The Supreme Court handed down its decision in NAMUDNO v. Holder this morning.
And rather than confront the big issue head on, the Court essentially punted, setting the big question aside for another day. The special provisions of the Voting Rights Act remain in the books, ready for the next challenge.
The case raised two questions: First, can the utility district, which is neither a county nor a parish and does not register voters (and thus not a "political subdivision" under the explicit statutory definition) bailout from coverage of Section 4 of the Act? And second, if the utility district cannot bailout, then they argued that the preclearance requirements are unconstitutional.
The Court only reached the first question and concluded -- in a surprising 8-1 opinion authored by the Chief Justice -- that the utility district can attempt to bailout under section 4. While invoking the "constitutional avoidance" doctrine, in other words, the Court disposed of this challenge on statutory grounds. I have two initial thoughts about NAMUDNO and the Court's approach.
(1) Why would the Court avoid the constitutional question? Anybody who read the transcript of the oral argument could appreciate that the constitutionality of the Act rested on uncertain ground. Those who count votes could see at least 4 votes against the Act, and Justice Kennedy seemed a likely fifth vote. How did we get from that state of affairs to the decision we got today? One answer may very well be that the conservatives could not get Kennedy to go along. This is a big step, after all, and Kennedy might not be ready to take it quite yet. If this is true, then this outcome is the best that the conservatives could get, and the "liberals" were happy to go along, as this was a much better outcome than they had a right to expect.
If I am right about this, then the Act remains on solid constitutional ground for the foreseeable future. Justice Kennedy could always change his mind, of course, but until then, constitutional challenges to the Act are likely to go the way they always have. This is now the sixth challenge to the Act since its initial enactment in 1965 (Katzenbach; Morgan; Georgia; City of Rome; Lopez; NAMUDNO), and each and every time, the Court has deferred to the wishes of Congress. So the real question for the future is, why would the Court change its mind? What would have to happen for the Court to strike down this law? These questions lead me to my second thought . . .
(2) The Puzzle that is Justice Thomas. Eight justices were willing to set down the constitutional question and decide the case on statutory ground. Justice Thomas was not. He not only wanted to reach the constitutional question, but he also would strike down the special provisions of the Act as beyond the powers of Congress to enact.
This is remarkable. Remember that Justice Thomas is one of those rarified "classical jurists" who, as opposed to the "liberals," does not make law from the bench. Yet here he is in NAMUDNO, wishing to strike down portions of the Act because Congress did not put in the record enough evidence to satisfy him about the need for the statute any longer. Make no mistake: Congress had plenty of evidence in the record, thousands of pages worth. But the evidence Congress did have was not the evidence Justice Thomas wanted.
To Justice Thomas, Congress must have evidence of intentional racial discrimination in order to justify the extension of the Act any longer. In fairness, this makes some sense: the argument dates back to City of Rome, when the Court decided on the same day that the Fifteenth Amendment embodied a standard of intentional racial discrimination. Note: Could Congress prohibit state voting practices devoid of purposeful discrimination but only with a discriminatory effect? According to Justice Thomas, the answer is no. The full Court, in City of Rome, disagreed. Shouldn't Justice Thomas at the very least recognize this disagreement? And wouldn't a "classical jusrist," uninterested in writing law but only in interpreting it, side with all the prior rulings upholding the constitutionality of the Act?
To state the obvious: we are about to embark on a historic debate on the nomination of Judge Sotomayor to the Court. I am sure we will hear a lot about the conservative justices and their penchant for interpreting law, not making it, for calling balls and strikes, not for writing the rules of the game. When you hear these comments, think about Justice Thomas in NAMUDNO. Think also about the upcoming Ricci case. Talk to me then about judicial activism and "classical judicial jurists."
Now, I think City of Rome says that Congress, in an attempt to prevent intentional discrimination (and enforce the 15th Amendment), is allowed to reach out past intentional discrimination and capture some activity that the 15th Amendment doesn't prohibit - if that's the only way to prevent intentional discrimination, and in 1980 they were convinced a broad prophylaxis was. I don't see that Thomas disagrees with that at all. If you're arguing that City of Rome gives Congress a right to bar practices or changes that have a discriminatory effect after most intentional discrimination has evaporated, I don't think that's what it says at all. The question that City of Rome requires Congress to answer when it reauthorizes the Act, and I thought everyone agreed on this, is whether there's still enough intentional discrimination to justify an overbroad prophylactic that captures all sorts of changes that aren't intentionally discriminatory or even so discriminatory in effect (see, say, Barnett v. City of Chicago, a case about whether blacks should get 19 65-percent black wards or 20). Thomas makes a case that there isn't enough left; whether you find that convincing or not is quite debatable, but I think he's directing his attention to just the right question.
ReplyDelete