There’s a long New York Times Magazine article that was posted this morning, purporting to tell the story of “a largely Republican countermovement of ideologues and partisan operatives who, from the moment the Voting Rights Act became law, methodically set out to undercut or dismantle its most important requirements.”

Actually, the most important requirement of the Voting Rights Act has always been its prohibition of denying anyone the right to vote because of race, and in recent years there has never been any significant movement — Republican or otherwise — to the contrary. Republicans were instrumental in passing the original act (voting for it, as I recall, in higher proportions in both houses of Congress than did Democrats).

Subsequent disputes over the act have involved only the use of the “disparate impact” approach to its enforcement, and whether one section of the act — involving “preclearance” of state and local voting changes by the federal government — is any longer justified. There’s nothing sinister in the conservative positions here. The race-based decision-making encouraged by the former is bad for any number of reasons, and actually encourages the racial segregation of voting districts, which is quite at odds with the ideals of the civil-rights movement. As to the latter, the Supreme Court was quite right to rule two years ago that, indeed, the preclearance formula of Section 5 can no longer be justified.

If anyone believes that the right to vote has been denied because of race, the act did and does contain plenty of ways to challenge such discrimination, and nobody of any significance in either party is opposed to that. But plaintiffs have to prove their case in court — just as they must under any other civil-rights statute, and indeed that burden is on plaintiffs in any civil lawsuit. There’s nothing wrong with that, but liberal civil-rights groups have become spoiled and want to be able to have their way without having to prove their case. That’s no longer justified.