This book excerpt is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

On June 25, 2013, the Roberts Court handed down their decision in Shelby County v. Holder. The 5-4 decision gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965’s “preclearance” condition, which required states and localities with a history of racial discrimination in voting practices to get permission from the federal government before they could change any policy related to their elections. The country had changed dramatically, Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority; the “strong medicine” of the Voting Rights Act, he argued, was no longer needed, let alone justified. But Michael G. Miller and I show throughout our new book, An American Problem: How the Country Built – and the Supreme Court Broke — The Voting Rights Act just how misguided that reasoning was. In the parts of the country freed from preclearance by Shelby County, our electoral institutions have grown demonstrably less open to Americans of color.

When Mike and I started working on what would become An American Problem, a promise made by Justice Roberts in Shelby County still held. “Section 2” of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, he wrote — the section containing the tools allowing litigators to attack election laws and policies that disproportionately harmed voters of color ± “is permanent and applies nationwide.” Although the Shelby County majority was happy to invalidate the preclearance regime that June morning, they told the country that tools remained still for removing discriminatory laws from the statute books.

But this is no longer the case.

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

Death tends to make people realize things. Unexpected departures from this earthly plane, in particular, can prompt the living to reflect on how to better use the time they have left. Chief Justice John Roberts, who has led the Supreme Court since 2005, received such a prompt in February 2016, when Justice Antonin Scalia died in his guestroom at a luxury ranch resort in Texas. 

According to The New York Times, Scalia died without having told anyone what to do with his papers—drafts of opinions, copies of memoranda exchanged between the justices, notes on the Court’s internal meetings, and so on. If those documents were to become public, they could shed light on the Court’s deliberative processes, revealing, for instance, when and why justices changed their minds, or in which cases their minds were already made up.