The Supreme Court’s Surprise Defense of the Voting Rights Act

A constant question with this Supreme Court is what constraints, if any, the six Justices in the conservative supermajority see in their drive to upend constitutional law. On Thursday morning, Chief Justice John Roberts seems to have spotted his limit. In 2013, Roberts wrote the majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, which threw out Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. Now, joined by the Court’s three liberals and—more tentatively and incompletely—by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, he has written the majority opinion in Allen v. Milligan, which narrowly preserved Section...