Shelby and the Left’s False Narrative

Andrew C. McCarthy:

For anyone other than a “social justice” demagogue, the Supreme Court’s Shelby decision, striking down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), is cause for celebration. In real life, this is a success story: A society that overcomes ingrained, systematic racial discrimination — and does it during a 40-year span while, in parts of the world the Left somehow prefers to America, discrimination endures and becomes even more lethal. But the Left does not live in a real nation; it lives in a false narrative: The United States is the villain that can never be redeemed, and racism is not just its original but its indelible sin.

In our real nation, the VRA was always of dubious constitutionality. The Supreme Court expressly recognized that in originally upholding it, just as Congress recognized it in originally limiting its duration to five years. It was a distortion of the constitutional principles of federalism and equal sovereignty among the states — absent which there would have been no union. The distortion was tolerated because of the gravity of the evil it addressed, just as surgery must traumatize the body in order to cure it. But the VRA was a remedy, not a new order of things. It was supposed to vanish once the disease — the denial of a core privilege of citizenship through systematic, pervasive racial discrimination — was cured.

The disease was long ago eradicated. That does not mean racism is over. There are vestiges of racism in our society. Because we are dealing with human nature, some of them are to be expected. But many are a direct result of the Left’s race-obsessed narrative, dominant on the campus and in the media for over a generation. It tirelessly promotes — it needs — the destructive canard that racial animus is the cause of every effect, and thus that systematic reverse discrimination, far from a temporary remedy, must be a lasting framework and a thriving industry.

Racism would otherwise die its natural death. It is a violation of the self-evident truth that we are all created equal. That government and our society failed, for a very long time, to keep faith with this truth is incontestable. But the truth is self-evident because it does not come from any government or society. It is part of our nature, a gift from our Creator, and an immutable tenet of our Judeo-Christian heritage. If we hold to what makes us Americans, all racism — including the purportedly benign kind — will be seen as immoral. For now, racism of the sort that drove the VRA to passage in 1965 is aberrational.

Significantly, and quite contrary to the Left’s hysterical rants against the Shelby ruling, the VRA was not intended to end racism. It specifically targeted the denial of voting rights by state governments (and their subdivisions) that practiced systematic racial discrimination. Once that denial ended, the VRA and its (at best) barely constitutional methods were to end.

That was originally supposed to happen 43 years ago. It should have happened no later than 1982 when, as the Supreme Court observes, the VRA was extended for 25 years rather than ended . . . only to be extended for yet another quarter-century in 2006. By then, in a nation on the cusp of electing its first black president, the states targeted by the VRA had long featured numerous black and other minority elected officials; indeed, such is the contemporary electoral parity between races that black registration and voter turn-out rates are often greater than comparative white rates.

The VRA’s remedial measures would have been unconstitutional — clearly so — but for the continuation of the evil they were designed to address, the denial of the right to vote guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment. As the Shelby majority observed, the framers intended states to be autonomous in the conduct of elections and to be treated with equal sovereignty and dignity; yet, VRA Section 5 requires them to obtain federal permission (from the Justice Department or a three-judge court) before enacting any laws related to voting, and Section 4 applies that requirement only to some states.

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