While I vehemently disagree with the majority's decision in Shelby County v. Holder, I don't know that calling Chief Justice Roberts a white supremacist, and distorting his ruling in Holder helps us to understand the current decision or Roberts earlier rulings on the court.
I have cited two paragraphs of Robert's decision below. My brief summary would be that we have made significant progress, but we are still not all of the way there yet.
"Nearly 50 years later, they are still in effect; indeed, they have been made more stringent, and are now scheduled to last until 2031. There is no denying, however, that the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions. By 2009, “the racial gap in voter registration and turnout [was] lower in the States originally covered by §5 than it [was] nationwide.” Northwest Austin Municipal Util. Dist. No. One v. Holder, 557 U. S. 193 –204 (2009). Since that time, Census Bureau data indicate that African-American voter turnout has come to exceed white voter turnout in five of the six States originally covered by §5, with a gap in the sixth State of less than one half of one percent. See Dept. of Commerce, Census Bureau, Re-ported Voting and Registration, by Sex, Race and His-panic Origin, for States (Nov. 2012) (Table 4b).
At the same time, voting discrimination still exists; no one doubts that. The question is whether the Act’s extraordinary measures, including its disparate treatment of the States, continue to satisfy constitutional requirements. As we put it a short time ago, “the Act imposes current burdens and must be justified by current needs.” Northwest Austin, 557 U. S., at 203."
As the court had suggested in the Northwest Austin decision, if we treat states differently then it must be justified by current data, not data that is decades old. Was this a blatant effort to disfranchise Black voters? Or was this an attempt to faithfully interpret the Constitution, which opened the door to racially charged efforts to erect new barriers to Black access to the polls?
Linda Greenhouse discussed Roberts and his views on race in 2009 prior the the Northwest Austin decision. She noted in an editorial for the NY Times that," As a young lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department, he wrote sharply worded memos on behalf of the administration’s failed effort to block expansion of the [voting rights] act in 1982. Confronted with his paper trail during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing in 2005, he explained that he was simply expressing the administration’s views." https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/opinion/09greenhouse.html
Can we claim, as you seem to be suggesting, that Roberts is racist because he wrote those words? Or as Roberts claimed, was he simply doing his job within an administration that was frequently blind if not hostile to calls to end discrimination in American life?
Perhaps the problem goes deeper and reflects the concerns of slave-holding and white supremacist founding fathers who helped draft and ratify the constitution in the first place.
Speaking about racial equality in criminal justice Michael Klarman wrote in his Bancroft Prize winning study, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality, "Thus even the Warren Court, with its unparalleled support for civil rights, and the Rehnquist Court, with its ostensible commitment to constitution colon blindness, have tolerated race discrimination in criminal justice." Klarman blames this fact on public opinion and the fact that, "Most white Americans, even today, are reluctant to confront the troubling truths about the extent to which criminal justice remains color-coded."(Klarman, 2004, p. 232.)
We need to celebrate the recent decision of the court on voting right. I for one hope that it reflects a partial acknowledgement that their ruling in Shelby County v. Holder had opened the door to new racially biased voter suppression efforts. I’m not as optimistic about the affirmative action ruling that should be coming out in the next two weeks or so.
