There is no question that we can and should celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), which is one of the most successful– and important–laws ever passed by Congress.
It may be one of the few statutes passed by Congress that has fully achieved its objective: it has enfranchised millions of black and other Americans who had been wrongly denied their right to vote, and it stopped the widespread, systematic, official discrimination being practiced by state and local governments in the Jim Crow South.
What is sad, however, are the scare tactics being used by opponents of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in one case in 2013, Shelby County v. Holder, to assert that “almost all of the protections in the Voting Rights Act” have been “systematically dismantled” and that the right to vote has been taken away.
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