That earlier decision, however, was vacated in 2009 when the Supreme Court decided that the utility district could pursue a statutory “bailout” from Section 5 coverage. Unlike the Texas utility district, Shelby County freely admitted that it has a recent history of voting discrimination that disqualified it from “bailing out.”

Section 5 requires states and localities with a history of discrimination in voting – mostly in the South and Southwest – to obtain federal preclearance before implementing any changes in a voting “standard, practice, or procedure.” Preclearance is obtained by demonstrating, either to the Attorney General or the D.C. District Court, that the change does not have a discriminatory purpose or effect.

Congress enacted the preclearance procedure in 1965 after it found that certain jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination often were devising new discriminatory voting practices when old ones were struck down by the federal courts. Thereafter, Congress reauthorized Section 5 four times, in 1970, 1975, 1982, and, most recently, in 2006, each time finding that voting discrimination in the covered jurisdictions had remained high. Section 5 has prevented hundreds of discriminatory voting changes from going into effect, and has deterred countless others from ever being enacted.

In the Shelby County case, Judge Bates confronted the fundamental question of what legal standard should be used to determine whether, as Shelby County claimed, Congress had exceeded its authority in reauthorizing Section 5 for 25 years in 2006. Shelby County invoked recent Supreme Court holdings that, at least as to certain Fourteenth Amendment legislation, “[t]here must be a congruence and proportionality between the injury to be prevented or remedied and the means adopted to that end.”  In so doing, the County proposed a standard that would effectively preclude Congress from renewing effective antidiscrimination laws. The United States and defendant-intervenors (represented by civil rights organizations and law firms, including the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the ACLU, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund) argued that, in its prior rulings in 1966 and 1980 upholding Section 5, the Supreme Court held that Congress may “use any rational means to effectuate the constitutional prohibition of racial discrimination in voting.” 

This post is part of an ACSblog Constitution Week Symposium. By Doug Kendall, President, and Judith Schaeffer, Vice President, Constitutional Accountability Center  

As ACS members know, our Constitution is under attack from tea partiers and other self-professed “constitutional conservatives” who have claimed the document as their own and distorted it to support their ideological agenda. Over the past two years, they have made increasingly extreme, and in some cases absurd, claims about our Nation’s charter. They started with calls to repeal a number of Amendments, including the part of the 14th Amendment that protects citizenship at birth. They progressed to claims that Social Security, Medicare, and portions of the Affordable Care Act are unconstitutional. It’s gotten to the point where it seems that many in the tea party believe the entire 20th Century was unconstitutional. Talk about a bridge to the 21st Century!  The tea party movement seems to want to build a bridge back to the colonial era and the Articles of Confederation.

There is no greater threat to progressive values than this effort to make progress itself unconstitutional. This week, Constitutional Accountability Center and our partner organizations, including the Center for American Progress and People For the American Way Foundation, launched a coordinated effort  -- Constitutional Progressives -- to take our Constitution back and rebut the constitutional fairy tales being peddled by tea party leaders. Our greatest assets in doing so are the text and history of the Constitution itself.

Constitutional Progressives celebratethe Framers for creating the best and most durable form of government in world history, but believe the Constitution today is better than the document ratified in 1789.  Generations of Americans have made our country and our Constitution “more perfect” by ratifying Amendments that have eliminated slavery, protected liberty and equality, expanded the powers of the federal government, and secured voting rights for every adult citizen in America.   

This story of constitutional improvement should inspire all Americans, and we’re asking people across the political spectrum to join Constitutional Progressives by signing the “Whole Constitution Pledge” --  a pledge to support the entire Constitution, including the Amendments adopted over the last 220 years. The Pledge can be signed on line, here. More than 15,000 people across the country have already signed. We’ve made a similar call to all Members of Congress, urging them on Constitution Day to reaffirm their constitutional oath of office -- their pledge to support the whole Constitution, not just the parts they like or find ideologically convenient.