David Dailey at The Atlantic retraces Chief Justice Roberts’s lifetime of quietly dismantling the Voting Rights Act.

“Roberts’s papers from [his time in the Department of Justice], housed at the National Archives, . . . show how Roberts devised the messaging strategies that made it possible for the administration to claim it supported the VRA, while actually helping to neuter it—an approach he has since mastered as chief justice.”

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More than two decades later, about to ascend to the high court, Roberts would brush aside concerns about his views on voting rights by suggesting that the 1982 fight was a youthful folly, and that he had just been doing his job. “Senator,” Roberts told Russell Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, “you keep referring to what I supported and what I wanted t

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