Voting Rights Cases Make This Supreme Court Squeamish
The court really wants to stay out of the political thicket. Call it the “Roberts Doctrine.”
He’d prefer not to.
Photographer: Mario Tama/Getty ImagesYesterday’s Supreme Court arguments in a major voting rights case portend what appears to be the future of election law: The continuing withdrawal of the court from the role of policing elections for racial fairness. Call this the Roberts Doctrine.
The chief justice has been pushing the agenda of judicial disengagement from voting rights issues since 2012, when he wrote a landmark decision in the case Shelby County v. Holder, striking down section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The new case, out of Arizona, addresses Section 2 of the same act. The court may well be poised to weaken that part of the law to make it harder to challenge a state’s voting practices as racially discriminatory. If it does, this will continue the judicial pullback from a role the courts have played since 1964, when the Supreme Court established the principle of one person, one vote.