The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is among the most successful laws in US history. And it is one of the most morally righteous things the United States of America has ever done.

The law was America’s first serious attempt since Reconstruction to build a multiracial democracy, and it succeeded beyond even the most radical post-Civil War Republicans’ dreams. On the day President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, Black voter registration rates in the Jim Crow haven of Mississippi were just 6.7 percent. Two years after the VRA became law, that rate was 60 percent.

So the Voting Rights Act, which the Republican justices are expected to take another bite out of during the Supreme Court’s new term, was a triumph. But it also rests on assumptions about how power is distributed

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