What was the Voting Rights Act of 1965?

0:03The 1965 Voting Rights Act, it's really important to understand the reach of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It had a number of provisions that were designed to get at racial discrimination in voting, but probably its most important provision was the pre-clearance regime that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 established. States that had historically discriminated against African Americans had to pre-clear any changes to their voting laws with the federal government before those changes could go into effect. Now, the real-life impact of this was momentous. African Americans had voter registration and turnout in some parts of the South at this time at like 0%, and it skyrocketed in the wake of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Had the Court in 1966 determined that the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional, all of that progress would never have happened, because it really was Congress's attempt to try to be

0:56creative to address almost a century of discrimination in voting. But by 1966, the court was on board. This is not the Court of 1903 that decided Giles v. Harris. This is not the court that was dismantling the Reconstruction Acts passed in the wake of the Civil War. This was a court that was just as committed to protecting African American voting rights, and really minority voting rights more generally, because the Voting Rights Act wasn't just about African Americans in the South, although it wasn't the primary focus, but other groups had also been historically disenfranchised, as well. The act just became very important for allowing the Federal government to police and protect the voting rights of minorities in this country writ large. The courts were on board in 1966. South Carolina v. Katzenbach, they recognize that the Voting Rights Act was unprecedented in a sense of when you think about the world of federal legislation,

1:51and you think about our system in which we typically think of states as having pretty broad authority to set voter qualifications. The Voting Rights Act was viewed as unprecedented because it interrupted that discretion. Now, states that have terrible records on voting rights, they have to report to the federal government. That is not typical in our system, but the Supreme Court recognized that it was necessary. It wasn't that Congress had not tried case-by-case litigation, challenging restrictive voting laws in the South, but that litigation through the Department of Justice had not been successful. More stringent legislation was needed in order to address really what was a systematic problem. In South Carolina v. Katzenbach, the court found that there were certain federalism costs that were imposed by the Voting Rights Act, but it was necessary, given

2:41the levels of discrimination that existed in the South at the time.