Dissent

Congress approached the 2006 reauthorization of the VRA with great care and seriousness.  The same cannot be said of the Court's opinion today.  The Court makes no genuine attempt to engage with the massive legislative record that Congress assembled.  Instead, it relies on increases in voter registration and turnout as if that were the whole story.  See supra, at 18-19.  Without even identifying a standard of review, the Court dismissively brushes off arguments based on "data from the record," and declines to enter the "debat[e about] what [the] record shows".  One would expect more from an opinion striking at the heart of the Nation's signal piece of civil-rights legislation.

-- US Supreme Court Chief Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her dissent of the SCOTUS decision invalidating a key part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, 25 June 2013