This book excerpt is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

On June 25, 2013, the Roberts Court handed down their decision in Shelby County v. Holder. The 5-4 decision gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965’s “preclearance” condition, which required states and localities with a history of racial discrimination in voting practices to get permission from the federal government before they could change any policy related to their elections. The country had changed dramatically, Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority; the “strong medicine” of the Voting Rights Act, he argued, was no longer needed, let alone justified. But Michael G. Miller and I show throughout our new book, An American Problem: How the Country Built – and the Supreme Court Broke — The Voting Rights Act just how misguided that reasoning was. In the parts of the country freed from preclearance by Shelby County, our electoral institutions have grown demonstrably less open to Americans of color.

When Mike and I started working on what would become An American Problem, a promise made by Justice Roberts in Shelby County still held. “Section 2” of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, he wrote — the section containing the tools allowing litigators to attack election laws and policies that disproportionately harmed voters of color ± “is permanent and applies nationwide.” Although the Shelby County majority was happy to invalidate the preclearance regime that June morning, they told the country that tools remained still for removing discriminatory laws from the statute books.

But this is no longer the case.

In this excerpt from the book’s introduction, Mike and I discuss not only the negative impacts that Shelby County has had for voters of color, but also the continued attacks on what remained of the Voting Rights Act’s litigation tools; Section 2 was largely nullified in the Court’s decisions in Brnovich v. DNC and Louisiana v. Callais. As we head into the 2026 midterms, the country will be without a federal statute capable of invalidating discriminatory voting maps policies, everywhere from the smallest school board in rural Wisconsin to the nation’s largest states.

Voting rights activists often referred to Sections 5 and 2 as the “shield” and the “sword.” Section 5’s preclearance condition blocked thousands of discriminatory policies before they could go into effect; Section 2 could strike down such policies that made it into law. But today, the shield is broken and the sword is dulled.

By any measure the Voting Rights Act was tremendously successful. Throughout the states of the former Confederacy, registration rates among Black voters surged nearly 20 percentage points in just three years, with the largest effects concentrated among the most egregious pre-VRA offenders. In Mississippi, for instance, Black voter registration swelled to roughly 60% in 1968—up nearly ten times from the pre-VRA rate of just 6.7%. In real terms, the VRA allowed more than a million Black Southerners to........

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