Last year, the “Felonious Five” conservative activist justices of the Roberts Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the most important pieces of landmark legislation in U.S. history.
John Blake at CNN takes a deep dive into the question, Has the Roberts court placed landmark 1964 civil rights law on a hit list? (excerpts, paragraphs reordered):
The act was first introduced by President John F. Kennedy in 1963 amid bloody civil rights campaigns in places such as Birmingham, Alabama. After Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon Johnson marshaled the sympathy generated by Kennedy’s death and the suffering of civil rights protesters to pass the bill after a bruising, yearlong legislative battle.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called the law “the child of a storm, the product of the most turbulent motion the nation has ever known in peacetime.”
The law, though, didn’t just help blacks. It explicitly banned discrimination against women, religious minorities, Latinos and even whites. It also served as a model for other anti-discrimination measures passed by Congress: the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.
“The Civil Rights Act was significant not just for what it did but for what it meant symbolically,” says Allison Orr Larsen, a law professor at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. “The national government was no longer going to sit and be idle while individual liberties were trampled.”
Before the law’s passage, the United States was trapped in a Mad Men era where employers brazenly advertised for white workers and forced women to fetch coffee. The law banning sex discrimination helped lead to millions of women entering and advancing in the workplace.
“The largest beneficiaries of affirmative action are white women,” says Charles Gallagher, a sociologist at La Salle University in Philadelphia.
The law shifted the balance of power and gave ordinary people a legal tool to fight back.
“To bring a racial discrimination lawsuit or to claim gender discrimination was unheard of before 1964,” says Kevin R. Johnson, dean of the University of California, Davis, School of Law.
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A half-century later, defenders of the landmark law say it faces a new threat: Five votes on the U.S. Supreme Court and an indifferent public.
As the nation celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, it’s tempting to believe the battle over the law is over. But people are still clashing over it — what it means, how long should it last and whether it discriminates against whites.
Now some supporters of the law fear the battle has shifted to new terrain. They warn that the conservative majority on the court, headed by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., will do to the law what it did last year to the Voting Rights Act — gut the parts that make it work while leaving its façade still standing.
“I think Roberts is very smart and takes the long view,” says Kent Greenfield, a columnist and professor at Boston College Law School. “The Roberts court won’t say this law cannot stand.”
Instead, Greenfield says, the Roberts court is already chipping away at the legal architecture of the act, making it more difficult for an individual or a group to sue for racial discrimination. “It’s getting harder and harder for plaintiffs in discrimination suits to get to the court, much less win their cases,” Greenfield says.
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The Roberts court may also be poised to open another door that had been closed by the Civil Rights Act, others say.
When the act was passed, some business owners claimed it was unconstitutional because it violated the rights of small, private businesses to serve the customers they preferred. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected that argument in the 1964 case involving an Alabama motel owner who said serving black customers violated his rights.
Another family-owned business is making a claim about how they should run their business that could cripple the anti-discrimination laws in the 1964 act, says Greenfield, the Boston Law School professor.
In the recent Hobby Lobby case, the Christian owners of a chain of arts and crafts stores said that the Affordable Care Act violated their religious beliefs because it forced them to provide birth control methods to employees.
The court hasn’t ruled on Hobby Lobby yet, but court watchers say some conservative members of the Roberts court appeared sympathetic to Hobby Lobby’s claims during oral arguments. Roberts suggested in those arguments that the court could limit claims to companies owned by only a few shareholders or a family.
But Greenfield says accepting Hobby Lobby’s argument could endanger provisions of the 1964 law that ban businesses from discriminating against all customers and employees.
The Christian owner of a fast-food company such as Chick-fil-A, for example, could claim that religious beliefs prevent them from providing benefits to same-sex partners, says Greenfield, author of “The Myth of Choice: Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits.”
“There are also plenty of people in America who hold sincere religious beliefs, deeply held, that women belong in the home,” Greenfield says. “A company believing that could say we think it’s immoral to hire women away from their families.”
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 may seem unassailable, but so did another landmark civil rights bill, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Greenfield says. The court gutted it last year when it invalidated federal enforcement over all or parts of 15 states with a history of discrimination against minority voters.
“The attacks on the Voting Rights Act started small,” Greenfield says. “Roberts planted small seeds here and there that grew into these more robust attacks.”
The same could happen to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he says. “We take these laws for granted. But little by little, we are going to see them erode if we don’t take care of them.”
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Is the 1964 law safe or is it on a judicial hit list?
Stay tuned. Another storm may be on the way.
It’s a long read, but read the entire report.
Isn’t it ironic that Roberts has sympathy for Hobby Lobby’s dilemma. Hobby Lobby purchases the majority of its merchandise from China and they aborted 13 million babies in 2008. I read many years ago when he was being groomed by the Bush administration that he approved a policeman shooting a teenage black, in the back, who was running from a store. He is also scrapping away at the civil rights act of I believe 1964. In reality, we do not have a constitution anymore because the people have allowed it to be destroyed by the men behind the curtain. The vast majority are sheep who believe everything read to them by the media.