What the Supreme Court Doesn’t Understand About the Voting Rights Act | Larry Miller's Blog: Educate All Students!

What the Supreme Court Doesn’t Understand About the Voting Rights Act | Larry Miller's Blog: Educate All Students!:

What the Supreme Court Doesn’t Understand About the Voting Rights Act

by millerlf

Ari Berman on June 25, 2013 The Nation Magazine

No sooner had the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, after two hundred years of slavery and nearly 100 years of Jim Crow, than Southern conservatives, who failed to stop the law, began to attack it. South Carolina mounted the first constitutional challenge to the law only a month after it was enacted. President Nixon tried to weaken the law take the “monkey…off the backs off the South,” as did Presidents Ford in 1975 and Reagan in 1982. Every effort to gut the VRA failed. Each time the law’s constitutionality was challenged, in 1966, 1973, 1980 and 1999, the Supreme Court upheld the act. Every congressional reauthorization, in 1970, 1975, 1982 and 2006, made the law stronger, not weaker, in protecting voting rights. Each Congressional reauthorization was signed by a Republican president, cementing the bipartisan