Roberts and Voting Rights
By Benjamin Greenberg has an excellent post on John Roberts and Republican attempts to gut the VRA.
The importance of federal enforcement of these rules cannot be overstated. When LBJ pushed the first post-Reconstruction civil rights bill through the Senate, the bill was gutted not so much by removing substantive rights as by requiring that violations of voting rights be prosecuted by local jury trials, essentially making the act unenforceable. What made the 1965 Civil Rights Act so important was that it have the federal government the necessary powers to enforce 15th Amendment rights that states had been openly nullifying for several decades. But, to repeat what I said recently, these powers only matter of administrations are willing to use them. This history is also instructive because it’s a roadmap of what to expect when the VRA comes up for renewal. The strategy will be to reduce the ability of the federal government to enforce voting rights provisions. It’s important to be aware that this has the almost the= same effect as just repealing the bill altogether. Voting rights without federal remedies will be toothless.