Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Mukasey
Issues
Is Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One eligible as a "political subdivision" under §4(a) of the Voting Rights Act to bail out of §5's preclearance requirement?
Did Congress provide enough evidence of an existing pattern of discrimination in voting practices to justify the extension of §5 in the 2006 Amendments?
Congress passed the Voting Rights Act to enforce the dictates of the Fifteenth Amendment-that all Americans had the fundamental right to vote, regardless of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." When the VRA was first enacted in 1965, the original intent was that §§ 4 and 5 would be temporary measures against particular states which would phase out after several years of remedial work. Congress, however, took a different route, and extended these "temporary" measures repeatedly, while broadening their scope to cover more states and political subdivisions. Several jurisdictions, like Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One ("District"), are trying to exempt themselves from these requirements, arguing that these measures are anachronistic and too burdensome. After the District Court for the District of Columbia rejected the District's claim, the case is before the Supreme Court on appeal. Is it still necessary for the federal government to regulate state and local governments to prevent discriminatory voting practices? This case might serve as a vehicle for the Supreme Court to answer that question.
Questions as Framed for the Court by the Parties
Whether §4(a) of the Voting Rights Act, which permits "political subdivisions" of a State covered by §5's requirement that certain jurisdictions preclear changes affecting voting with the federal government to bail out of §5 coverage if they can establish a ten-year history of compliance with the VRA, must be available to any political subunit of a covered State when the Court's precedent requires "political subdivision" to be given its ordinary meaning throughout most of the VRA and no statutory text abrogates that interpretation with respect to §4(a).
Whether, under the Court's consistent jurisprudence requiring that remedial legislation be congruent and proportional to substantive constitutional guarantees, the 2006 enactment of the §5 preclearance requirement can be applied as a valid exercise of Congress's remedial powers under the Reconstruction Amendments when that enactment was founded on a congressional record demonstrating no evidence of a persisting pattern of attempts to evade court enforcement of voting rights guarantees in jurisdictions covered only on the basis of data 35 or more years old, or even when considered under a purportedly less stringent rational-basis standard.
In 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act ("VRA") under § 2 of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The VRA prohibited state actors from imposing discriminatory practices that cut into the voting rights of citizens.