General Discussion

Longtime court observers note that the elimination of the VRA has been a decades-long dream of the chief justice, John Roberts, a George W Bush appointee, who had written of his disdain for the law and his desire to see it eliminated as early as the 1980s, during his time in the White House counsel’s office in the Reagan administration. Roberts has often presented himself as an instutituonalist, more reasonable and less vulgar than colleagues to his right, like Alito or Thomas. But the elimination of the Voting Rights Act will be his true legacy, and it is this that he should be remembered for: a hostility to multiracial democracy that he valued more than his own intellectual honesty, more than his dignity, and much, much more than the integrity of his institution – a hated and discredited court which now lies in ruins at his feet.