Others claim that Section 5 is the “heart” of the Voting Rights Act and that the VRA cannot effectively survive without it. That is also a historically false claim. How could that be true, when Congress made clear that it considered Section 5 a temporary, emergency provision that would terminate after five years?
Hans von Spakovsky contributes to SCOTUSblog’s Shelby County v. Holder symposium:
… it is Section 2 that is the core provision of the Voting Rights Act. It is the permanent, nationwide ban on racial discrimination in voting that implements the protections of the Fifteenth Amendment. Section 2 gives both voters and the Justice Department an effective tool to stop voting discrimination. Section 5 was a temporary tool that was needed at the time to supplement the protections of Section 2, but the extraordinary circumstances that justified Section 5 in 1965 simply do not exist today.