Sherrilyn Ifill
speaker
219 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 5 May
Sherrilyn Ifill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Right, right, right.
Right, which is why the effects test was so important.
So the Supreme Court says, no, it has to be intentional discrimination.
And Congress comes back and says, in 1982, no, we meant you can just show that the effects of the decision produced this result.
The results.
And these are the amendments to the Voting Rights Act in 1982.
You know who really was opposed to those amendments in 1982?
No, a very bright young lawyer who worked in the Department of Justice first as a special aide to, it's not going well, yeah, as a special aide to the Attorney General and then to the Solicitor General.
And he was the point person on trying to convince Congress not to pass these amendments that would address the Supreme Court's decision in Mobile v. Bolden.
And that young attorney's name was John Roberts.
to the way that you counted these votes appeal to the united states congress that's what not to the congress but section so there's two big sections of the voting rights act what we were just talking about was section two okay section five the one that was essentially gutted in 2013
has been often called the most successful provision of any civil rights statute, because it is the only one that allows you to get at the discrimination before it actually comes into law and happens.
OK.
So for a number of jurisdictions that had a history of voting discrimination, if they wanted to make a change to some voting procedure, if they wanted to eliminate an office, if they wanted to reduce the number of members, if they wanted to redistrict, they had to first get permission, or we called it preclearance, from a federal authority, either the attorney general,
or a federal district court in the District of Columbia.
And that's the system that we worked with for many, many years, until 2013.
And so that was from 1965 to 2013, that's what happened.
In 2006, the United States Congress overwhelmingly, in a bipartisan basis, 396 to 33 in the House, 58 to 0 in the Senate, reauthorized that provision of Section 5.
But in 2013, John Roberts said, no, no, no.
This is a stain on the South.
Showing 61–80 of 219 · page 4 of 11
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