Voting Rights Appeal Offers ‘Potentially Defining Moment’ for Chief Justice
The U.S. Supreme Court could decide as early as today whether to hold a hearing on an appeal that contends a section of the Voting Rights Act renewed two years ago is an unconstitutional regulation of the states.
The Supreme Court is required to review all cases involving the Voting Rights Act, but the justices could decide to affirm a decision upholding the law without a hearing, USA Today reports. Denying a hearing would be the most cautious option, according to the article.
The part of the law at issue, Section 5, requires nine mostly Southern states and several localities to get Justice Department clearance before changing election procedures.
Law professor Richard Hasen of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles told USA Today that the case offers a “powder keg” of divisive issues. “The question is whether the role of race in American politics has so changed … that remedies that were once constitutional are now impingements on state sovereignty,” he told the newspaper.
A New York Times op-ed by its former Supreme Court reporter, Linda Greenhouse, says the case represents “a potentially defining moment” for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. that will force him to show his hand on the federalism issue.
“The Roberts court has not resumed the Rehnquist court’s federalism battles, and the chief justice’s own views are unclear,” Greenhouse wrote. “But he does not come as a novice to the debate over the Voting Rights Act. As a young lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department, he wrote sharply worded memos on behalf of the administration’s failed effort to block expansion of the act in 1982. Confronted with his paper trail during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing in 2005, he explained that he was simply expressing the administration’s views.
“Perhaps.”
