Why is there a need for the voting rights act if we have the 15th Ammendment, and why does this act have to be renewed every so often?
Because the 15th wasn’t comprehensive enough. Briefly, you couldn’t deny people suffrage based on their race, but you could deny it based on other criteria (like the ability to read). Those tests were typically applied unequally - a white person would come to the polling place and be given an easy section of text to read and interpret. A black person would come to that polling place and be given a complex passage of text to read and interpret.
IIRC, the relevant part of the Voting rights Act that needs renewal is the part which says “We, the Feds, do not trust the state & local governments to follow the federal law mandating racially blind election procedures. So we, the Feds, will supervise all elections in these states (X, Y, Z) until future date Q”.
And every time date Q comes around, they re-investigate whether those states & localities can yet be trusted to actually follow the laws of the USA. Pretty much, the evidence says they can’t be trusted. And so the date gets changed to 10-15 years in the future & the federal oversight continues.
The 15th Amendment reads:
“Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
Basically, the 15th amendment recognized the right of U.S. Citizens to vote, regardless of race. It gave Congress broad authority (the “appropriate legislation” language) to ensure that this right is protected.
Many Southern states tried to get around the 15th Amendment by enacting restrictions on voting which were racially neutral on their face, but clearly meant to disenfranchise African-Americans, such as literacy tests and poll taxes.
The VRA, rather than creating a right to vote, was meant to address specific practices by states which violated that right.
Some sections of the law were specifically meant to be temporary (but not the parts of the law which ban poll taxes or literacy tests, which are permanent). Mostly, these are the sections that provide for federal oversight of elections in certain states, to monitor compliance with the law. The assumption was that, presumably, these provisions would eventually become unnecessary.
And part of that supervision is that anytime those states want to make any changes in their voting or registration procedures, they have to get permission from the U.S. Department of Justice.
I don’t know how much indepth investigation goes on. There’s a lot of pressure to renew that part of the Voting Rights Act because there’s just the assumption that not renewing it will mean that people will lose their right to vote.
So, the VRA was designed to give teeth to the 15th Ammendment? Did the crafters of that ammendment not recognize that it could be circumvented by crafty racists?
Of course they recognized it - that’s why they included Section 2 of the amendment.
Sure they did. Hence, Section 2.
They probably couldn’t predict the exactly how said crafty racists would try to get around the constitution, so they gave Congress very broad authority to deal with whatever tactics those crafty racists employ.
Look up Prohibition and the Volstead Act as a similar example.
The amendment is what makes the later law constitutional.
There were two oft-confused “problems” with the Fifteenth Amendment–(1) it could be “circumvented” by nominally race neutral voting tests with a disparate impact on black and white; and (2) it “lacked teeth” if it wasn’t enforced.
Only the first problem related to the text of the amendment. It prohibits states from restricting the right to vote based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude”. It allows (or would inevitably have been construed in the Nineteenth Century to allow) literacy, tax payment, or property qualifications, which under the circumstances would weigh heavily against black people.
Why did Congress allow this? Well, for one thing, New England states had their own literacy tests–directed against immigrants–which they wanted to preserve. For another, even race-neutral tests–if fairly administered–would have been a great advance over no black suffrage at all, and suffrage would have widened over time as black people became better educated and wealthier.
But alas, this ran up against the second problem with the Amendment, which is that after a few years it wasn’t enforced. The Southern states administered their literacy tests and poll taxes in a brazenly discriminatory manner, and nobody in Congress or the federal courts did anything about it.
This wasn’t a flaw in draftsmanship; any Constitutional provision is only as good as the will of Congress and the courts to enforce it. The generations after 1870 lost that will.
So in essence, it was poorly drafted and or conceived without regard to its enforceability at that time. Bottom-line, it was meaningless at the time it was made law.
You could say the same thing about every provision of the constitution. The constitution is not a self-enforcing document.
It was most certainly not meaningless. In fact, it had its most immediate and permanent impact in the North. Save for a few Western and New England states, most Northern states restricted voting to white people in 1870. After 1870, no more.
The Southern states, oddly enough, were not restricting suffrage in 1870, because of Reconstruction. The Fifteenth Amendment was designed to prevent them from doing so in the future, and on that score it failed for 90 years. As we’ve been trying to explain to you, laws and constitutions do not carry guns and enforce themselves.
No, because it expressly gave the Congress the power to enforce it, in the second paragraph. That was a major change in the constitutional system, since it gave the federal Congress an oversight power over the states that it did not have before, and good drafting: you can’t foresee everything that will arise and put it all into a constitutional provision. The drafters passed the general principle and gave the Congress the power to enforce it, by passing legislation.
What basis are you making that conclusion on? The language and structure of the 15th is very similar to those preceding it. The Constitution wasn’t designed to be so specific - those who drafted it did a very good job of keeping it broad enough so that it would be flexible down the road for any specific voting transgressions that they couldn’t anticipate. Saying, “we also hold the right to enforce this as we like” was an incredibly powerful way to do that.
slight hijack
Why is it that Congress never implemented Adm XIV Sect 2?
For the same reason they didn’t enforce the Fifteenth Amendment–they lost the will to do so. Given that the white South voted solidly Democratic, there was zero chance that any Democrat, ever, would vote to reduce Southern representation–and therefore zero chance that it would happen in any time period when the Democrats controlled either house of Congress or the presidency.
There were sporadic attempts to enforce reduction during all-Republican intervals, especially after the census of 1900, but they never garnered a sufficiently large Republican majority to overcome unanimous Democratic opposition. The legalistic argument against reduction was that it was impossible to quantify the number of persons disenfranchised by any particular restriction. But the real reason was that by 1900 too many Republicans felt it was a loser of an issue and simply no longer cared.