E-mail a friendDebo Adegbile
airdate July 2, 2009
As director of litigation for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), Debo Adegbile oversees the areas of criminal and economic justice, education and political participation. He argued the case before the Supreme Court against a constitutional challenge to the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and coordinated national campaign strategy and made appearances to educate the public about VRA issues. Adegbile received a J.D. from NYU's law school and was formerly an associate at a multinational law firm.
NAACP LDF lead litigator explains the importance of the Voting Rights Act, past and present. (2:28)
Full interview. (11:20)
Debo Adegbile
Tavis: Debo Adegbile is the director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund who recently argued for the preservation of the Voting Rights Act before the U.S. Supreme Court. Following those arguments the court ruled 8 to 1 to uphold the central provision of the Voting Rights Act. He joins us tonight from Washington. Debo, nice to have you on the program and congratulations.
Debo Adegbile: Thank you, Tavis, it's good to be with you.
Tavis: I want to walk through this case. There's been so much written about it and there's so much conversation ongoing about what the court said and what the court didn't say. Let me start, though, with this -- what was at stake here? What was the case about, given your involvement in arguing one side of it?
Adegbile: The case was about the Voting Rights Act, and a provision that we consider to be the heart of the Voting Rights Act. It was about protecting minority voters in a lot of states where discrimination against them has been persistent and adaptive. So it was about the heart of the civil rights movement and the ongoing problems, but it was also about Congress' power to enact statutes to protect minority voters and others across many different civil rights.
Tavis: I should probably back up, and again, I don't want to make any assumptions that we all understand what the Voting Rights Act is and what the intent of the law was. Let me back up and ask you to explain what the Voting Rights Act is, exactly.
Adegbile: The Voting Rights Act is one of the crowning achievements of the civil rights movement. It was the act that moved us as a democracy from Jim Crow and exclusion to a system of inclusion, and I think there's nobody that seriously doubts that we could never have had an African-American president elected but for the Voting Rights Act.
The Voting Rights Act is, in a sense, about the constitutional promise of equality with regard to the vote, and as you and your viewers know, we have a long and ignominious history of discrimination in the area of voting. The Voting Rights Act said that we were going to live up to our promises, and the statute that I defended is one that was designed for some of the worst violators of voting rights, primarily in the deep South but not exclusively there.
Tavis: All right, so what brings this case before the Supreme Court? Tell me more about the actual case.
Adegbile: So this particular provision, which we call Section V, is a provision that Congress has to revisit periodically and vote to continue. In 2006 Congress voted overwhelmingly to continue the statute after finding that we had made tremendous progress in the area of voting, but they saw a great deal of continuing problems and decided they wanted to stay the course and eradicate discrimination in voting once and for all.
Eight days after President Bush signed the reauthorization and the vote in the Senate was unanimous -- 98-0, we don't see that too often -- but eight days later, some lawyers, activist lawyers out of Texas brought a challenge trying to have the act declared unconstitutional. Every time this act is passed there are those that take a run at it and try and tear it down, and so this was the most recent failed attempt to do so.
Tavis: So the Supreme Court votes 8-1 to uphold the provision that was being argued here, and yet there's still debate about what the court is going to do in the long term -- or maybe not even the long term; in the short term, because while it was 8-1, the chief justice had some comments that made some a little uncertain about how strongly the court was actually behind the provision. Let's talk about what he had to say.
Adegbile: Absolutely. There was a fair amount of hostility during the oral argument to this provision. We were a little bit surprised during the oral argument because so many decisions of the Supreme Court have upheld its constitutionality, and as I said, Congress overwhelmingly passed it again in 2006. But that hostility was palpable in the courtroom and some of that played out in the opinion that Chief Justice Roberts authored.
He had some criticisms of the act, but the central thing that we should focus on is he essentially made it easier for some jurisdictions to get out from the requirement of making certain showings under the Voting Rights Act, but he refused to reach the question of whether or not it was unconstitutional and left that for a different day.
So jurisdictions that are covered under this provision have to show the federal government that their voting changes don't discriminate against minority voters. If they can show that they have a clean bill of health for 10 years then they're entitled to be removed from this coverage formula, and we think that's just fine. If they can show that they're clean, that's terrific with us. If they can't, then they continue to need to be covered and that's where we are today.
Tavis: But there are some who believe that the chief justice left the door open, so to speak, to revisiting this case when, again, while he did not say that it was unconstitutional there is some concern about whether or not in the future the court is not going to hear another case and further weaken the Voting Rights Act. You're not concerned about that?
Adegbile: Tavis, at the Legal Defense Fund we're always concerned about that because the historical pattern has been that civil rights have been gained only through steadfast enforcement and the efforts of brave men and women and even children on the streets, in the courts, in the legislatures, and elsewhere. So our experience is that regardless of what an opinion of the Supreme Court says, civil rights are not guaranteed. They are something that need to be protected, and each generation has its role.
So for us, there's nothing surprising in this, although the hostility was articulated a little bit more plainly than we might expect it from the high court. It's something that we're ready for and something we've dealt with before. There are ebbs and flows, but we're there to put our shoulder against the boulder and keep it from rolling back down the hill.
Tavis: Did the Obama administration, the Justice Department, take a position on this, and if so, what was their position?
Adegbile: They vigorously defended the act, and during the oral argument I argued side by side with the deputy solicitor general, Neal Katyal, who mounted a vigorous defense of the constitutionality of this provision of the Voting Rights Act.
Tavis: All right. So what's being debated now is what Congress will do, if anything, in the days, weeks, and months ahead. And when I say if they will do anything, I specifically referenced now, or am specifically referencing, whether or not they will put more teeth into the Voting Rights Act.
So what Chief Justice John Roberts basically says without saying it is if the Congress wants to put more -- if Congress wants to put more teeth in this law so that it doesn’t get watered down in the future by another case, then Congress has to pass a more rigorous standard, has to pass a law that has more oomph to it.
What's Congress, to your read, going to do about this, given, to your point earlier, that they did get behind this aggressively in 2006?
Adegbile: It's an interesting question, and the Constitution calls, in a sense, for shared responsibility to enforce our rights; certainly in the area of voting. The 15th Amendment gives Congress an express role to play in enforcing equality at the polls, and Congress has done that through the Voting Rights Act. And the Supreme Court and even the presidents have largely been in support of this effort.
Now, the Supreme Court is saying that if they were sitting in Congress' seat they might approach it differently, but we think that it's for Congress to decide after hearing the evidence, as they did. And the record that Congress assembled was over 15,000 pages long. After hearing all that evidence, Congress decided that the best way to address the problem that they have seen is to continue with the statute that has been considered the most effective civil rights remedy in the history of the country.
Congress may revisit the question of should the act be modified in some way, but it's far from certain that that will happen. It's going to be up to Congress to see what needs to be done, and perhaps they'll sit and consider whether there is a way to further insulate the act.
Tavis: So in plain English, the Voting Rights Act does not guarantee one's right to vote; what it does is essentially to protect one's right to vote. That's what it does. You referenced President Obama earlier in this conversation. Just as Clarence Thomas was this one vote, and I mentioned that this thing was upheld 8-1; the one person voting against it was the only African-American on the court.
We know him, of course, to be Justice Clarence Thomas. Clarence Thomas basically says that when this law was instituted, the country was a very different place, a different kind of racism, a different kind of segregation, a different kind of Jim Crow.
We now have an African-American president in the White House; the same one you referenced a moment ago. It is based upon that belief that Justice Thomas said, and I'm paraphrasing here, that we no longer need a Voting Rights Act to protect people's right to vote. After all, we got a Black man now in the White House.
There are a number of critics who agree with his assessment that the Voting Rights Act is no longer needed. What's your sense of what's going to happen, again, in the coming months as more persons start to line up behind Justice Thomas' view that if you got a Black man in the White House, what do you need Voting Rights Act protections for?
Adegbile: Well, the Voting Rights Act, of course, is about equality for all citizens, not about opportunity for a single citizen or even a very talented citizen to reach the highest office. The Voting Rights Act was about leveling the playing field so that everybody can run for office, everybody can have their votes counted, and everybody can be an equal under the Constitution.
So the idea that the Voting Rights Act has helped lead us to this point where we have an African-American president and a second African-American justice on the Supreme Court does not mean that there are not persisting problems in the area of voting.
I think it would be a mistake to equate progress, which we acknowledge and embrace, with the idea that there are no more lingering problems in the area of voting, and I think you're right to say that in many respects, discrimination takes a different form today, but discrimination is no less painful if it's practiced through sophisticated methods than it is when it was practiced before the more blunt approaches of the days of Jim Crow.
Each hurt and each are proscribed by our Constitution, so we welcome the progress we've seen, but we know that we have further to go and that our Constitution calls for us to go further.
Tavis: So quickly and finally here, remind me, given that Congress upheld this for the last time in 2006, when by law it comes up for vote again.
Adegbile: The act will be -- it was authorized for 25 more years, so I think it's 2031, I think is the next expiration, if I have my math right.
Tavis: Yeah, I'm not a math major either, but whatever 2006 plus 25 is, that's when it comes up for renewal. So we will see what happens between now and then with regard to another case coming up that may attempt to further weaken the Voting Rights Act as we know it. Debo, nice to have you on. All the best to you, and congratulations on winning the case.
Adegbile: Thank you so much, Tavis. Great to be with you and your viewers.
Back to July 2, 2009