Impact of 'Shelby' ruling

The Roberts court chose a most cynical way to celebrate this summer's 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court's conservative majority announced a 5-4 ruling that guts one of King's greatest triumphs, the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote Tuesday's opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, was 10 years old in 1965, when police officers beat and gassed citizens in Selma, Ala., who were demonstrating for the right to vote; that assault, and King's subsequent march from Selma to Montgomery, spurred passage of the law Roberts and his colleagues undid on Tuesday by declaring a key provision outdated.

But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was not going to let the majority ignore that they were invalidating years of bipartisan efforts in Congress toward "achieving what was once the subject of a dream: the equal citizenship stature of all in our polity, a voice to every voter in our democracy undiluted by race."

Ginsburg invoked "the great man who led the march from Selma to Montgomery, and there called for the passage of the Voting Rights Act. ... 'The arc of the moral universe is long,' he said, but 'it bends toward justice,' if there is a steadfast commitment to see the task through to completion. That commitment has been disserved by today's decision."

Her dissent, joined by the other three liberal justices, was a sharp rebuke of the conservatives for the yawning gap between their frequent vows of judicial modesty and the "hubris" apparent in their "demolition" of the Voting Rights Act. "What has become of the court's usual restraint?" she asked the judicial activists of the right.

The 15th Amendment, which guarantees the right to vote, expressly gives Congress the "power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." Congress used that power as recently as 2006, renewing the Voting Rights Act by 390-33 in the House and 98-0 in the Senate; then-President George W. Bush signed the legislation.

That renewal continued what had been the law's most important provision: subjecting states with histories of discrimination to extra scrutiny before they can change voting laws. Lawmakers concluded that "serious and widespread intentional discrimination persists" in the mostly Southern states covered by these "preclearance" requirements.

But Roberts said he had "no choice" but to invalidate that provision, because he disagreed with the lawmakers' policy conclusions. "Today's statistics tell a decidedly different story," the legislator-jurist said from the bench.

The chief justice justified his intervention by citing improved voter-registration percentages and by pointing out that Selma and Montgomery now "are governed by African American mayors."

The justices had a late-session listlessness that seemed at odds with the significance of the moment. Stephen Breyer yawned. Anthony Kennedy stared at the ceiling. Sonia Sotomayor sipped a drink and Antonin Scalia rocked in his chair.

Ginsburg, though, was steely as she scolded the majority. "It was the judgment of Congress [in 2006] that '40 years has not been a sufficient amount of time to eliminate the vestiges of discrimination following nearly 100 years of disregard for the dictates of the 15th Amendment,'" she said. In Alabama, she said, Congress found "many" barriers to minority voting rights. "They were shocking and they were recent."

History may not be as ancient as Roberts supposes.