Shelby County V. Holder Case Study

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As President Lyndon B. Johnson once stated, “Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact” (Johnson). In 1965, in response to black Americans being incessantly disenfranchised, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, prohibiting racial discrimination in voting. For its first 48 years, the Voting Rights Act was extremely effective, with black voter registration and turnout greatly increasing. Nearly fifty years later, in 2013, in the Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court declared Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional. This ruling has essentially made …show more content…
Acknowledging its success, Congress continued to reauthorize and in some cases, expand the Voting Rights Act throughout the remainder of the 20th century. The act was reauthorized four times within the ensuing fifty years, each time with overwhelming bipartisan consensus in Congress. However, in the Shelby County v. Holder case of 2013, the Supreme Court declared Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional, effectively negating the rest of the landmark legislation. Unfortunately, however, the problems that prompted the Voting Rights Act in the first place were not solved. Under the Voting Rights Act, states and localities previously identified by Section 4 could be bailed out from being subject to pre-clearance. To be bailed out, localities must prove that there has been no voter discrimination in the past ten years. Between the years 1965 and 2013, no counties in Louisiana or Mississippi were bailed-out and only one in Georgia and Alabama each were (New York Times). These low numbers prove that to some extent, voter discrimination in the South still exists. In Shelby County v. Holder, Shelby County only focused on proving that there was little vote denial. In the United States, the problem is not so much vote denial as it is vote dilution. Many states have reworked their district lines to ensure that there are fewer black majority districts, which is known as gerrymandering. This manipulation makes it difficult for certain groups to have their voices heard. To some extent, Section 4 has prevented this discrimination from getting out of control. But with the Shelby County v. Holder outcome, there is no telling what will happen in the future. The Voting Rights Act ensured that there would be some federal oversight to see that district lines are not exploited. Without legislation like the Voting Rights Act, states have the opening to gerrymander district lines as they
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