The Supreme Court has a long history of declaring that the problem of racism in the United States has been solved. It did that in a series of decisions just after the Civil War, striking down civil-rights and anti-lynching laws and paving the way for decades of racial segregation. And today it has just done it again. In Shelby County v. Holder, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the court, said that a key provision of the Voting Rights Act is unenforceable unless Congress rewrites it to account for the fact that racism isn’t as bad as it was in 1965, when the law was first enacted. The act requires all state and local governments with a history of voting discrimination to...
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