The Fight for American Voting Rights: Inside Ari Berman’s New Book

A month after the Supreme Court’s Shelby County decision [gutting the VRA], North Carolina passed a law that essentially repealed or curtailed every voting reform in the state that had encouraged people to vote. Now, if North Carolina was still subject to Section 5 of the VRA and had to approve its voting credentials with the federal government, there’s no way the federal government would have approved that law, because it’s clear that the law left African-Americans and other minorities worse off than before. There’s clear data that African-Americans were more likely to use early voting, to use same-day registration, to vote at a precinct, to not have a government-issued ID. That’s a situation where clearly the law would have been blocked, but the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, and now this law is in effect, and there is a very long legal process to challenge it. 

Let’s talk about the specific court that was able to gut the Voting Rights Act. What does it say about the Roberts Court that the VRA has been under legal attack since it was passed, and this was the court that finally succeeded?
The Supreme Court has shifted so significantly to the right since the Voting Rights Act was passed. The VRA was passed in the heyday of the Earl Warren Court, the most liberal court of the 20th Century, and the court has inched further and further to the right since then, first through Richard Nixon’s appointments (though even then the Supreme Court was largely favorable to the VRA) and then to the Reagan administration (though again, even then the Supreme Court was largely favorable to the VRA). The current Supreme Court is filled with Reagan disciples. All five justices who gutted the Voting Rights Act either worked in the Reagan administration or were appointed by Reagan. So the backlash against civil rights in the Seventies and Eighties has come to fruition today, because people who came of age politically at that time, when there was a really strong, conservative backlash to the Voting Rights Act and to civil rights laws more broadly, they’re now on the court. You can trace the counterrevolution of voting rights directly from the early efforts to challenge the VRA to the Supreme Court of today.

Does that make you nervous for this next election, and the administration that will almost certainly get to appoint one or more Supreme Court justices?
It makes me very nervous, because there’s no doubt that if a Republican is elected president in 2016, that Republican is going to appoint a Supreme Court justice – or numerous Supreme Court justices, if there are openings – that are hostile to the VRA. That’s now the prevailing opinion in conservative legal circles, this hostility toward voting rights, and I think civil rights more broadly – although Anthony Kennedy sometimes jumps back and forth. As we saw in 2014, new voting restrictions in four states – North Carolina, Texas, Wisconsin and Ohio – came before the Supreme Court on an emergency appeal basis, and in three of those instances the Supreme Court failed to block laws that restricted voting rights. So there’s a worry that the court is not going to protect voting rights. 

I was struck by the section in your book about the racist police violence that happened shortly after LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act, since police violence is such a huge issue today. What’s the significance of the resurgence of this fight for voting rights happening now, amid Black Lives Matter and the broader fight against racist police practices?
That’s a really interesting point, and something I hadn’t thought that much about. But you know, the 1965 Watts riots in California happened just five days after the Voting Rights Act was passed. And in the subsequent years – ’66, ’67, obviously ’68, after Dr. King was killed – there were huge riots in American cities. That was because of a lot of factors – the war in Vietnam, domestic unrest – but it was certainly true that the relationship between poorer African-American communities and the police was not good at all. You saw that in Watts, you saw that at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, when the police beat Democratic protestors. Generally speaking, when people feel like they’re not respected, that leads to this kind of violence and these sort of outrages. I don’t think it’s fair to say that there’s a direct correlation between new voting restrictions and people being killed; I think that would be a stretch to assert. But I do think the fact that places around the country are trying to make it harder for African-Americans to vote certainly sends a very distressing signal about the state of civil rights in 2015.