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In Narrowing Voting Rights Act, Conservative Justices See Progress on Rac...

tell it, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has served its laudable purpose of eliminating racial... It also reflected divisions in the wider society about how much progress America has made at...

NYTIMES 입력 2026.04.30 18:06 0

In Narrowing Voting Rights Act, Conservative Justices See Progress on Rac...

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In Narrowing Voting Rights Act, Conservative Justices See Progress on Racism

The majority said the law was a victim of its own success and no longer needed. Dissenters responded that Congress should make the call.

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People lining up to register to vote in Selma, Ala., in February 1965.

Credit...

Associated Press

Adam Liptak

Adam Liptak is the chief legal correspondent and host of The Docket.

April 30, 2026,

5:04 a.m. ET

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To hear Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. tell it, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has served its laudable purpose of eliminating racial discrimination in elections and has now passed its sell-by date.

“Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South,” Justice Alito wrote for the six conservative justices in the majority in

Wednesday’s decision

that appeared to deal a coup de grâce to a towering achievement of the civil rights movement.

A stunningly effective piece of legislation secured at the cost of blood and lives in the South in the

Jim Crow era

, the act helped Black voters match and sometimes exceed registration rates of those of white people.

Justice Alito denied none of that, acknowledging, though mostly through quotations from earlier opinions, that the law was a response to “nearly a century of entrenched racial discrimination in voting, an insidious and pervasive evil which had been perpetuated in certain parts of our country through unremitting and ingenious defiance of the Constitution.”

As a result of the Voting Rights Act, he wrote, Black Americans, once barred from the polls, now vote at similar rates as the rest of the electorate.

That theme — that the aims of the law have now been satisfied — has run through the three rulings issued by the court’s conservative majority over the past 13 years that collectively robbed the act of its power. That was of a piece with other efforts by the court’s conservative majority to ensure that race-conscious policies do not continue indefinitely, as in

its decision

to put an end to affirmative action in higher education. It also reflected divisions in the wider society about how much progress America has made at eliminating the racism of its past.

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