Why Conservatives Are Trying to Kill the Voting Rights Act
The Voting Rights Act turned 60 years old this month. It’s a landmark piece of legislation designed to enforce voting rights protected by the Constitution, especially for Black Americans in Southern states with a history of suppressing racial minorities from voting. The act is considered one of the most effective laws ever passed to protect voting rights. Today, it’s a shell of itself.
Jamelle Bouie, a political columnist for The New York Times, often analyzes today’s political stories through the lens of a historian. He’s written about why the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision to exclude African Americans from becoming citizens still matters today and how the Trump administration’s war on the federal government is similar to the Iraq War’s “shock and awe” campaign. And he’s recently taken on the conservative movement’s successful effort to dismantle the Voting Rights Act.
“The notion that everyone deserves equal access to the ballot, that everyone deserves equal access to elections, that one person ought to mean one vote, and that there ought to be some measure of political equality has never really sat well with the political right in this country,” Bouie says.
On this week’s More To The Story, Bouie sits down with host Al Letson to talk about how the Voting Rights Act has been defanged by the Supreme Court, why the Democratic Party is made up of “a bunch of weenies,” and why he believes the country is now in a constitutional emergency.
This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.
Al Letson: So this month marks the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act being signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The Supreme Court seems to be dismantling it bit by bit. Tell me a little bit about the history of the act and how it’s changed over the years.
Jamelle Bouie: The Voting Rights Act is more or less drafted and passed and signed in the first half, more or less of 1965. It’s signed into law August 6th, 1965. Much of the work is done earlier in the year. And anyone who’s seen the movie Selma, who knows sort of basic civil rights chronology, knows that it was prompted, precipitated by movement efforts to demonstrate the high barriers to voting that still existed post 1964 Civil Rights Act.
And the signature piece of it, the piece of it that really made it transformative was section five, which is called pre-clearance. And pre-clearance simply meant that in jurisdictions covered by the law, if they wanted to change their voting rules, they had to go to the Justice Department, submit them and get approval. That’s it. But in practice it meant that lots of localities and municipalities and states that were looking for ways to dilute or otherwise undermine the voting power of black residents simply couldn’t because the federal government was maintaining kind of a sharp and watchful eye over their conduct.
And in the 2013 case, Shelby County Beholder, the Supreme Court basically gutted pre-clearance. Specifically the court said that the existing pre-clearance formula, which was based off of states that had histories of voting discrimination, was outdated. John Roberts essentially is saying, the chief justice, he wrote the opinion for the court. Roberts saying that, “Times have changed. It’s unfair to hold these states to account for actions taken in a previous generation.”
So in theory, a Congress could pass a new voting rights bill with a different formula for pre-clearance. You could have universal pre-clearance, which is something I would prefer, where all states had to submit voting plans prior to enactment, to make sure they’re not discriminating. But in practice, Congress just has not had a voting majority for any kind of serious voting rights bill. And so the Roberts Court decision and pre-clearance, and subsequent decisions from the court have weakened the law in other ways.
So in 2021, for example, in a decision written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court held that you needed to prove intent to discriminate in order to file suit under section two, which gives sort of a cause of action. You can sue under section two for voting discrimination.
And proving intent is so hard, the evidence of it you can see and clearly point to, but proving intent, I mean that’s a tough bar to reach.
That’s what made the decision in 2021 so absurd, because even at the height of voting discrimination in this country, lawmakers were smart enough not to say, “We’re doing this to discriminate against Black people or Hispanic people or whomever.” The 15th Amendment still exists. It explicitly bars discrimination in voting on race. And so obviously lawmakers figured out ways to get around it. And so to prove intent, it’s impossible.
I think people that are watching the way politics are playing out right now, especially if you’re not a student of history, you may not realize that all of these movements, everything that we’re seeing right now has been in the works for a very long time. Like Chief Justice Roberts hasn’t liked the Voting Rights Act since he was a young man working under Chief Justice William Rehnquist. So this is sort of fulfillment of a promise that was made many years ago, to shift society into this new place or maybe more accurately, to shift society back to an old place.
I think that’s right. I mean, Roberts has a long history of disliking the Voting Rights Act, but in general, the conservative movement has never liked the Voting Rights Act. It’s never liked the idea of a federal government exercising its authority in strong ways to curb states from shaping their electorates and shaping their elections.
The notion that everyone deserves equal access to the ballot, that everyone deserves equal access to elections, that one person ought to mean one vote, and that there ought to be some measure of political equality has never really sat well with the political right in this country. And with the Trump administration and with the Supreme Court, they are very clearly aiming to use this power to advance their vision of some people have more access than others.
So do you feel like we are in a constitutional crisis?
I mean, yeah, I’m very much of the view that we’re in some kind of constitutional emergency, whether you want to call it a constitutional crisis, whether you want to describe it as an ongoing assault on the constitutional structure, the term I like a lot, whether you want to see it as an acute instance of constitutional rot, the foundation is rotting under our feet, however you want to describe it, right? There’s different ways to talk about this. I think it’s clearly true that we’re in a state of constitutional emergency.
So I want to step back a little bit and just look at the Democratic Party. I’m curious if the struggles that you’re seeing right now, like what’s going on with the Voting Act, but also when we look at taking away women’s rights to choose, in red states, I’m curious if you think that the Democratic Party has just been a little bit too meek in the past and not been able to codify these things. I’ve heard many people say that the argument over Roe V. Wade, we didn’t even need to have that. It could have been codified to stop this from happening, but the Democrats never did it. I don’t know, what’s your thoughts on that?
I think you could fault the Democrats probably rightfully for not codifying Roe V. Wade when they had the chance, although it’s worth saying that probably the first time there was an actual voting majority, like a pro-choice voting majority in Congress was the most recent democratic trifecta, that people who remember the 2009 to 2011 cycle may recall that part of what almost killed the Affordable Care Act were pro-life Democrats who were demanded a promise that there would not be any funding for abortion in the law.
During the time when there was briefly a Democratic super majority, a chunk of that super majority constituted Democrats who probably would not vote to codify Roe V. Wade. So just for saying that. But the reason conservatives are anti-abortion isn’t because liberals support choice, they’re anti-abortion because they have a sincere belief that one should not be able to get a legal abortion. And I think it’s worth remembering that the other side gets a vote, right? The other side has agency, they don’t do things purely in reaction to their opponents, but they have an independent source of motivation.
Now having said that, do I think that the Democratic Party is a bunch of weenies? I do. Do I think that Democrats could use more fight in them? I absolutely do. I know you know this, but listeners who maybe have not watched The Wire or rewatched The Wire may not remember, I believe it’s a scene in season four, when the character Marlowe Stanfield goes into a convenience store and steals a lollipop just because he can.
And there’s a security guard there who sees him steal it and is like, “Hey man, could you just do me a solid and put it back, because I know you’re just kind of disrespecting me to disrespect me, but I have no choice, I have this job. This is what I do and you know I just can’t let you leave having stolen something.” And Marlowe, who is kind of like a murderer psychopath, and a powerful on the rise drug kingpin, looks at him and says to him, “You want it to be one way, but it’s the other way.”
And I think about that all the time with relation to Democrats. I think so many elected Democrats who are of a generation of lawmakers who came of age on the oldest side in the seventies, in the eighties and the nineties, in a period where even when the country’s politics were headed towards stark polarization, that would’ve been the nineties. There are still moderate Republicans, there are still conservative Democrats. There’s still kind of a bipartisan ethos in Washington. And there’s still the sense in their political upbringing that you could calm the common ground with your opponents, that you kind of basically wanted the same things, just had different ways of going about it.
And there was a sense as well that the country was generally kind of conservative, and so you just had to work around that. And so Democrats of that ilk, of that generation, I think are just dispositionally inclined to behave as if their Republican counterparts are operating in good faith, as if they don’t really mean the extreme things they say. And I think this belief is downstream of this view that kind of we’re all playing a game, but that’s not how it is. They want it to be one way, but it’s the other way. And the other way is that, “No, Republicans want to destroy you.” The Republican Party is out to win and win for the duration.
To your point, I think that many Democrats, including the current Democratic leadership, and when I say leadership, I’m talking about Chuck Schumer, they want to go back or they wholeheartedly believe that we are still living in the world of Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan, and I’m curious if you agree with this, the Democrats are very much entrenched in the idea of, whose turn is it? Instead of like, who’s got the sharpest blade? So they will push forward a candidate that they feel like, “Well, it’s their turn,” instead of the candidate that really has a blade that’s sharp and can go in and cut, and Republicans are the exact opposite.
So I do agree with this. I think that Hakeem Jeffries knows that we’re not in the era of Reagan and Tip O’Neill, but I think what we’re sensing from democratic leadership is that they imagine themselves in the face of this chaotic president and this transgressive political movement, they imagine themselves as the protector of the system. They’re defending the way things used to be so they can be restored. Unfortunately, this just reads as being weak and there’s no going back.
What it means is that you can’t do a game of seniority anymore. I think of the minor in the scheme of things, but revealing, the fight over who is going to be the ranking member in the House Oversight Committee. Initially Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was running for that spot and her opponent was Jerry Connolly. Now Ocasio-Cortez, I believe we’re about the same age, I think. So she’s like 36, 37. Jerry Connolly was 74 years old, and his supporters were like, “Yeah, he’s 74, but he’s like a young 74, cancer notwithstanding,” direct quote, “A young 74, cancer notwithstanding,” and Connolly-
It’s just a wild caveat. I mean, that’s just a wild caveat.
It’s comical. And he won and was promptly just like an inert and not particularly interesting chairman or ranking member. And he passed away recently. And it’s like that’s the problem.
I get it. I get it, older members. Leadership may not like AOC all that much. They may think that she is too aggressive, whatever, but she’s unquestionably one of the most media savvy and compelling people in the Democratic Party. Why wouldn’t you want her to be the ranking member on your oversight committee, which offers plenty of opportunities to make noise against your opponents? Why wouldn’t you want to do that?
And it demonstrates, as you said, it’s not even that they don’t want to elevate the person with the sharpest blade. They seem to be afraid of the blade, afraid of what it looks like to be that aggressive. You see this with the reaction to Zohran Mamdani, another compelling telegenic, charismatic Democrat, who you would think that any rational party would be like, “Yeah, let’s make this guy, let’s elevate this guy because he has it, whatever it is.”
But there’s all this fear, all this worry that like, “Oh, he’s Muslim. Oh, he’s kind of left-wing. So voters are going to be…” But there’s no understanding that political leadership is a thing that exists and that you can shape the environment in which voters understand your party and your candidates ,and the Democratic Party’s refusal to do this has left it in a situation where voters don’t know what it stands for, that people who identify as Democrats think the party is weak, and that Republicans and conservatives can just make up stuff and say, “Yeah, Democrats said it.” And people, I guess they did.
When you talk about Mamdani, I think about, if there was a, for lack of better term, a Bizarro Mamdani, where he was the exact opposite, but still charismatic and all of those things, he’d be a star in the Republican Party, and they’d be putting a lot of love behind him and pushing him forward. Whereas in the Democratic Party, they don’t want to touch him. And it’s just a really clear example of how party leadership seems to be out of step with the actual rank-and-file members of the party.
This is so true, and it’s interesting. So back in the eighties there was a conclusion, there are many more moderate Democrats who felt that the party elite was out of step with the rank-and-file by which they meant that it had moved too far to the left. And so things like the Democratic Leadership Council, guys like Bill Clinton were trying to realign the party leadership with what they believed to be the moderate base of the party.
And I’m not certain that they were wrong, because Clinton does end up winning two terms as president, Democrats have a pretty good [inaudible 00:17:25] so on, so forth. I think there’s a misalignment between the party base and the leadership, but I don’t think it’s an ideological misalignment, and I don’t think it’s an ideological misalignment because I think the figures who are rising to the top as people that rank-and-file Democrats are excited about, don’t have ideology in common. Zohran Mamdani, AOC, Bernie Sanders, Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, they’re all over the board of Democratic Party ideology.
But what they have in common is a willingness to treat Republicans not as wayward colleagues, but as opponents, as people you have to beat and to be willing to be creative and compelling in attempting to do that. And that’s I think, where the mismatch is. You see, there are a lot of polls right now showing Democratic Party’s low overall approval, but so much of it is driven by actual Democratic voters looking to Washington and just being frustrated with Chuck Schumer and Jeffries and aging and inert leadership.
If Democrats can solve that problem, if it can elevate people who understand that the moment that we’re in requires more fight, then those numbers are going to go up.
So Jamelle, there is one thing in politics that drives me absolutely crazy. Whenever there’s an election, I hear people say, “We need candidate X in office because he’s a good businessman and we need government to run like a business.” What do you think about that?
So I 100% agree about the notion that it’s absurd to want to think of government as a business. The goal of a business is to make a profit. The goal of a government is to deliver services. A businesses run like a little dictatorship, right? The CEO says, the boss says what goes. And the thing about businesses is a lot of them fail, but I’ll say that I think maybe one reason the public is so attracted to this notion of running the government like a business, aside from the way that our culture elevates the businessman as this figure of emulation, the entrepreneur.
But I think one reason perhaps is that our government does not do a good job of delivering services in a way that makes it clear that this is a product of the government. So much of what our government does is obscured under layers of tax credits and incentives and that kind of thing. Direct benefits, a one-to-one relationship between, we say we’re going to do this, and this happens to you, few and far between, and I think it creates the impression that the government isn’t doing anything.
I’m always struck by, people love social security, they love social security, they love Medicare, and I think one of the reasons is that social security is very simple. You see, in your check it says you pay your social security tax, and then when you turn 65 or 67, you get a check in return. It’s very straightforward.
Yep. Simple.
To go back to Mamdani, I’m convinced that part of his appeal isn’t even the substance of the policies, but the fact that they’re so simple. Free buses,. City grocery stores, rent control, that’s easy to understand. It’s simple. Our federal government doesn’t do this so well.
I also think, to your point, that what Trump has done very well is made his policies simple. It’s Make America Great Again, and these are all the things that I’m going to do to enact that. And also, say what you want about Trump, he is a master marketer and he has an innate understanding of his audience. And so when the COVID checks went out and he made sure that his name was on it, even though he was opposed to the checks going out, when people got those checks, they saw his name on it. But the fact that the effective political messaging keeps it simple is a huge part of it.
I think that’s absolutely right. I have a couple thoughts. The first is that, the example of Trump putting his name on the checks is such a great one. During the last year’s election, there was a rally where Obama was speaking, and Obama was praising Biden for not putting his name on his checks because that showed he was for the American people and not just for himself.
But I saw that and I was like, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” that politics isn’t this game of showing how responsible you are. First of all, it’s winning elections, but second of all, it’s using rhetoric, public engagement, public speaking, public discourse to connect ordinary people to government and to persuade them that you will do better for them than the other guy. And that involves sending messages however you can. And so if writing your name on the check is what it takes to remind voters that you are doing something for them, you should do it.
This is the basic insight of the old 19th century political machines. You’re an Irish immigrant. You show up in New York and boss, the Tammany machine, greets you, says, “Hey, I represent this neighborhood. You need a job, you need a place to live? Come to me. We’ll get you a job.”
And the job is coming from Tammany, it’s coming from us, and the only thing we need from you is your support. Election comes along, give us a ballot. That’s all we need. That direct relationship, yeah, there’s corruption, whatever, but that represents a direct relationship between the representative, the system, and the voter. And Trump, I think kind of intuitively gets this. He’s very 19th century figure in a lot of ways. He intuitively gets this, and I’m not sure Democrats intuitively get this, some do, but I think that this older generation, existing leadership are too just acculturated in this era where that kind of directness seems like uncouth or inappropriate.
But no, it’s exactly what’s needed. And yes, does it mean maybe that you can’t have big complicated policies anymore? Probably, but that’s probably a good thing to begin with. Maybe there should be a return to just simplicity in our policymaking, rather than trying to figure out what kind of tax credits you’re going to get if you make this kind of money, just say, “Oh, every family gets a flat amount of money to help with their kids. Everyone gets access to a basic level of healthcare. Everyone gets a flat amount of money to help pay for housing.”
It’s simple and it’s direct thing. Roosevelt understood this. I mean, you go around the country, you’ll find buildings that still have that dude’s name stamped right in them, reminding you that you have this bill, you have this library, you have this courthouse, you have this playground because Franklin Delano Roosevelt wanted you to have it, and that’s powerful.
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