President Obama confronts George W. Bush court on voting, gay rights cases
President Barack Obama faced an uncomfortable truth Tuesday: He was powerless to stop George W. Bush’s Supreme Court from eviscerating the most consequential civil rights law of the past half-century.
The constitutional law professor sat by helplessly — “deeply disappointed” — as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a 5-4 majority opinion that tore down one section of the Voting Rights Act and effectively killed another. Obama, who voted against Roberts in 2005, could see it coming. Everyone in Washington could.Continue Reading
Roberts had written critically of the Voting Rights Act as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration, making arguments that he dismissed during his confirmation hearing as the work of a hired hand — but that stuck in the craw of civil rights activists.
“The judge was on the wrong side of history. He was on the wrong side of the Voting Rights Act, not just the letter but also the spirit of the act,” John Lewis, the Georgia Democratic congressman who was savagely beaten during a 1965 voting rights march in Alabama, told senators back then. On Tuesday, Lewis described Roberts’s opinion as a “dagger into the heart” of the law.
Obama is hardly the first president to govern at a time when the Supreme Court is controlled by justices appointed by the other party — but for a president with big ideas about the government’s role in protecting the disenfranchised, Bush’s moves loom as a particular obstacle, as Tuesday showed.
The irony, of course, is that it was Roberts himself who wrote what is surely the most important opinion of Obama’s first term, enshrining Obamacare as the law of the land. That same justice on Tuesday wrote the opinion striking down key parts of the Voting Rights Act — and could well play a major role in cases Wednedsay regarding gay marriage, barely a year after Obama spoke out in favor of it.
The historic pairing of Obama and Roberts — two singular talents of their respective parties at this moment in time — sets them up to be opposing forces on some of the most important issues of the day, long after Obama leaves office and the Roberts court lives on. That clash on Tuesday took the form of Roberts striking down key parts of a law central to the civil rights movement — perhaps doing more in one opinion to change civil rights protections than Obama could do singlehandedly as president to advance them, even by his presence as the nation’s first black president.
Likewise, Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) knew the Roberts ruling was a sure thing — though the conservative Georgia Republican welcomed it as a sign of progress for the South.
“Today’s ruling should not come as a surprise,” Westmoreland said. “We no longer suffer from the voting rights issues we saw in 1965 that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court’s decision will not weaken the positive impact the VRA had on our country, nor will it diminish the importance of the Civil Rights Movement. It simply acknowledges the progress that has been made since 1965.”
The decision striking down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act — and effectively nullifying Section 5 — did little to settle the political debate over whether minorities still need the federal government to ensure access to the polls in states and counties that have a history of racial discrimination. But it ensures that Bush’s record on civil rights will be seen at least as much through the prism of his court picks as his signature on the 2006 Voting Rights Act extension, the fourth renewal of the law since its original enactment in 1965. The Roberts legacy outlived the law.
“There is no denying,” Roberts wrote, “that the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions.” He was joined in the decision by another Bush appointee, Samuel Alito, conservatives Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, and swing voter Anthony Kennedy.