The “dead letter” VRA and the elimination of dignity
Vann R. Newkirk II writes a “Requiem” for the Voting Rights Act in The Atlantic (gift link):
The best things shine bright, but never long. So it was for the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 legislation that protected Black suffrage by neutralizing voter suppression in southern states, and became the foundation for equal ballot access for all Americans. Of the 250 years since the country’s founding, less than a quarter unfolded under the aegis of universal suffrage. Color television, credit cards, and Barbie dolls arrived earlier than the VRA and will survive longer. The reign of Queen Elizabeth II lasted a decade longer than the guarantor of democracy in America.
The ruling SCOTUS handed down its Callais decision this week “renders Section 2 all but a dead letter,” wrote Justice Elena Kagan in her dissent.
“Like previous VRA-related decisions, Callais was “narrow,” in that it did not strike down the law itself, Newkirk writes. “But although the edifice built at great expense—by Fannie Lou Hamer, by John Lewis, by the bloodied limbs of Mississippi sharecroppers and Alabama marchers—has not been entirely bulldozed, only the facade remains.”
The rest of the essay you can read at the link. Newkirk reflects on the law’s impacts over the last 60 years, Republican efforts to subvert or neuter it, and how through legal “engineering, Roberts, Alito, and their allies have created a trap for voting-rights cases” that renders them dead on arrival.
The final two paragraphs carry meaning Newkirk may not have considered:
But representation in Congress was never the ultimate goal of the VRA, nor will that be the primary problem the country faces after its fall. The point of the Voting Rights Act, as stated by Lyndon B. Johnson, the president who signed it into law, was to force the opponents of liberty to “open the gates to opportunity” to all Americans. Voting rights were, to him, a matter of the “dignity of man and the destiny of democracy,” and the law itself was meant to be a proactive guarantor of that destiny. Without it, no American should consider their dignity to be secure.
This is something that Black voting-rights advocates, from Frederick Douglass to Kwame Ture, long understood; that no person’s rights could really be inalienable if any person’s rights were trampled. The Voting Rights Act was the true instantiation of the Declaration of Independence. For centuries, Black people fought for the ballot, not just to have a say in their government, but to demonstrate their own value, both to themselves and to others. And, for a while, they succeeded.
No offense meant to Newkirk, but what Americans and the world witnessed after Donald Trump and his merry band of brigands reoccupied the White House in January 2025 was the actual closing of the gates Johnson forced open. Not just Black people, but all nonwhite people, all undocumented residents, and all non-MAGA Americans began seeing their dignity stripped as soon as Trump 2.0 launched its ICE assault on city after city beginning in January 2025.
An America exclusively of, by, and for white, Christians was Stephen Miller’s obsession, Russell Vought’s Project 2025 blueprint, and a post-Constitutional Republican Party’s means to rule indefinitely over what they once smugly declared a republic, not a democracy. Trump simply wants subjects, and his name and his mug plastered everywhere. Trump 2.0 gave ICE agents carte blanche permission to ignore the Constitution and to brutalize and jail citizen and noncitizen alike. They signaled to Trump’s enemies/subjects via shock-and-awe that “no American should consider their dignity to be secure.”
The conservative Court majority rendering the Voting Rights Act a dead letter this week is just a mopping-up operation.