If you want to understand what’s happened to voting rights in the U.S. over the past decade, just take a look at a recent ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
That ultraconservative court took a substantial bite out of voting rights when it reversed its own precedent to hold that multiple groups, like Black voters and Hispanic voters, can’t team up to argue that a state has diluted their votes.
The holding is legally wrong, yet the Supreme Court could conceivably uphold it, because the decision reflects a long-term conservative strategy: Undermining voting rights law one step at a time in relatively low-profile cases rather than through sweeping decisions that draw a public outcry.
To understand the Fifth Circuit’s decision, and where it falls in the conservative crusade to undermine the Voting Rights Act of 1965, you have to go back to 2013, when the Supreme Court decided a case called Shelby County v. Holder. That decision overturned one of the key elements of the VRA, namely the requirement that states with a history of racial discrimination in voting must get newly designed districts pre-cleared by the Department of Justice, subject to expedited judicial review.
Critics of the decision, myself included, treated it as a landmark conservative holding. The headline of my column at the time was, “The Civil-Rights Era Ended Today.”
Yet the broader public, even the liberal public, didn’t react to the Shelby County case in the way it has to more recent decisions like Dobbs. Maybe the reason is that voting rights law is complex, so that understanding and explaining pre-clearance is tricky. Or maybe white liberals weren’t sufficiently alarmed, during Barack Obama’s second term, about the threat to nonwhite people’s votes.
But the most probable explanation for why both the Shelby County case and subsequent decisions chipping away at voting rights haven’t triggered a public uproar is that Chief Justice John Roberts correctly calculated that it would be best to attack voting rights incrementally.
Roberts is deeply conservative. But unlike the court’s more extreme conservatives, he prefers to make doctrinal changes slowly, one step at a time, to avoid undermining the court’s legitimacy and creating backlash. That stealthy strategy has been depressingly effective when it comes to undercutting voting rights.
The new Fifth Circuit opinion is a version of this same incrementalism. The appeals court didn’t say that no vote dilution claims can ever be brought under the Voting Rights Act, even though conservatives might welcome such a holding. Instead, it focused narrowly on the language of Section 2 of the law, which says that to win a case, the plaintiffs must prove that elections are not equally open to a protected “class” of citizens. The Fifth Circuit reasoned that the word “class” covers only members of a specific racial group, not members of more than one racial group added together.
The decision matters a lot. It is intended at a conceptual level (and maybe a political level) to split any potential coalition between Black and Hispanic voters. It’s not an accident that both groups tend to vote Democratic more than Republican, or that Republicans have made efforts to peel away those voters.
And the ruling dovetails with recent Supreme Court decisions that have made it harder and harder for voters challenging a district’s lines to prove the motivation was dilution of votes based on race — which is protected by what remains of the VRA — and not based on party, which the court said was none of its business in 2019’s Rucho v. Common Cause.
It would be great if the Supreme Court would overrule the Fifth Circuit. That could happen: The Fifth Circuit’s reading of the statute is unconvincing as a matter of text, history and logic. But if the Supreme Court lets the ruling stand or upholds it, that would be consistent with Roberts’ method on voting rights.
Death by a thousand cuts is just as effective as a stab to the heart — and less likely to get noticed.
Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and a law professor at Harvard University.
