If the Court strikes down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, this year especially, given the record of the past three years, the justices who do so will reveal a disconcerting level of disconnect from the realities of modern American politics as they were expressed in the near-unanimous renewal of the Act in 2006. And the partisan ruling they would issue in this circumstance would be even more brazenly ideological and untethered from precedent than the Citizens United ruling issued in January 2010. To say that "things have changed in the South," or anywhere else in America for that matter, is the truth about voting rights. But it is not the whole truth. And it is certainly not nothing but the truth. A Supreme Court ruling that strikes down one of the most popular and successful laws in the nation's history should not be based upon such duplicity.

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But it very well may be. It seems clear that the case will turn now on whether any of the Court's conservatives have changed their minds about Section 5 since Northwest Austin was decided; whether those justices saw in the great voting rights battles of 2012 a renewed purpose to and justification for Section 5. The Chief Justice gave himself a political out, in Northwest Austin, when he wrote that "it may be that" that the improvements wrought so far by the Voting Rights Act "are insufficient and that conditions continue to warrant preclearance." Fair enough. But this is also the man who even 30 years ago -- a period in which all parties now agree was filled with intentional racial discrimination in voting -- was fighting within the Administration to reject the 1982 renewal of the statute; fighting for it even after the Reagan White House had decided to embrace the Act's renewal.

Ask yourself, then, in light of the transcript of the Northwest Austin argument, which conservative justice -- which fifth vote -- is going to undertake the sort of soul-searching it would likely take to save the act? When confronted with some of the very evidence civil rights lawyers offer up in Shelby County, Justice Kennedy conceded that it made a "good demonstration of discrete discriminatory acts." But "my concern," he still told the lawyers, "is that it's just not clear to me that Congress addressed this for the rest of the country." Justice Alito echoed this concern. And the Chief Justice himself said, of Section 5's renewals: "Well, they said five years originally and then another 20 years. I mean, at some point it begins to look like the idea is that this is going to go on forever."

And then ask yourself whether you would be less surprised to read, instead, the language of a 5-4 majority opinion in Shelby County that states that Congress must cover all American jurisdictions under Section 5 if it is going to cover any jurisdictions under Section 5. Such a ruling would place upon this do-nothing Congress an impossible task -- and the justices who would endorse it know that. As Rep. Henry Hyde, the legendary Illinois Republican, said during the legislative fight leading up to the 1982 renewal of the act: nationalizing the Section 5 standard would "strengthen the law to death" by making it national in scope and thus over-stretching the federal resources necessary to enforce it.