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THE DEATH OF THE FOURTH AMERICAN REPUBLIC  
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Jamelle Bouie
August 6, 2025
The New York Times
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_ Last Friday, the Supreme Court all but announced how it would rule
on the future of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. _

Selma, Ala., 1965., Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

 

Last Friday, the Supreme Court all but announced how it would rule on
the future of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The case in question, Louisiana v. Callais, which was heard
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the first time in March, is a dispute over the drawing of the
state’s six congressional districts. Nearly one-third of Louisianans
are Black, but in 2022 state lawmakers drew just one district where
those Black voters had a reasonable chance of electing a
representative of their choice.

In Louisiana, as is true in much of the Deep South, voting is highly
polarized by race. Black people tend to vote for Democrats, white
people for Republicans. It’s in this environment that Black voters,
a distinct and coherent minority, are shut out of political power
unless they constitute a majority — or close to a majority — of a
congressional district.

Several individuals as well as groups representing those voters sued
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Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — which ensures fair
representation — arguing that the law required the state to draw two
congressional districts in which Black voters had the opportunity to
elect their preferred candidate.

 

A federal appeals court sided with the plaintiffs and ordered the
Louisiana State Legislature to draw a new map with a second
majority-Black congressional district, which it did. But this map was
challenged by a group of self-described “non-African American”
voters, who charged that it was an illegal racial gerrymander. It’s
this case that the Supreme Court has decided in essence to hear again,
and it is for this case that the court wants the parties to address
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the state’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority
congressional district violates the 14th or 15th Amendments to the
U.S. Constitution.”

Under the current Supreme Court’s vision of a rigidly colorblind
Constitution — indifferent to either racial inequality or the
mechanisms of color caste — the answer is very likely to be yes.
There is also the matter of Chief Justice John Roberts, who has led
the court’s effort to curb, limit and undermine the Voting Rights
Act. One assumes that having gotten the court to strike down one part
of the law in 2013, he is eager to get it to strike down another,
considering his decades-long hostility
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the law, which has been in his sights since he was a young lawyer in
the Reagan administration.

There is good reason to think that the Roberts court, given its past
behavior as well as its established antipathy toward anything that
might encumber a state’s ability to shape its electorate, will use
this case to conclude its war on the Voting Rights Act with a decision
that renders Section 2, and thus the law itself, moot: a toothless
nullity to be ignored by those who fear the ballot and the power of a
free choice. In doing so, the court would extinguish a law that more
than any other made the promise of American democracy a reality.

If by American democracy we mean a pluralistic, multiracial society of
political and social equals, then American democracy as we know it
began with the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 60 years ago
today.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended discrimination in public
accommodations, but civil equality is a hollow promise in the absence
of political equality. As President Lyndon Johnson observed in his
remarks
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the signing of the Voting Rights Act, quoting himself from his days as
a senator: “This right to vote is the basic right without which all
others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals,
control over their destinies.”

In this, Johnson echoed the Kansas senator Edmund G. Ross — a
Republican known, infamously, for saving the first President Johnson
from impeachment and almost certain removal — who declared
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15th Amendment, that the right to vote was “the most necessary and
the most sacred of all rights, because it underlies all, and without
which we are secure in the enjoyment of none.”

“There is no middle ground in this question,” Ross continued.
“We must concede the right of suffrage to everyone who stands as our
equal in the scale of creation, or we must deny it to all. It is
universal suffrage or autocracy.”

The 15th Amendment, which held that “the right of citizens of the
United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United
States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous
condition of servitude,” wrote this high ideal into our
Constitution. But the country failed to meet its demands. It let
reactionaries curb the right to vote for millions of Americans, Black
and white, and sustained a wave of nativist elitism that suppressed it
for immigrants deemed undesirable.

It was the Voting Rights Act, passed at the high point of the civil
rights movement, that made something close to universal suffrage a
reality. The law demolished the architecture of Jim Crow
disenfranchisement. Following the language of the 15th Amendment —
ratified nearly a century earlier — it prohibited the enactment of
any election law that would deny or abridge voting rights on account
of race or color. It suspended all literacy tests in the states that
used them and prohibited anyone acting under color of law from
intimidating any eligible person trying to vote. It pushed back hard
against vote dilution, blocking legislative attempts to reduce the
strength of a person’s vote. Most significantly, it instituted
preclearance, which forbade covered states and jurisdictions to make
any change to voting standards, practices or procedures without first
submitting that change to the Justice Department for approval.

The immediate effect of the Voting Rights Act was to enfranchise
millions of Black Americans living in the South. Turnout in
presidential elections
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Black voters in the states of the former Confederacy rose from around
25 percent in 1960 to just over 60 percent in 1968. Rates of voter
registration
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states such as Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi doubled (or more than
doubled) from 1965 to 1967. And Southern states were, within the next
decade, electing Black lawmakers in numbers not seen since
Reconstruction.

 

Subsequent amendments strengthened the law. A 1975 revision introduced
a national ban on literacy tests and created new protections for
language minorities. A 1982 amendment established that states and
localities are liable under the Voting Rights Act if the effect of
their policies is to discriminate against voters, regardless of
intent. And a 2006 reauthorization — passed overwhelmingly by a
Republican-led Congress and signed by a Republican president —
extended the core provisions of the Voting Rights Act for another 25
years, at least until the Supreme Court issued its 2013 decision in
Shelby County v. Holder, effectively ending preclearance and
inaugurating a new era of voter suppression. Since Shelby County, the
court has continued to chip away at the law, even going so far as
to invert the formula
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the 1982 amendment, elevating the intent of the lawmakers over the
consequences of their actions. If a legislature did not mean to
discriminate (pinkie promise), then for this Supreme Court, it does
not matter that it actually did.

SINCE THEIR REVOLUTION, the French have lived under five republics.
The first was overcome by Napoleon. The second, a brief return to
republican democracy after decades of monarchy, was trampled by
Napoleon’s nephew, Louis Napoleon. The third succumbed to the Nazis,
and the fourth was overwhelmed by the contradictions inherent in its
colonial domination of other peoples. The Fifth Republic, established
in 1958, endures.

Americans pride ourselves, by contrast, on our undivided history under
one Constitution — a single, ongoing experiment in self-government.
But look closely at American history and you’ll see that this is an
illusion of continuity that belies a reality of change, and sometimes
radical transformation, over time. There are several American
republics and at least two Constitutions, a first and a second
founding
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Our first republic began with ratification in 1788 and collapsed at
Fort Sumter in 1861. Our second emerged from the wreckage of the Civil
War and was dismantled, as the University of Connecticut
historian Manisha Sinha argues
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by Jim Crow at home and imperial ambition abroad. If the third
American republic took shape under the unusual circumstances of the
middle decades of the 20th century — what the Vanderbilt historian
Jefferson Cowie calls “the great exception
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of depression, war and a political system indelibly shaped by
immigration restriction and the near-total exclusion of millions of
American citizens from the political system — then the fourth began
with the achievements of the civil rights movement, which included a
newly open door
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the world.

_This_ was an American republic built on multiracial pluralism. A
nation of natives and of immigrants from around the world. Of
political parties that strove to represent a diverse cross-section of
society. Of a Black president and a future “majority-minority”
nation. There was an ugly side — it’s no coincidence that state
retrenchment from public goods and services followed the crumbling of
racial barriers. But for all its harsh notes and discord, this was the
closest the country ever came to the “composite nation
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of Frederick Douglass’s aspirations: a United States that served as
home to all who might seek the shelter of the Declaration of
Independence and its “principles of justice, liberty and perfect
humanity equality.”

IT’S THIS AMERICA that Donald Trump and his movement hope to
condemn to the ash heap of history. It’s this America that they’re
fighting to destroy with their attacks on immigration, civil rights
laws, higher education and the very notion of a pluralistic society of
equals.

 

The Supreme Court’s war on the Voting Rights Act precedes Trump but
it is simpatico with his aims. The court’s steady effort to make the
law an artifact of the past is of a piece with its broad expansion of
executive power for the current president. Both work to undermine the
basis for this more politically equal era of American democracy and
clear the path to an American autocracy.

But while the Voting Rights Act may be heading to its demise as a
functional piece of legislation, it can still stand as a symbol: of
our collective capacity to expand the horizons of democratic life; of
our creative intelligence in the task of making a more perfect union;
and of our ability to confront and overcome the worst of this
nation’s past and present.

The Voting Rights Act is quite likely dead. Long live the Voting
Rights Act.

_JAMELLE ANTOINE BOUIE is an American columnist for The New York
Times [[link removed]]. He was
formerly chief political correspondent for Slate
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the Columbia Journalism Review
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Uberti called Bouie "one of the defining commentators on politics and
race in the Trump era
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* Voting Rights Act
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* Supreme Court
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* democracy
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* U.S. history
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* Racism
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