Earlier this week, Rep. Terri Sewell (D-AL) introduced the long-awaited H.R. 4, the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2021. House leaders have spent the last months drafting this bill, and it presents an opportunity for members of both parties in Congress to join together—as they have in the past—to continue the important provisions of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965 and help ensure that, no matter our race or zip code, we can have an equal say in the decisions that shape our future.
The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act is specifically intended to restore the Voting Rights Act (VRA) after two U.S. Supreme Court decisions badly weakened it in the past decade: Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, and Brnovich v. DNC earlier this summer.
In Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court voided the law’s Section 5 requirement that the U.S. Department of Justice pre-clear voting policy changes in jurisdictions with long histories of racial discrimination in voting, claiming that there was no sign that Congress had thought about whether the provision was still needed. As a result, numerous states have created new barriers to voting. Additionally, in this year’s Brnovich v. DNC, the Court made it harder (though not impossible) to bring challenges to discriminatory voting laws under Section 2 on the grounds that they have an adverse impact on the ability of minorities to vote.
The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would address the results of these court decisions by restoring and expanding the protections of the original VRA. As for the anti-voter bills that state legislatures passed this year, the John Lewis bill would not automatically affect any of them, but it would make it easier to challenge some of them in court as racially discriminatory. (However, the For the People Act would address many of these restrictive anti-voter bills. That’s why we need both bills. As CLC’s new 2021 State Scorecard on early voting and vote-by-mail shows, the For the People Act would expand access for millions of voters across at least 37 states and potentially millions more in states whose legislative sessions have not yet concluded for the term.)
Due to the Voting Rights Act’s success in combatting anti-voter policies, Congress has reauthorized the VRA five times since 1965 with overwhelming bipartisan majorities—most recently in 2006 by a vote of 390-33 in the House and 98-0 in the Senate. During each reauthorization, Congress held hours of hearings with testimony and evidence that demonstrated the persistence of racism in voting access and the continued effectiveness of the VRA in combatting it.
Since the Supreme Court’s Shelby County decision in 2013, the effort to restore the pre-clearance provisions of the VRA has similarly been bipartisan, even as final passage has eluded Congress. In 2014, for example—soon after the Court’s decision—Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) joined Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), a former chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, to introduce a bill to strengthen the VRA. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), in his June 2021 Charleston Gazette-Mail op-ed specifically highlighted the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act as legislation he supported, in part because of its bipartisan potential, and he wrote that he and his Republican colleague Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) have been working to champion VRA restoration in the Senate.
As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent in Brnovich v. DNC this summer, “If a single statute represents the best of America, it is the Voting Rights Act. It marries two great ideals: democracy and racial equality. And it dedicates our country to carrying them out.” Members of Congress from both parties can now help fulfill the promise of the VRA by voting for the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center is dedicated to advancing democracy through law at the federal, state and local levels, fighting for every American’s rights to responsive government and a fair opportunity to participate in and affect the democratic process.
