"Sordid Business: Will the Supreme Court Kill the Voting Rights Act?"

Slate has published my latest Jurisprudence essay. It begins:

Under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court has not been friendly to voting rights or reasonable campaign finance laws. But so far, its retrenchment has been incremental. The court upheld Indiana's strict voter-identification law without any evidence the law was needed to prevent voter fraud, but it left the courthouse door slightly open for voters who could show the law would impose a special hardship on them. A majority has sided with First Amendment challengers to campaign finance laws in all four campaign finance cases it has decided, but thus far it has not overturned the cornerstones of current law: federal contribution limits and corporate and union spending limits in candidate elections. The court has read the Voting Rights Act in increasingly narrow ways that undermine its effectiveness and did so again last month. But it has not held the foundational civil rights law unconstitutional. Yet.


On April 29, the last day of the court's term, the justices will hear a case from an obscure utility district in Texas, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder. (The shorthand is NAMUDNO. The court will release audio of oral argument right after argument concludes.) At stake is not only the constitutionality of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act but, potentially, the constitutionality of a host of other civil rights laws. These include the requirement for the creation of majority-minority districts in cities and states with large minority populations and the guarantee of language assistance to non-English-speaking voters in jurisdictions with a fair number of them. The NAMUDNO ruling will come just before the next round of redistricting and could have a major effect on who wins in all kinds of races, from obscure utility districts to state houses to Congress.

Posted by Rick Hasen at April 27, 2009 08:12 AM