176176 Chapter 5 | Civil RightsAfrican Americans were placed together for racial reasons. This ruling opens the
door for a greater consideration of race than had been allowed in the previous cases.^68
In 2017, the Court struck down districting plans in North Carolina and Virginia for
packing African Americans into districts, thus diluting their ability to have an equal
opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.^69 However, racial redistricting remains
an unsettled area of the law. The Court also struck down an important part of the 1965
VR A in a 2013 ruling. This case concerned the “coverage formula” that determines
which states have to get approval from the Justice Department before implementing
changes in an election law or practice (such as redistricting or moving the location of a
polling place). This “preclearance” provision of the law was viewed as one of the best
ways to stop discriminatory voting practices because it could prevent them before they
were implemented, rather than having to wait until they went into effect to challenge
them. The Court ruled that the coverage formula was an unconstitutional burden on
the covered states and was a violation of the Tenth Amendment.^70
The racial redistricting and voting rights cases illustrate that the Supreme Court is
increasingly activist in issues involving civil rights: it is generally unwilling to defer to
the other branches of government, and will assert its view of discrimination and equal
protection regardless of what the other branches think (see Chapter 14 for a broader
discussion of judicial activism). In some periods, like the 1950s and 1960s, judicial
activism has served to further civil rights. More recently, it has served to limit them.Women’s Rights The Supreme Court has also been central in shaping women’s civil
rights. Until relatively recently, the Court did not apply the Constitution to protect
women’s rights, despite the Fourteenth Amendment’s language that states may not
deny any person the equal protection of the laws. Apparently, women were not regarded
as people when it came to political and economic rights in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. These protectionist notions were finally rejected in three cases
between 1971 and 1976, when the Court made it much more difficult for states to treat
men and women differently.
The first case involved an Idaho state law that gave a man priority over a woman
when they were otherwise equally entitled to execute a person’s estate. This law was
justified on the “reasonable” grounds that it reduced the state courts’ workload by
having an automatic rule that would limit challenges. But the Court ruled that the
law was arbitrary, did not meet the “reasonableness” test, and therefore violated the
woman’s equal protection rights under the Fourteenth Amendment.^71 The second case
involved a female air force officer who wanted to count her husband as a dependent
for purposes of health and housing benefits. Under the law at the time, a military
man could automatically count his wife as a dependent, but a woman could claim her
husband only if she brought in more than half the family income. The Court struck
down this practice, saying protectionist laws, “in practical effect, put women not on a
pedestal, but in a cage.”^72
These two cases relied on the rational basis test for discrimination between
men and women (which evolved from the reasonableness test). Along with the strict
scrutiny test (see Chapter 4), it allows the Fourteenth Amendment to be applied
differently to particular categories of people. Under the rational basis test, states can
discriminate against a group of people as long as there is a “rational basis” for the state
law in question. Today, for example, states can pass drinking laws that allow only those
who are 21 and older to drink on the grounds that traffic fatalities will be lower with that
drinking age rather than under a law that allows 18-year-olds to drink.
The strict scrutiny test gives racial minorities the strongest protection as the
“suspect classification” under the Fourteenth Amendment, but it has not been
applied to women. This test stipulates that there must be a “compelling state interest”rational basis test
The use of evidence to suggest that
differences in the behavior of two
groups can rationalize unequal
treatment of these groups.Full_06_APT_64431_ch05_148-197.indd 176 16/11/18 1:29 PM