EMILY FENG, HOST:
The central tenet of the Voting Rights Act has been effectively demolished. That's the opinion of Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote in her dissent in a landmark case at the High Court this week. But the author of the majority opinion, Samuel Alito, disagrees. The staunch conservative justice has spent much of his legal career focused on a section of the act. But why? We'll put that question to Peter Canellos. He is author of "Revenge For The Sixties: Sam Alito And The Triumph Of The Conservative Legal Movement." Welcome.
PETER CANELLOS: Thank you.
FENG: You're a historian, so I want to start with the Voting Rights Act and what it was meant to solve. And we're going to play a bit of a speech that then-President Lyndon B. Johnson gave in 1965, when he was urging Congress to pass the act. And that speech came just a week after the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.
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LYNDON B JOHNSON: Rarely are we met with a challenge not to our growth or abundance or our welfare or our security, but rather to the values and the purposes and the meaning of our beloved nation. The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue.
FENG: This speech is considered an important turning point for the nation. But Peter, what was Samuel Alito's reaction to that moment? And how did that moment then inform the rest of his legal career?
CANELLOS: Sam Alito has always been skeptical of race-based solutions. I think he has acknowledged in his opinions, though, the evils of segregation, the intention to redress wrongs that President Johnson talked about. But I think he's always had a countervailing fear of the Supreme Court interfering too much in voting, which he sees as a state matter.
This was personal to him in one way, in that a Supreme Court decision from that era had inaugurated what we now regard as the one person, one vote standard. He, as a teenager, remembered disagreeing with it because his father, who headed the Office of Legislative Services in New Jersey, was then obliged to come up with a map that would equalize these legislative districts. It was a terrible challenge to his father because his father's job depended on a strict political neutrality. Sam Alito remembered as a teenager hearing the clack, clack of a slide rule downstairs late into the night as his father was struggling with this terrible task.
And he later said that, you know, one of the things that drove him into the law was his disagreement with the reapportionment decision. So I think from an early age, Alito had a skepticism of the Supreme Court particularly - but also the federal government generally - sticking its nose into voting matters.
FENG: Which brings us to today, and I want to listen to some of Alito's questioning during the oral arguments for this case.
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SAMUEL ALITO: So the 15th Amendment pretty clearly requires intentional discrimination, and the 1982 amendment to the Voting Rights Act walked away from intentional discrimination.
FENG: What is he arguing here?
CANELLOS: There's been a long-standing debate within the world of voting rights about whether you judge the effect of a policy or whether you judge the intent of a policy. Conservatives tend to believe the federal government only has the power to act against something if there is overt discrimination as opposed to a policy that has the sort of incidental effect of limiting someone's participation.
FENG: And was that one of the key arguments that helped clinch the majority decision?
CANELLOS: Yes, but the Supreme Court - both Alito and Chief Justice Roberts have been moving in this direction for a long time. I think they believe that the 15th Amendment, which is the Voting Rights Amendment, which also empowers the legislation like the Voting Rights Act - that it should be limited only to intentional discrimination. They're basically saying, partisan gerrymandering is okay unless it's explicitly racial. Now, liberals will come back and say, well, we have a situation where many of these racial minorities are hugely disproportionately Democrats. So an enactment that is meant to limit democratic participation has the overwhelming effect of limiting racial participation as well and racial clout of each person's vote.
FENG: I want to dig into something you mentioned earlier, which is that this decision is a culmination of several decades of rulings from both Justice Alito and the Chief Justice John Roberts that have weakened voting protections. Can you explain how this has been a long-term project of theirs?
CANELLOS: Conservatives and members of the conservative legal movement believe that the country went too far in using race-based solutions to race-based problems. I think most of them would acknowledge the very overt ills of the segregation era and the aftermath of the segregation era, the way that poll taxes were used, the way literacy tests were used.
They would say, however, that it has perpetuated a sort of thinking that is racial in nature, and it is not strictly colorblind. It's taking race into effect every time you redraw districts right now because of the Voting Rights Act. That has been a strong presumption on the part of Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts, virtually since they joined the court in 2005 and 2006, respectively. In case by case, they have narrowed the force of the Voting Rights Act and, in this case, carries this to a new level.
FENG: That's Peter Canellos, author of "Revenge For The Sixties: Sam Alito And The Triumph Of The Conservative Legal Movement." Thank you, Peter.
CANELLOS: Thank you.
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