The Voting Rights Case and the Constitution After Trump

After some reflections on how the oral arguments in the tariff case affect our expectations about what the Court might do, we turn to the Court’s pending decision in a case challenging the constitutionality of the key remaining provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. We offer what we hope are some more in-depth and analytic comments on the doctrines in play in the case and (as usual!) highlight the ways in which the arguments against the statute are rife with internal tensions. We conclude with some unoriginal observations about the political implications of a decision to invalidate the Act and with what we hope are some more original observations about how to situate the Court’s likely action in the kind of broader account of American political development that we’ve offered sporadically in the podcast and in a more focused way in our episodes on the Constitution after Trump.