Reporters and legal commentators shout from the roof-tops when landmark rulings stop everything and change the world. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court did them one better in Shelby County v. Holder—it issued a landmark ruling that recognized that it was time to stop something because the world had changed.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the signature achievement of the Civil Rights Movement, a single enactment which barred the rigging of elections so that only one race could win. It transformed a region's politics. Through it, Congress banned particularly noxious tools states had used to deny the franchise to millions of Americans during Jim Crow. Almost 50 years later, those tools are long gone and no constituency wants to bring them back. As the Court points out, the results are quantifiable and staggering: where once, states like Mississippi kept fewer than 7% of black Americans from registering to vote, now higher percentages of blacks then whites do so; Philadelphia, Mississippi and Selma, Alabama have black mayors; shoot, even South Carolina, a pioneer of old American racism from the days of Calhoun, has elected a Governor who would have been denied the franchise under Jim Crow (as has Louisiana).
Tuesday's ruling touched none of that. It also left standing Section 2 of the VRA, which arms Americans with the ability to haul into Court anyone that acts to deny them their right to vote in the future. Section 2 remains alive and well and to this day, individuals use it to challenge state actions.
So what did the Court do? It looked only at a single provision of the VRA that was drafted in the 1960s to be a "temporary," "extraordinary departure from the traditional course of relations between the States and the Federal Government[.]" That departure, which had been set to expire after 5 years, singled out particular jurisdictions for greater scrutiny of anything they did impacting elections. Anything from moving polling places to rescheduling elections, to changing the identification requirements for voters to get a ballot, to redistricting. Initially, those jurisdictions were identified in 1965 on the basis of relevant, timely factors—if in 1964 a government used the kind of sketchy tests the Jim Crow South did to deny Americans their right to vote and that government saw voting participation at least 12% below the national average (a good proxy for whether the tests were being used to effectively keep people from voting), it was required to get Federal permission to do any of those things.
Remember that the relevant provision was "temporary." As a result of that fact, to remain law beyond 1970, it had to be passed again, by a new Congress. In 1970, the Congress re-passed the relevant provisions for a second "temporary" period, while adjusting the coverage formula to reflect data from 1968. It did the same in 1975, this time for 7 years and a coverage formula based on new data from 1972. And then Congress re-upped the act again in 1982 (for 25 years) and again in 2006 (for 25 years). Unlike the actions taken in '65, '70, and '75, though, the Congresses that re-upped these provisions of the VRA in the '82 and '06 didn't adjust coverage to reflect new data. Oh, they compiled a record; they just ignored it and left coverage exactly as it was, based on voting turnout information from 1972.
To say the least, the results were peculiar. The coverage formula reviewed in Shelby applied greater scrutiny to the election laws of the 3 most "diverse" boroughs of New York City, but not to Queens and Staten Island. It left voter ID laws effective immediately in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky but required federal signoff for the same requirements to be adopted in Texas and South Carolina.
THAT was what the Supreme Court looked at Tuesday and invalidated, finding that the 2006 Congress did not rely on any current information or address any current problem in any rational way when it pretended that Bull Connor was still in office, that fire hoses and German shepherds were being held at the ready to prevent peaceful marchers, and re-adopted the 1975 coverage formula. The Supremes acknowledged that time did not stop in 1972 and prevented a coverage formula pretending that it did from declaring jurisdictions suspect and subject to far greater scrutiny through 2031, a full lifetime after the data relied on was generated.
The end result of Shelby County is that the same law now applies across the nation again. Voters in Queens and Brooklyn again share the same level of protection of their voting rights. Texas's voter ID law will have the same weight as Connecticut's. Any American with complaints about redistricting maps will now look to the same law (VRA Section 2) to figure out whether they're legal, independent of whether they live in Utah or Florida. And it will stay that way until and unless Congress decides that some current crisis justifies a departure from the bedrock preference all English-speaking countries for laws of general applicability the same way that decades of Jim Crow did.
That's a victory for law, a victory for prudence, and a victory for the equal protection of American voting rights.