Why Is John Roberts in a Rush All of a Sudden? |
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Over his two decades on the Supreme Court, United States Chief Justice John Roberts had consistently played the long game when it comes to the court’s weakening of voting rights. That was until the past few weeks. With a series of major upheavals in the past month alone, Roberts has signaled that he is shifting to a two-minute offense. This change of velocity, heralded by rulings relating to Louisiana’s and Alabama’s redistricting, threatens to continually upend American elections and create incentives for maximum partisan warfare at exactly the wrong time. The question is why Roberts is suddenly playing like a man running out of time.
Let’s review ways in which the chief justice, and the court he has led, had shown remarkable patience in voting and election cases. When Roberts was a 26-year-old staffer in the Reagan administration in 1982, he led the charge against Congress expanding Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to give minority voters a better chance to elect their candidates of choice to Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies. He believed that the new Section 2 would lead to proportional representation, rather than something more akin to a winner-take-all system, and strongly opposed what he termed racial quotas. He lost that battle over the scope of Section 2 when Congress passed the 1982 VRA amendments. But Roberts bode his time.
By 2006, when Congress on a bipartisan basis renewed the VRA yet again, Roberts had already been named chief justice by President George W. Bush. Voting rights opponents immediately challenged that part of the 2006 VRA renewal keeping in place for another 25 years Section 5 of the act, which required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting to get federal approval before making changes to their voting rules. In 2009, when the issue first reached the Supreme Court, Roberts wrote an opinion in the Northwest Austin case that raised questions about Section 5’s continuing constitutionality but ultimately punted on the question. Instead of taking up the question directly, he gave Congress a chance to tweak Section 5’s formula for which states would be subject to preclearance. Congress did not act, and it took another four years, and another round of redistricting after the 2010 census, for Roberts to lead the court in the Shelby County v. Holder case to strike down the existing preclearance regime. In that opinion, Roberts not only assured readers that things had changed in the South; he pointed to Section 2 as an alternative means of providing protection to minority voters on........