South Carolina v. Katzenbach

The Court had original jurisdiction over the controversy between South Carolina and the Attorney General, and the absence of disputed facts made expedited resolution appropriate. The State’s immediate exposure to the Act’s coverage formula, suspension of voting tests, preclearance requirement, and examiner provisions created a concrete controversy.

The Court limited its review to §§ 4(a)–(d), 5, 6(b), 7, 9, 13(a), and related procedural provisions that were actually in operation against South Carolina. Challenges to other provisions, including criminal sanctions in §§ 11 and 12(a)–(c), were premature because no one had been prosecuted or threatened with prosecution under them.

The Fifteenth Amendment prohibits racial discrimination in voting and expressly gives Congress power to enforce that command through appropriate legislation. Although States ordinarily have broad authority over voter qualifications and election administration, the Amendment supersedes state power when that power is used to circumvent a federally protected voting right.

Congress was not confined to passing a general ban and leaving all enforcement to case-by-case judicial litigation. Under the familiar McCulloch standard, Congress may select means plainly adapted to a legitimate constitutional end so long as those means are not prohibited and are consistent with the Constitution’s letter and spirit.

The extensive legislative record showed nearly a century of deliberate evasion of the Fifteenth Amendment, including discriminatory literacy tests, subjective registration rules, white primaries, racial gerrymanders, and resistance to federal decrees. Congress could reasonably conclude that ordinary litigation had been too slow and too easily evaded to remedy entrenched discrimination.

South Carolina could not invoke Fifth Amendment due process, the Bill of Attainder Clause, or separation-of-powers principles as protections belonging to the State itself. Nor could it assert those protections on behalf of its citizens against the Federal Government. Those objections therefore reduced to the central question whether Congress had acted appropriately under the Fifteenth Amendment.

Congress targeted jurisdictions that maintained a test or device on November 1, 1964, and in which less than half of voting-age residents were registered or had voted in the 1964 presidential election. Tests and devices had a long history as instruments of racial disenfranchisement, while unusually low registration or turnout was a sensible indicator of the practical effects of disfranchisement.

The legislative record contained direct evidence of substantial discrimination in most covered States and localities, including Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, and portions of North Carolina. Congress could infer that the remaining jurisdictions meeting the same criteria also posed a significant risk of the same problem.

Congress could attack the most urgent geographic concentration of the problem without simultaneously applying identical remedies everywhere in the Nation. The constitutional principle of equal footing among States concerns the terms of state admission to the Union; it does not prevent Congress from addressing local constitutional violations with remedies tailored to the places where they persist.

The Act also accounted for possible overinclusion. A covered State or subdivision could seek a declaratory judgment in the District Court for the District of Columbia by showing that it had not used tests or devices discriminatorily during the preceding five years. This burden was manageable because the relevant evidence concerning the conduct of local voting officials was especially within the jurisdiction’s knowledge.

Congress could make the Attorney General’s and Census Director’s trigger findings unreviewable. Those determinations involved objective statistical calculations and routine examination of state laws, and a jurisdiction improperly covered could still seek termination through the Act’s declaratory-judgment procedure. Congress also had authority to channel these federal challenges to the District Court for the District of Columbia.

A literacy test may be constitutional if fairly administered, but it violates the Fifteenth Amendment when used to perpetuate racial discrimination. Congress had substantial evidence that covered jurisdictions, including South Carolina, had adopted and administered literacy, understanding, character, property, and voucher requirements to disfranchise Black citizens.

Congress could conclude that merely ordering future fair administration would not erase the accumulated effects of past discrimination. White voters who had been exempted from or assisted through such tests would remain registered, while Black citizens previously excluded would continue to bear the consequences of the discriminatory system.

The five-year suspension was therefore a proportionate remedial measure. Congress reasonably rejected complete reregistration of all voters as unnecessarily harsh while preventing covered jurisdictions from continuing to use devices that had served as tools of racial exclusion.

Congress found that jurisdictions subject to voting-rights litigation had repeatedly adopted new voting practices to evade federal court decrees and preserve racial discrimination. It could reasonably anticipate similar evasions after the Act took effect and require advance review of voting changes in the jurisdictions with the most persistent records of discrimination.

Section 5 did not forbid covered jurisdictions from changing their election laws. It suspended the enforcement of a new voting rule unless the jurisdiction obtained either a declaratory judgment that the change lacked discriminatory purpose and effect or the Attorney General’s nonobjection after submission.

A covered jurisdiction seeking to implement a new rule had an immediate and concrete dispute with the Federal Government because the Act itself prevented the rule from taking effect. A declaratory judgment resolving whether continued suspension was necessary therefore was not an advisory opinion.

For the same reasons that Congress could centralize bailout litigation, it could require § 5 declaratory actions to be brought in the District Court for the District of Columbia and place the burden on the jurisdiction seeking to enforce its new rule.

Congress had evidence that local registrars had used procedural obstacles, arbitrary standards, harassment, and outright defiance of court orders to deny Black citizens registration. Suspending discriminatory tests alone would not necessarily stop those localized practices, so Congress could authorize federal examiners to identify and list persons qualified under valid state law.

The Attorney General’s discretion to certify a locality for examiners was guided by statutory standards. He was directed to consider, among other factors, racial disparities in registration and evidence of good-faith local compliance with the Fifteenth Amendment; he was not free to act arbitrarily.

The prompt challenge procedure protected against the use of challenges as a tool of harassment while preserving ways to remove voters listed through mistake or fraud. A challenger had to act quickly, support the challenge with affidavits from two persons with personal knowledge, and serve the challenged voter; the voter remained entitled to vote while the matter was resolved.

The Act supplied indirect judicial protection through procedures allowing termination of examiner operations when all listed voters had been placed on the rolls and there was no longer reasonable cause to fear racial discrimination. That mechanism supported the constitutionality of the examiner scheme despite the absence of direct review of the initial certification.