The justices, before deciding whether to take the case, asked the Biden administration to weigh in - a move that seemed prompted less by sincere curiosity (the Trump administration sided with the students, but there is little doubt the Biden administration will take a different view) than by a desire to postpone the case until next term. Just offstage is the fate of affirmative action, in a case involving Asian students’ challenge to Harvard’s admissions policies - and asking the court to overrule its 2003 decision letting universities consider race as a factor. 6? Is Biden’s vaccine-and-testing mandate for private employers legal? Must states with vaccine mandates provide religious exemptions? Can Trump successfully claim executive privilege to stop the release of documents or prevent former aides from testifying before the House select committee investigating Jan. Meantime, other high-profile disputes appear headed to the court. Does the Constitution require - not just allow but require - Maine to make these vouchers available to religious schools, for explicitly religious instruction? The likely answer from this court seems obvious. The case comes from Maine, where some areas of the state are so rural, there are no public schools the state instead offers tuition vouchers to attend public schools in other areas or private institutions. The next month, the court agreed to review an abortion law, although the case satisfied none of the usual criteria for review: There was no split in the circuits, no conflict “with relevant decisions of this court,” no unsettled question of federal law.īefore leaving for the summer recess, the court added a religion case to its docket that could remove another cornerstone in the separation of church and state. But in the grim aftermath of Shelby County, voting rights advocates sought to expand the use of Section 2.īy the end of September 2021, the court’s approval rating had dropped to 40 percent, the lowest since Gallup started testing the question in 2000.Įven before the 2020-2021 term had drawn to a close, the court set the stage for the potentially watershed term now underway.Īfter years of dawdling and ducking, the court agreed in April to decide its first significant gun rights case in a decade, clarifying the scope of its 2008 decision that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms.
to vote on account of race or color.”įor years, that provision had taken a back seat to Section 5, because pre-clearance was such a powerful tool. The new Section 2 prohibited any voting practice that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right. In the aftermath of the 1980 ruling, Congress - yes, it was a different era - passed a new, strengthened version of Section 2 designed to make clear the law barred practices with discriminatory effects, whatever the motive. In a 1980 decision, the court held that Section 2 applied only to intentional discrimination, not to practices that have the effect of disadvantaging minority voters. Section 2 allows after-the-fact challenges to changes in voting procedures. In any event, he assured anyone who might be concerned, “Our decision in no way affects the permanent, nationwide ban on racial discrimination in voting found in” Section 2. “Our country has changed” since the Voting Rights Act was passed, Roberts proclaimed, with arguably excessive optimism.
In Shelby County, Roberts led the charge to neuter the law. For decades, this provision safeguarded the votes of millions of minority voters - and drove Republicans in the South and other covered areas to distraction.
Holder eviscerating Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, the critical mechanism that required jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination to obtain advance approval for voting changes - known as “pre-clearance ” - from the Justice Department. In 2013, Roberts wrote the 5-to-4 majority opinion in Shelby County v. Since his service as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration, Roberts had been a longtime antagonist of a broad reading of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which he saw as an affront to states’ rights and an unnecessary artifact of what he views as a bygone era of explicit discrimination. This time, in a case about voting rights, the conservatives were united, with Roberts fully on board. Democratic National Committee, decided on the last day of the term. This much was clear in the smoking ruins of the Voting Rights Act: A court that could do this could do anything.īut if one case from the 2020 term epitomized the brazenness of the new majority, and signaled more to come, it was Brnovich v.