Adam Serwer of Mother Jones suggests we look at Chief Justice Roberts’ long history with it.

Memos that Roberts wrote as a lawyer in President Reagan’s Justice Department during the 1980s show that he was deeply involved in efforts to curtail the effectiveness of the Voting Rights Act, the hard-won landmark 1965 law that is intended to ensure all Americans can vote. Roberts’ anti-VRA efforts during the 1980s ultimately failed.

[snip]

Voting rights violations, according to one memo he helped draft in 1981, “should not be too easy to prove since they provide a basis for the most intrusive interference imaginable.” If Roberts and the Reagan administration had gotten their way, discriminatory voting systems in most of the country could only be barred when discrimination could be shown to be intentional. That would make it much tougher for the feds to intervene in states and localities and guarantee equal voting rights. The Reagan administration argued that they were just trying to preserve the Voting Rights Act, but it was really attempting to preserve a Supreme Court ruling neutering the law.

[snip]

Roberts helped the administration hone its argument. He wrote that it made sense for parts of the VRA to require proof that discrimination was intentional. “Broad aspects of criminal law and tort law typically require proof of intent,” Roberts wrote in a draft op-ed in 1981.

Serwer wrote this column in February of this year. About the only thing he got wrong was suggesting that the Roberts Court would strike down Section V of the law, the one that requires that the Federal Dept. of Justice approve new voting laws from certain states whose history has shown them to act in a discriminatory way toward minorities. Instead, the Court invalidated Section IV, which created a formula which determined whether a state “maintained a ‘test or device’ restricting the opportunity to register and vote.” The Roberts Court said the formula uses outdated tests or devices (literacy tests, poll taxes) and thus is no longer valid. Until such time as Congress creates a new one, the VRA is effectively closed down.

I don’t know whether it would have made any difference to the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee when Roberts was going through his confirmation hearings if they’d known this, and maybe they did, but it certainly might have given them at least one more thing to question him about. It might not have mattered, though. Remember that Roberts swore as a justice he’d be an “umpire,” not a rulemaker. That was a lie. He’s had an agenda since the day he became an Associate Justice, and his elevation to the Chief Justice position just made that agenda easier to further.