CHAPTER
13

The Thirteenth Through Fifteenth Amendments: Civil Rights

In This Chapter

• The Thirteenth Amendment: abolishment of slavery
• The Fourteenth Amendment: due process and equal protection
• The Fifteenth Amendment: the right to vote

The three amendments that combine to form a constitutional bulwark for civil rights were ratified in the years following the Civil War and are known as the Reconstruction Amendments.

The Thirteenth Amendment formalized President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, making slavery illegal as part of the law of the land. The Fourteenth Amendment aimed to ensure every citizen is treated the same under the law, no matter what race or economic standing, and has turned out to be one of the most far-reaching parts of the Constitution for protecting the individual regardless of race or creed. The Fifteenth Amendment not only guaranteed the right to vote, but also banned authorities from putting up obstacles such as registration requirements that might be discriminatory against minorities and the poor or uneducated.

The Thirteenth Amendment: Abolishing Slavery

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

“Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

In 1641, Massachusetts became the first of the American colonies to legalize slavery. By July 4, 1776, slavery was legal in all 13 original states.

In one of its most infamous decisions, the Supreme Court held that slavery was legal in 1857. The Dred Scott decision, formally Scott v. Sandford, came in the case of a lifelong slave claiming his freedom. Historically and legally, if a runaway slave could make it to a free state or territory, he or she was free. Dred Scott argued that because his owner had taken him to a jurisdiction where slavery was outlawed, he was free.

The Supreme Court, in a blatantly political decision designed to head off a confrontation between slave and free states, rejected Scott’s argument. The court not only held that slavery was legal, but also reversed longstanding legal precedent and said Scott was still a slave, even in a free state. The reasoning behind the case was due process: setting a slave free would deprive an owner of his property. Even worse, the Supreme Court ruled that people of African descent, whether slave or not, could not be American citizens because they were inferior.

Protesting the Dred Scott decision, abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass pointed out that the Constitution said “We the people,” not “We the white people.” He added, “Slavery lives in this country not because of any paper Constitution, but in the moral blindness of the American people, who persuade themselves that they are safe, though the rights of others may be struck down.”

The Civil War

The Supreme Court apparently hoped the Dred Scott decision would defuse tensions between slave owners and abolitionists, and between slave states and free states. It didn’t. In fact, it fanned the flames that led to the Civil War.

In 1858, the year following the decision, Abraham Lincoln, while debating Stephen Douglas for a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois, made the speech—“A house divided against itself cannot stand”—that helped turn him into a national figure. Lincoln lost that race, but he won the Republican presidential nomination and then the election in 1860.

Lincoln was against slavery, and the Confederate states, comparing themselves to the American colonies less than a century earlier, declared independence. Lincoln took pains to make war against the Confederacy not on the grounds of slavery—it had been ruled legal by the Supreme Court, after all—but because the rebel states had violated our constitutional form of government by seceding. To Lincoln, it ostensibly was not a war of slavery but of secession. In August 1862, Lincoln defined the war this way: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”

The war began in 1861, and it was not until January 1, 1863, that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, based on his assumption of war powers, went into effect. It may be worth noting that the Emancipation Proclamation actually freed relatively few slaves—those in the Union states, or who had escaped to Union states.

Reconstruction

Even before the Civil War ended, when it became clear that the Union would prevail, Lincoln and his advisers agreed that a constitutional amendment was needed to overturn the Dred Scott decision and prevent any state—or the federal government—from again legalizing slavery. Lincoln also saw the proposed Thirteenth Amendment as a political move to demoralize the South in the last throes of the war.

Amid pitched battles in Congress—the Republicans were for it, the Democrats against it—the Thirteenth Amendment was approved in February 1865. The war formally ended with the signing of the treaty at Appomattox, Virginia, in April, and the amendment was ratified later in the year. A number of states refused to ratify the amendment in 1865. The last state to ratify it was Mississippi in 1995.

In an 1873 case, the Supreme Court, by then made up of a roster considerably different from the justices who came up with the Dred Scott decision 16 years earlier, ruled that the Thirteenth Amendment prohibited all types of involuntary servitude, not solely the slavery of people of African descent. “If Mexican peonage or the Chinese coolie labor system shall develop slavery of the Mexican or Chinese race within our territory, this amendment may safely be trusted to make it void,” the court held.

The nation and the Supreme Court took a broad view of civil rights in the years immediately after the Civil War, during the period known as Reconstruction, when the South was in effect ruled by Northern occupying forces. At first, the courts seemed to be moving toward identifying and eliminating symbols and manifestations—“badges and incidents”—of slavery, including many different types of discrimination against blacks.

For example, there was concerted effort to keep former slave owners from keeping their former slaves working for them in conditions comparable to slavery, including sharecropper arrangements. Under these arrangements, a former slave might be granted property—40 acres and a mule was typical—but then would be charged exorbitant fees for rent, seeds, food, furniture, and equipment. Every year the sharecropper would fall farther behind and deeper into servitude—a form of post–Civil War slavery that carried the threat of jail for nonpayment.

But the advances against involuntary servitude slowed when the federal forces withdrew from the South in 1877 and many areas began institutionalizing discrimination in the form of so-called Black Codes and Jim Crow laws.

Another notorious Supreme Court case came in 1896: Plessy v. Ferguson, which ushered in the “separate but equal” doctrine, holding that under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments (see the following section) the states had to ensure that blacks and whites had the same benefits in society; however, they did not need to ensure that blacks and whites enjoyed those benefits shoulder to shoulder or had access to them together. It was not until 1968 that the Supreme Court made it clear that a black family had the right to move in next door to a white family: “At the very least, the freedom that Congress is empowered to secure under the Thirteenth Amendment includes the freedom to buy whatever a white man can buy, the right to live wherever a white man can live.”

In 1868, 3 years after the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified to help wipe out the inequality and discrimination that lingered after slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment also struck down the part of the original Constitution that counted a slave as three fifths of a person for allocating seats for the House of Representatives and members of the Electoral College. It also blocked the former Confederate states and their citizens from filing lawsuits seeking compensation for damage to their property during the Civil War, including claims their freed slaves represented property losses.

Citizenship

Beyond those historical artifacts, the continuing impact of the Fourteenth Amendment comes from that brief opening paragraph, which begins: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States … are citizens of the United States.”

The Constitution does not define citizenship, but it has been interpreted to give the same rights to both natural-born and naturalized citizens, or people from other countries who become American citizens. Natural-born citizens include children born within the United States and children born outside the United States but whose parents are U.S. citizens. Neither the Constitution nor the Supreme Court has said so explicitly, but the longtime practice has been to regard any baby born in the United States as a natural-born citizen, including those whose parents are in the country illegally.

There have been and no doubt will continue to be proposals in Congress to require at least one parent to be an American citizen for a baby to be a citizen from birth, but wholesale changes in the rules of citizenship seem unlikely in the foreseeable future. As a nation of immigrants, our culture, tradition, and laws have always held a bias toward making it easier rather than harder for newcomers to become citizens.

The second part of the opening paragraph, dealing with civil rights, is the one that has sent so many ripples through American society: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States …” or deny any due process of law or equal protection of the laws.

In practical terms, the Fourteenth Amendment allowed the federal courts to extend many of the provisions of the Bill of Rights to the states, too. Free speech, fair trial, the right not to give evidence against yourself—none of those rights in the first 10 amendments applied to the states until the Supreme Court extended them, literally on a case-by-case basis, under the Incorporation Doctrine. This doctrine holds that many of the liberties in the Bill of Rights are so fundamental to our system of justice that they should be incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.

A prime example is the Sixth Amendment. The right to legal counsel originally covered only federal defendants, but the Supreme Court extended it to state defendants in capital cases in the Scottsboro case in 1932 (see Chapter 10) and in noncapital felonies in Gideon v. Wainwright in 1963.

Civil Rights

Due process is, in a word, fairness. It might be procedural fairness: you should get a hearing, your day in court, your chance to tell your side of the story, and for a decision to be made fairly, according to an established process and set of rules. If you lose your government job, your kid gets kicked out of college, or your property taxes go up, you might want to be sure the proper procedures have been followed. Due process might also be substantive, which covers every other aspect of fairness and protects specific rights, even if they are not mentioned specifically in the Constitution. For example, the courts have relied on substantive due process to tell the government to keep its nose out of our bedrooms.

The Equal Protection Clause is the authority behind the “one man, one vote” principle, along with many other aspects of fairness in our society. If one person or group of people is allowed to do something, we all should be allowed to do it.

However, the concept of equal protection under the Constitution is misunderstood in the sense that it does not really require that all people be treated equally, either as individuals or groups or classes. The Fourteenth Amendment requires only that the laws be applied equally to individuals and groups.

The day-to-day real-world effects of a law or regulation may turn out to be more detrimental to certain people, but it might be permissible anyway as long as there is a good reason for the law or regulation and it was not enacted for the purpose of discrimination. In other words, there can be a legal justification for lumping certain people into classifications and then prohibiting them from doing something everybody else is allowed to do.

Over time, the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection provisions have been applied not only to racial discrimination, but also to women, gays, and other groups claiming discrimination. As with so many other aspects of constitutional law, perhaps the best way to figure out what it means today is to look at how the law evolved through the Supreme Court cases over the years.

An 1886 Supreme Court case, Yick Wo v. Hopkins, showed how a law can discriminate legally and at the same time be administered in a discriminatory fashion. During the late 1800s, San Francisco was home to many Chinese immigrants. Because of discrimination, the only work opportunities many of them could find were in laundries. San Francisco passed an ordinance requiring a permit to operate a laundry in a wooden building. Most laundries were in wooden buildings, and most laundries were owned and operated by Chinese people, so this ordinance presented an economic hardship to the Chinese community. The laundries had to either close down or get a permit.

The Supreme Court ruled that the ordinance was not unconstitutional because it had a legitimate purpose: there was a high danger of fires in laundries, and the chances of the fire spreading and causing more harm was greater if the laundry was in a wooden building. A permit allowed authorities to inspect laundries and determine if they were being run safely. The fact that Chinese suffered more than the rest of the population was an unfortunate and unintended side effect. The ordinance itself was not unconstitutional.

However, the court found that the law was being enforced unfairly, that permits were routinely approved for non-Chinese laundries and rejected for Chinese laundries. The court struck down the law not because it was discriminatory, but because it was administered in a discriminatory manner.

Incidentally, one other important point was made in that case. The court said the Chinese deserved equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment because equal protection applies not only to citizens but to “any person” under a state’s jurisdiction.

A series of cases in 1873 produced what have become known as the Supreme Court’s Slaughter-house decisions. The cases grew out of a New Orleans ordinance that granted a monopoly for slaughterhouses. Would-be competitors sued on Fourteenth Amendment grounds, claiming economic discrimination. They said the monopoly had been granted as patronage in return for political favors. The Supreme Court upheld the monopoly, citing the city’s justifiable reasons for it: to keep slaughterhouses from dumping offal into the city’s waterways.

In an 1880 decision, the Supreme Court held that a state ban on blacks serving on juries did not violate the prospective black jurors’ rights, but it did violate the rights of black defendants under the Equal Protection Clause. A series of cases in 1883 known as the Civil Rights cases held that the Constitution does not prohibit racial discrimination by private individuals or organizations.

The 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which was enacted in the hopes of bringing equality or at least legal equilibrium between blacks and whites in the former slave-owning states.

Amid a collection of Jim Crow laws that denied black people the use of various public facilities from toilets to schools, in 1890 Louisiana passed a law that required blacks and whites to ride in separate railroad cars. The “white” cars were considerably better appointed. Homer Plessy, who was one eighth black—an octoroon in the parlance of the day—bought a first-class ticket for the white part of a train, pointed out to a conductor that he was black, and was arrested. He was fined $25 and appealed the conviction all the way to the Supreme Court, which decided by a 7–1 vote that he was not a victim of discrimination prohibited by either the Thirteenth or Fourteenth amendments. Justice John Marshall Harlan, himself a former slave owner, filed a memorable dissent, warning about the United States developing a “caste” system. But for half a century, until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the “separate but equal” doctrine remained the law of the land.

From the end of the nineteenth century through the first part of the twentieth, the Supreme Court went through a long period that emphasized a business-oriented view of the Fourteenth Amendment and due process. The court, reflecting a predominant attitude at the time, took a laissez-faire stance in a number of cases. The focus of due process was not on personal, individual liberties, but rather on property. The court held a market-centric approach with echoes of social Darwinism, a theory of the era that suggested the haves in society should make the rules for the have-nots.

One of the defining cases was Lochner v. New York in 1905, when the Supreme Court overturned a law prohibiting bakers from working more than 10 hours a day or 60 hours a week. The reasoning: the bakery owner would make less profit, and that was a violation of his right to due process. The court did recognize some measure of “police power” that allowed states to set some health and safety rules—for working in mines, for instance—but other rulings came down squarely on the side of employers and owners, including one that struck down minimum wage requirements.

The courts gradually came to recognize that due process protected not only economic rights but also personal rights. They became more likely to presume there were valid reasons behind a state law and those reasons were not necessarily outweighed by business interests. “We do not sit as a superlegislature to weigh the wisdom of legislation or to decide whether the policy which it expresses offends the public welfare,” the Supreme Court mused in one case.

In 1908, in Berea College v. Kentucky, the Supreme Court upheld a Kentucky law that prohibited black and white students from attending the same college. In a 1925 case, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, one of the first privacy cases extending parental rights, the court upheld a Ku Klux Klan (KKK) lawsuit allowing KKK parents to have their own private schools rather than send their kids to public schools.

During World War II, the federal government forced tens of thousands of Japanese and Americans of Japanese descent—including U.S. citizens whose families had been Americans for generations—to surrender their liberty and move to internment camps. A young Japanese American named Fred Korematsu was thrown in prison when he refused to turn himself in and live in a camp. He appealed his conviction, and in 1944 in Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld the internment program. Yes, it was a violation of the Japanese Americans’ individual rights, but the high court said it was justified because of concerns about espionage—national security, in other words.

When the Japanese Americans were finally freed, each was given $25 for train fare or $50 for a family. A commission appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1980 subsequently found that the Japanese Americans had been subjected to “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” The government then granted $20,000 payments to each internment camp survivor still alive more than four decades later, including Fred Korematsu.

Some believe the compensation to the internment camp survivors sets a precedent that could pave the way to reparations for slavery to African Americans, but others say it is unlikely there will ever be an American reparations program so long after slavery ended.

In a pair of 1948 cases, black families in Missouri and Michigan challenged racially discriminatory restrictive covenants—legal restrictions some owners put on their property to keep it from being sold to blacks. The cases were consolidated into one decision, Shelley v. Kramer, and the Supreme Court ruled that restrictive covenants that discriminate are not necessarily unlawful, at least as long as the people buying and selling voluntarily abide by them. The court held, however, that the covenants in the Shelley case were unconstitutional because by filing a lawsuit against their new black neighbors, the neighbors tried to get the state to enforce the discrimination.

One of the most famous Fourteenth Amendment cases was Brown v. Board of Education, handed down in 1954. Oliver Brown, a black man who worked as a welder in Topeka, Kansas, filed the suit because his daughter Linda was not allowed to go to the neighborhood schools with her white friends. Instead, she had to walk to a bus stop and take a bus to a black school. The Supreme Court consolidated the Brown case with several similar cases from South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and Washington, D.C. Thurgood Marshall, who later became the first black justice of the Supreme Court, was the lead attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in charge of a legal team that included some of the top lawyers from some of the biggest—and whitest—law firms in the country.

The Supreme Court’s 9–0 decision struck down the last vestiges of the “separate but equal” doctrine and sent out shock waves still being felt. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments …. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be available to all on equal terms.” Change was not immediate, of course, and there were many more court decisions and wrenching local controversies as schools integrated, sometimes with forced busing not only of black students to previously white schools but also white students to previously black schools.

The Fourteenth Amendment and its “one man, one vote” principle led the federal courts to get involved in reapportionment of congressional voting districts, which prevented states from redrawing or maintaining district boundaries that discriminated against black voters. These court rulings helped lead to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1964 as well as to further advances in education and other equal opportunities for minorities.

One of the best-known—and most controversial—extensions of constitutional rights through the Fourteenth Amendment came in a series of cases beginning in the 1960s involving contraception, abortion, and homosexual acts. The cases cited due process and took steps toward recognizing a fundamental right to privacy—a right not specifically mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. The Griswold case in 1965 struck down Connecticut’s anticontraceptive law, the Roe case legalized abortion in 1973, and the Lawrence case prohibited states from criminalizing consenting adult homosexual acts.

Miscegenation laws were not uncommon through much of U.S. history, but the last laws barring interracial marriage were struck down by the Supreme Court in a 1967 case, Loving v. Virginia. In that case, a white husband and his part-black, part–Native American wife were each sentenced to a year of prison for being married to each other. The decision overturning the law was unanimous.

In a 1968 case, Washington v. Lee, the Supreme Court struck down Alabama’s laws requiring that black and white prisoners be housed separately in state prisons, and in 1970, the high court ruled in Goldberg v. Kelly that the due process provision of the Fourteenth Amendment requires that a hearing be held and evidence presented before certain benefits can be taken away by regulators or administrators, including welfare benefits, pensions, and licenses. Welfare benefits are a type of property, the high court reasoned, and property cannot be taken away without due process. In 1971, in Reed v. Reed, the court ruled that state law cannot give preference to men over women to serve as executors of estates, thereby ruling for the first time that gender-based laws can violate the Equal Protection Clause.

In a 2000 “states’ rights” case, United States v. Morrison, a female college student who said she had been raped by two members of the school’s football team sued the men for damages under the federal Violence Against Women Act of 1994. In a 5–4 ruling, the Supreme Court held that the part of the law allowing female victims of violence to collect damages in federal court was unconstitutional because it exceeded the authority of the Fourteenth Amendment. The court noted that the law was designed to help women who did not get justice in state courts, but said under the Commerce Clause it was up to the states, not the federal government, to provide remedies for private wrongs.

The Fourteenth Amendment continues to be at the center of America’s struggle to define civil rights and race relations. College admissions and affirmative action is a prime example, as seen in the recent case, Fisher v. Texas, which made its way from Texas to the Supreme Court not once but twice in recent years. Abigail Fisher challenged the University of Texas admission process, saying its affirmative action provisions unfairly gave preference to minority applicants while discriminating against her as a white applicant.

In a 7–1 ruling in 2013, the Supreme Court agreed that yes, Fisher should be allowed to challenge whether the University of Texas’s admission policies were “made in good faith” and were not discriminatory. When Fisher lost her appeal in the lower courts, she appealed to the Supreme Court again, and the case was argued in late 2015. In the oral arguments, Justice Antonin Scalia’s comments wondered whether affirmative action might actually hurt some black students who would be more successful at less academically rigorous universities. Court watchers said the case, argued in 2015 and scheduled to be decided in 2016, would probably go one of three ways: Fisher could be returned to the lower courts again, the Supreme Court could narrowly strike down the University of Texas’s admission policies, or the court could declare affirmative action unconstitutional for college admissions across the country.

The Fourteenth Amendment also has been critical to one of the more sudden social transformations of American society—the expansion of gay rights in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. One of the major goals of gay rights activists—the legalization of same-sex marriage—was given formal, legal recognition in two landmark Supreme Court cases in 2013 and 2015.

In United States v. Windsor, Edith Windsor and Thea Speyer were two women who had been living together as a couple for decades in New York. They were legally married in Canada, and their marriage was recognized by the State of New York. But when Speyer died in 2009, federal tax authorities denied Windsor the federal tax exemption for surviving spouses, based on the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), under which Congress required that marriage had to be between a man and a woman. Windsor appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled 5–4 in 2013 that DOMA was unconstitutional under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments’ guarantees of equal rights and due process under the law.

Given that the Windsor ruling in effect legalized same-sex marriage under federal law, it was inevitable that a similar challenge under state law come before the Supreme Court. That was Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, when the court ruled again 5–4 that all states had to allow same-sex marriage. The court opinion said, “The Fourteenth Amendment requires a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex and to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out-of-state.”

The Fifteenth Amendment: Voting Rights

“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.

“The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

The Fourteenth Amendment was drafted with the goal of creating no new rights. Instead, it was supposedly created to extend existing rights to the states. Specifically, the Fourteenth Amendment did not give freed slaves the right to vote. It was still up to the states to decide who would vote and who wouldn’t. Congress approved the Fifteenth Amendment to counter any state laws that would deny the vote to blacks. Ratified in 1870, the third and last of the so-called Reconstruction Amendments said the states cannot use race, color, or status as a former slave as a reason for denying someone the right to vote.

As in so many other cases, the actual language of the Fifteenth Amendment was a compromise. Some people wanted no constitutional rules on voting eligibility; they wanted to let the states continue to set their own rules. Others wanted universal suffrage—or rather universal male suffrage because women did not generally have the right to vote and didn’t get it until a half-century later. The Fifteenth Amendment as ratified staked out a middle ground: states could still set their own rules for voting eligibility, but those rules could not bar a potential voter because of race. Consequently, the Supreme Court ultimately made it clear that the amendment did not confer the right to vote on anyone.

When the newly elected President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew federal troops from the South in 1877, the idea was to heal the nation’s wounds and ease political dissent in the South, where many people felt like they were an occupied country within a country. With less federal oversight, however, a number of states brought in voter-qualification laws that seemed nondiscriminatory but had the practical effect of preventing blacks from voting. Poll taxes, for example, kept poor people from voting, and blacks were more likely to be poor. Literacy tests kept many blacks from registering, especially when administered by clerks who sometimes rejected black voters who could actually read and write more proficiently than white voters who were approved. Sometimes strict registration procedures were instituted that were not publicized in the black community and presented opportunities for clerks to reject black voters for minor technical missteps in the process.

In 1915 in Guinn v. United States, the Supreme Court overturned the “grandfather” clauses a number of states had instituted, which said that you were automatically eligible to vote if you were a descendant of someone who had voted earlier or been eligible to vote earlier—such as before blacks had the right to vote. This kept whites from having to take literary tests or meet other registration requirements, while giving clerks more opportunities to reject black voters. In a 1939 case, Lane v. Wilson, the Supreme Court struck down an Oklahoma law that said people who had voted earlier did not have to reregister, while others had a 121-day window to register—or be ineligible to ever vote. And in 1944, the high court struck down a Texas law that said you had to be a member of one of the major political parties to vote in a primary election. The parties’ respective central committees decided who was a member of the party and who wasn’t, and not many black people were welcomed to membership back then.

In reality, many black voters suffered discrimination for many years until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 spelled out equal voting rights for all.

But the key provisions of the Voting Rights Act did not last forever, and other issues going to the heart of “one man, one vote” continue to pose constitutional issues.

In 2013, citing both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Supreme Court rolled back key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that required a number of states to get approval from the U.S. Department of Justice—preclearance it was called in the legislation—before changing state or local voting laws. The goal of the Voting Rights Act, of course, was to prevent states from passing laws that would make it more difficult for minorities to register and vote. The decision in the 2013 case, Shelby County v. Holder, held that the law was out of date and no longer needed because state voting laws were not discriminatory, and the states covered by preclearance had many black voters and black officeholders. The court rejected the argument that the Voting Rights Act was the reason there were so many black voters and black officeholders.

In the wake of the ruling, a number of states, both states that had been covered by preclearance and some that were not, changed their voting laws. Some of the changes made it easier for voters to register, including online, while a number of changes set new voter identification requirements.

The changes were widely viewed along partisan lines, depending on whether the party was generally predisposed to favor large voter turnouts. Supporters of voter ID laws, most of them Republicans, said those laws would prevent voter fraud. But opponents, mostly Democrats, pointed out that voter fraud was not a significant problem in any state or local jurisdiction—indeed, prosecutions for voter fraud were extremely rare—and warned that the true motive of stricter voter ID laws was to suppress voting among minorities and poor people who were less likely to have driver’s licenses or other government-issued identification.

Two other cases relating to voting, Evenwel v. Abbott and Harris v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, both look at aspects of redistricting—how votes are apportioned, according to the U.S. Census, among states for the purpose of determining how many congressional districts and Electoral College votes each state has. Both cases were argued before the Supreme Court in late 2015 and decisions are expected in 2016.

Some observers thought the Supreme Court would make no major changes in congressional redistricting—or in the way some critics say redistricting has amounted to gerrymandering to limit congressional districts dominated by minority voters and, thereby, presumably limiting the number of minority members of Congress. But others feared that the court, in the wake of the Shelby County decision weakening the Voting Rights Act, might lead to a process for redistricting that might make it even more difficult for members of minorities to be elected to Congress.