Why roberts voted

It should go without saying that future Section 2 plaintiffs will struggle to prove racist intent, given the heavy burden they carry under Perez. That means that the results test — the same results test that the young Roberts tried to kill — is now the last best defense against racist election laws.

And it is far from clear that this results test will survive much longer. In , for example, Roberts voted to eliminate a federal ban on housing discrimination that has a disparate impact on people of color. But Roberts wound up joining a dissenting opinion in that case because Justice Anthony Kennedy, a relatively moderate conservative who retired in , voted with the liberal justices to preserve the fair housing law.

Now, however, Kennedy is gone. And his replacement, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, is, if anything, even more hostile to voting rights than Chief Justice Roberts. It is likely, in other words, that Roberts finally has the majority he needs to strike down the results test.

The Voting Rights Act — the most important and most effective shield against racist election laws — may soon be an empty husk. And even if Democrats dominate the elections and enact new voting rights legislation next year, that legislation will still need to survive contact with the Roberts Court. Race and voting rights, for the reasons explained above, are fundamentally connected.

Even as America moves beyond the explicit white supremacy that defined the Jim Crow era, we remain racially polarized. Because voters of color — and especially African Americans — are so likely to prefer Democrats to Republicans, race allows the GOP to identify which voters it should target if it wants to give itself an unfair electoral advantage.

But not every voting rights issue is a racial issue. And here, as well, Roberts has shown little respect for voting rights. As I write these words, one of the most pressing challenges facing American democracy is the Covid pandemic. Elections are often a time of gathering, when voters come together at the polls to wait in line to cast their ballot. But any such gathering is potentially a public health threat during a pandemic. Worse, states have historically depended on older, retired individuals to staff the polls — but those individuals are likely to stay at home because they are particularly at risk from the coronavirus.

Early in the pandemic, a wide array of election experts advised Americans to cast their ballots by mail to reduce this strain on polling sites. But the post office, led by postmaster general and Trump megadonor Louis DeJoy, has decommissioned mail-sorting machines and ordered postal workers to work less. It is far from clear, in other words, that the United States has the personnel and physical infrastructure necessary to run an election during a pandemic.

And yet, in the midst of a crisis that could raise profound questions about the legitimacy of the upcoming election, Roberts has largely instructed the courts to do nothing. Last April, for example, many Wisconsin voters faced a choice between disenfranchisement and risking their health to go to the polls because the state was unable to process absentee ballot requests fast enough to ensure that everyone could cast their ballot by mail. To help ensure that ballots were not tossed out due to these unavoidable delays, a federal district court ordered the state to count ballots that arrived a few days after the official election date.

And this rule apparently applies even if a sudden, unanticipated crisis risks disenfranchising thousands of voters. Similarly, in Texas, state law permits voters over the age of 65 to obtain an absentee ballot, but it forbids most younger voters from voting by mail. Texas voters under the age of 65 will just have to find some other way to vote. Occasionally, that leads him to rule in favor of voting rights. In Republican National Committee v. But it should be obvious that voting rights violations are far less likely to occur in states where all the relevant public officials agree that voting rights should be protected.

Taken too seriously, deference to state and local officials means deferring to the worst actors. Jim Crow could only exist because federal officials — and federal courts — deferred to the judgment of white supremacist state and local officials.

Fifty-five years after the Voting Rights Act drove a stake into the heart of Jim Crow, the right to vote faces its greatest challenges since President Lyndon Johnson signed this landmark act. Whatever happens in the election, we cannot rely on the Roberts Court to protect those rights. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all.

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In another narrow decision, the court threw out the latest challenge to the Affordable Care Act by concluding the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue because they were not harmed by the law's requirement that all Americans obtain health insurance. Roberts, nominated to the court in by President George W. Bush, needed help to push for those more limited outcomes — and he got it in case after case. That help most often came in the form of votes from Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh and, to a lesser extent, Barrett.

By one measure — the share of opinions in which he was in the majority — Roberts lost influence. Other measures suggest Roberts, 66, is getting his way.

Middle: Conservatives' takeover stalled by Roberts-Kavanaugh bromance. Swing: Roberts inherits expanded role as the Supreme Court's man in the middle. Roberts, who just finished his 16th term, has touted the message unity sends. But the final action in two politically charged disputes showed the justices returning to predictable camps, the six Republican-appointed conservatives prevailing over the three Democratic-appointed liberals.

The Roberts Court has also sought over the years to restrain government regulation of money in politics, most notably in the Citizens United decision. And two years ago, a Roberts-led majority prevented federal courts from ever hearing challenges to extreme partisan gerrymanders, drawn by state legislators to entrench the party in power. In the final decision of the term, as Roberts tossed out the California mandate that nonprofits turn over the names of major donors , the chief rejected the state's arguments regarding anti-fraud and other law enforcement purposes.

He emphasized that "disclosure requirements can chill" First Amendment free association rights, agreeing with the challengers that donors could be dissuaded by potential public exposure. The challenges were brought by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, affiliated with the powerful Koch family, and the Thomas More Law Center, a Christian advocacy group. Supreme Court invalidates California's donor disclosure requirement. Some liberal critics beyond the court said the decision in the case outside the campaign finance context could crimp political regulations and lead to more anonymous contributions, so-called dark money, in campaigns.

Race and election law have long split the Roberts Court and in the past, those controversies came down to votes. But with the succession of Justice Amy Coney Barrett for the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last October, the disputes fell along conservative-liberal lines. The three appointees of former President Donald Trump are relatively young, likely entrenching the current trend for years. Roberts, now finishing his 16th term as chief justice, is himself only 66 and based on the usual judicial tenure could serve two more decades.

Senior liberal Justice Stephen Breyer is 82 years old. All eyes on Stephen Breyer's retirement plans as Supreme Court term ends. Another attack on the Voting Rights Act. The Arizona case offered a new Roberts Court milestone on the breadth of the Voting Rights Act, adopted amid the nation's epic civil rights struggles and only after the March "Bloody Sunday" attack on marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

The disputed Arizona policies required ballots cast by people at the wrong precinct to be wholly discarded and separately criminalized third-party collection of absentee ballots, for example from residents at a nursing home.