Tuesday, June 25, 2013

What's So Extraordinary About The Voting Rights Act?

By Mike Dorf

The opinion of Chief Justice Roberts in Shelby County v. Holder--striking down the coverage formula of the Voting Rights Act (VRA)--repeatedly states that the VRA is an extraordinary piece of legislation, and therefore requires an extraordinary justification.  He and the majority thus find that Congress's continued use of a 40-year-old formula doesn't work.  That strikes me as a fair conclusion, given the premise.  But is the premise right?  What's so extraordinary about the VRA?

The Chief Justice and, to be fair, prior cases, point to two features of the VRA: 1) The fact that it treats different states (and localities within some states) differently, thus allegedly violating the principle of equal sovereignty of the states; and 2) It subjects states to a procedure whereby the federal executive "pre-clears" state laws before they take effect.  Are these really extraordinary?

Let's begin with equal sovereignty.  The fact is that Congress routinely writes laws that apply differently in different states.  Consider federal environmental regulation, which regulates or forbids particular activities in proximity to threatened land, water or species habitats.  Under such laws, an activity that may be permissible in one state or locality--logging, say--is forbidden in another state or locality.  Now it's true that in these instances the law does not EXPRESSLY differentiate between the various states and localities, but so what?  Federal spending measures often do draw express distinctions, as when Congress authorizes a particular national park or military base.  As a matter of practical politics, Congress often attempts to disguise the fact that it has singled out some place for some special burden or goody, but this doesn't fool anyone. 

Should there be some rule that requires Congress to legislate in a way that formally treats the states equally?  It's hard to see why.  Often there are good reasons to treat different places differently because of different contexts and circumstances.  General rules can probably take that into account, and so a formal requirement of equal treatment of the states wouldn't do much damage, but for the same reason it would be relatively easy to evade.  In any event, the Court in Shelby County does not say that Congress must use general rules; it says that if Congress singles out states, it has to keep the basis for the singling out reasonably up to date.  Yet there doesn't appear to be any requirement that general rules with differential impact be kept up to date.  And so the opinion seems rooted in formalism on this point.


What about pre-clearance?  CJ Roberts cites the fact that the Constitutional Convention rejected a proposal to give Congress the authority to "negative" state laws in support of the proposition that pre-clearance is extraordinary, but this strikes me as a non sequitur.  Under the Supremacy Clause, Congress does have the power to negative state laws whenever it acts pursuant to an enumerated power.  It's called the preemption power.  Although CJ Roberts is right that states initially set the ground rules for elections, the Fifteenth Amendment (as well as Article I, Section 4 w/r/t federal elections) gives Congress the power to change--and thus to negative--those rules.  So there really is nothing extraordinary here, at least so far as the Constitution is concerned.

I don't deny that Congress does not ordinarily exercise its power to distinguish among the states or to require preclearance of potentially preempted laws, and in that sense the VRA is extraordinary.  But I don't think the Court has made the case that the VRA is constitutionally extraordinary, or that if it is, that the political safeguards of federalism are inadequate to guard against abuse of these ostensibly extraordinary powers.

5 comments:

Michael A Livingston said...

I think VRA is outstanding/unusual in that it responded to a very specific historical circumstance, that is, the effective unwillingness of the South to accept the verdict of the Civil War and continue to exclude blacks from voting in direct contradiction of the Reconstruction Amendments. I don't see how any one can deny that circumstances today are very different from 1965. As a legal/constitutional matter, it is of course more complicated, but the idea that anything that restricts VRA is necessarily a return to racism strikes me as very much overstated.

David Ziff said...

The Chief Justice's focus on the "extraordinary" nature of the VRA echoed arguments from the ACA case and the scope of the Commerce Clause. The fact that Congress rarely (never?) compels people to buy something made the ACA somehow more suspect. But as a constitutional matter there really didn't seem to be anything crazy about it at all (at least not to me). Congress often has to deal with unique problems and will often come up with unique solutions to those problems. I wonder if the Court's skepticism toward "extraordinary" legislation will bleed into other constitutional tests and the invalidation of other creative statutory fixes. I hope not. There's nothing in the constitution requiring laws to be ordinary.

meads said...

this is a typical Conservative decision , full of hubris , judicial activism, showing contempt for Congress and the President, substitutiing 5 Conservative judges political ideology for the clear authority of Congress under the 15th Amendment and defying the will of the people. The 5 Conservatives ignored the recent fact finding evidence of Congress cited by J. Ginsberg and substituted a straw man argument that Congress used 50 year old data. To be clear, the 13th-15th Amendments changed states rights and the concept of Federalism in the matter of enforcement of voting rights in this country and it is time the President and Congress to assert their Constitutional authority. Congress has the right to enforce voting rights under Section 5 and the Courts jurisdiction to second guess is very limited to cases of extreme Congressional abuse of that power. It is time for Congress to strip the Court of jurisdiction in cases involving the Civil Rights Amendments until the Court shows the proper deference. It is time for Congress to disabuse J. Kennedy of the notion that the Court is sovereign over Congress in this area. The proper response to this decision is to ignore it and have the DOJ challenge every change in the voting law in the states under section 5 and to have Congress refuse to sit any representative from those states .

Matt said...

This is such a minor quibble, but it really bugs me that Roberts said that the law was supposed to be "temporary" because there was a sunset provision.

Just because a law has a sunset provision doesn't mean that it was intended to be "temporary" -- rather, it could have easily been the case that the original drafters simply intended for future Congresses to revisit and revise the law. In any case, Roberts may have been right, but he provided no other citations or evidence for us to conclude that the law was designed to be temporary.

Anyways, maybe I'm off on this one.

Unknown said...

新女性徵信
外遇調查站
鴻海徵信
亞洲徵信
非凡徵信社
鳳凰徵信社
中華新女性徵信社
全國新女性徵信社
全省女人徵信有限公司
私家偵探超優網
女人感情會館-婚姻感情挽回徵信
女子偵探徵信網
女子國際徵信
外遇抓姦偵探社
女子徵信社
女人國際徵信
女子徵信社
台中縣徵信商業同業公會
成功科技器材
女人國際徵信社
女人國際徵信
三立徵信社-外遇
女人國際徵信
女人國際徵信
大同女人徵信聯盟
晚晴徵信