Chief Justice Roberts Played the Long Game on Voting Rights

Hello! Wednesday’s bombshell voting rights ruling from the Supreme Court is a testament to Chief Justice John Roberts’ patience and passion in this long game.

Beginning in 1982, when he was a junior attorney in the Reagan administration, he worked to oppose the expansion of a section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which originally covered only intentional discrimination, to address practices that had discriminatory consequences. At that time, his efforts failed.

On the court, Chief Justice Roberts first flirted with striking down the rule in 2009, four years into his tenure and a year after I started discussing the court.

In his majority opinion in that case, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder, the chief justice took a step back – after planting a ticking time bomb. “We are now a very different nation” from the one that first passed the Voting Rights Act, he wrote. “Whether the circumstances continue to justify that law is a difficult constitutional question we cannot answer today.”

His final response, which came after his colleagues’ decisions in 2013 and 2021 that offered some thought, came on Wednesday. The Times provided comprehensive coverage of the decision itself, the legacy it destroyed and the redistricting frenzy it started.

For my part, I examined the context of the decision: whether the law is no longer necessary when the country has come so far in achieving racial equality.

In this edition of the Docket, I thought I’d take a look at the law school’s reaction.

It was very bad. Election law experts called the Supreme Court’s voting rights decision Wednesday a “catastrophe,” a “catastrophe” and “the worst decision of the century.”

I found it difficult to find a prominent law professor who publicly praised the decision, which may be a testament to the liberal leanings of many law schools. Republican officials and civil rights groups welcomed the decision, with some saying it set historic precedents for racial equality. They say the Constitution does not allow the government to segregate people based on race, in public schools, higher education institutions or voting centers.

But Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard, wrote in a blog post that the decision is “a disaster for America’s minority representatives — potentially causing the biggest drop in the number of minority lawmakers since the end of Reconstruction.”

The decision, Louisiana v. Callais, made it difficult to pursue claims under a 1965 law that said voting maps reduced minority voting power. The vote was 6 to 3, with Justice Samuel Alito writing the majority opinion on behalf of all six Republican nominees.

In it, Justice Alito, to use his term, “revised” the four-part test set forth in the 1986 decision. His tweaks were technical but conservative, allowing states to defend voting maps that reduce voting power to minorities such as valid party supporters and requiring voters challenging such maps to focus on evidence of “present-day racial discrimination in voting.”

Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote in Slate that the decision was “the culmination of the life work of Chief Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who have shown continued resistance to the idea that the United States is governed by a multiracial democracy.”

Travis Crum, a law professor at Washington University in St. That would be, he wrote in a blog post, a serious blow and “much worse than what we got in the end.”

Professor Crum, noting that the court took an unusual step last year to decide that the case should be continued a second time and asked the parties to answer a broad question in the process, said it was clear that this decision was possible.

“The fact that after the renegotiation we got Alito’s rewritten “provision” rather than ineffective is strong evidence that the coalition fell apart last quarter and that the idea that struck the VRA was on the table,” wrote Professor Crum.

He wrote that such a decision would have been more explosive than the one that came down Wednesday, jeopardizing voting rights laws and other anti-discrimination laws.

Professor Crum also flagged a new challenge to the Voting Rights Act that is already at the Supreme Court’s door. In that case, from North Dakota, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled last year that only the government, not voters or other private groups, can sue to enforce the voting law.

If the Supreme Court ends up agreeing with the Eighth Circuit, it will set back voting rights litigation across the country. According to a supporting report filed by voting rights historians last year in a separate lawsuit, 93 percent of challenges under the provision since 1982 have been brought by private plaintiffs. It seems unlikely that the Trump administration will sue to apply the law to most voting disputes, meaning that opponents of the administration will be shut out of the courts over voting rights for now.

The Supreme Court stayed the 8th Circuit’s decision last July. Three members of the court – Justice Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch – dissented. It takes four votes to be reviewed.

Coverage of the Voting Rights Resolution

A mail bag

Expert Assistance in the High Court

Has the Supreme Court ever sought a special expert or outside expert to deal with a complex scientific or technical issue? – Steven Hunter

The court appoints special experts to hear evidence and issue recommendations on rare occasions acting as a trial court. That happens in a small class of cases where there is “actual jurisdiction,” often in interstate disputes over topics like water rights. But unlike federal trial courts, which can appoint independent experts to help judges understand complex issues, the Supreme Court relies on records developed in lower courts and, not without controversy, on testimony presented to it in amicus briefs.

I’d love to hear your questions about the law, the courts and anything else on your mind. Send them my way to the-docket@nytimes.com.

What I read

• “The Supreme Court is Under Threat: Early Studies in Legal Defense,” by Curtis Bradley and Neil Siegel, to be published in The Harvard Law Review. The article looks at some of the tools the court has used to maintain its institutional authority.

• “Automatic Judging,” by Rebecca Brown and Lee Epstein, examines in the UCLA Law Review “the parallels between what democracies have done to cause democratic backsliding in their jurisdictions and what the US Supreme Court has done in its jurisdiction.”

• “Sleep Deprivation in Prison,” Sharon Dolovich’s shocking look at the Southern California Law Review “is a devastating and dehumanizing experience, which, although a natural feature of prison life, has been largely ignored.”

Closing the Dispute

Group Breakup at a Fancy Dinner Hosted by the Defendant

If the six stalwart members of the Supreme Court looked a little tired Wednesday morning as they tackled the Voting Rights Act and considered President Trump’s attempt to revoke protections for Haitian and Syrian immigrants, they might as well have been out the night before a dinner honoring King Charles III.

The three liberal justices had no such excuse. None of them were there. (Neither the White House nor the court said if they had been invited, though, given the balance of the guest list’s tight-knit lineup, that seemed unlikely.)