What Happened to the Voting Rights Act?

The short answer of what happened to the Voting Rights Act is that the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) held that one of the main sections of the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional. Before getting to the longer answer of why the Court came to that conclusion, we will pick up a theoretical background question: is the United States a republic or a democracy?

Om Podcasten

The 1787 Project is the podcast version of the lectures for Professor Justin Dyer's socially-distanced class on the U.S. Constitution at the University of Missouri. Running from August 2020 - May 2021, the course is about how the U.S. Constitution of 1787 frames the way we organize our life together as a political community. Published twice a week, the episodes explore who gets to decide big questions of public policy and why, analyze the design of our national political institutions and the contested boundaries between them, and look at the structure of constitutional rights.