Only the closest reasoning and the most detailed attention to the arguments and evidence of a massive, painstakingly documented, ambitiously revisionist history would justify the harsh rhetoric in Steve Bickerstaff’s three-and-a-half-page attack on my Article[1]:  “Very little” is new in my “retelling” of the passage and renewals of the Voting Rights Act, he asserts, and my “rehash” of Supreme Court decisions is even “less effective.”  My “unannounced agenda . . . slants the discussion and detracts from the credibility of [the Article’s] scholarship.”[2]  I “unfairly denigrate[ ]” the “many complex and comprehensive” histories of Section 5, and my history lacks “thoroughness and objectivity.”[3]  But rather than responding to the specifics of my Article and argument, Bickerstaff offers only unsubstantiated assertions and confused and often incorrect capsule summaries of case law.

The terms “retelling” and “rehash” serve merely to disparage; they could be applied to eminent historians like Thucydides, Gibbon, or Woodward, as easily as to me.    Bickerstaff never reveals my ominous “political agenda” or points out my disturbing “slants”—charges that are damning to me if true, but damning to him if not sustained, and even more damning if left too vague to be evaluated or even potentially countered.  His disagreements with my analyses of particular judicial decisions are never spelled out; he just asserts a general contrary position and accuses me of bias for not agreeing with him.  Instead of addressing my criticisms of specific cases, he treats those criticisms as condemnations of the lifetime corpuses of decisions and silent concurrences of particular justices.  He reduces the force of his charge that my Article is not thorough by asserting that “a fair critical analysis of all of these cases in a single law-review article is impossible,”[4] thus indicting me for failing to accomplish a task that he believes impossible to achieve.  As the extensive references in my Article make clear, I draw on many interesting and useful papers and policy studies that analyze parts of that history, and I criticize others.  My criticisms are directed at particular aspects of particular studies, which I identify.[5]  Bickerstaff never specifically defends any of them, never examines any of them—indeed, he never even cites a single treatment of more than a tiny fragment of the history of Section 5, a curious oversight if “many complex and comprehensive” histories in fact exist.  In fact, they do not, and Bickerstaff ignores general patterns that I point out in the history of Section 5, patterns that are the prime focus of my paper, as well the light that those patterns shed on individual events that have previously been examined in temporal and topical isolation.

In the only examples he proffers of what he asserts is my “unbalanced”[6] scholarship, Bickerstaff condemns my analysis of Supreme Court opinions by Justices Potter Stewart and Sandra Day O’Connor as flawed by “a particular political slant or agenda.”[7]  Lumping together opinions that they wrote or merely joined over decades,[8] Bickerstaff never considers their reasoning or the facts of individual cases, though he skewers me for failing to “look[ ] meaningfully at the reasoning given by the Justices for their opinions.”[9]  Repeatedly mischaracterizing my positions and never once examining my reasoning or the evidence I adduce to support it, Bickerstaff also undermines his indictment by making factual errors and sweeping conclusions offered without any justification whatsoever.

I nowhere portrayed Justices Stewart and O’Connor “as foes of the Voting Rights Act”[10] per se even when, as in my discussions of Beer and Bossier I, I criticized their interpretations of the Act.[11]  I never stated that Justice Stewart implied that Sections 2 and 5 of the Act were unconstitutional, only that he held in Mobile v. Bolden[12] that proof of discriminatory intent was required under the Constitution to show any violation of the Act.[13]  I never charged that Justice Stewart “disregarded the text of Section 5 and sidestepped Supreme Court precedents” in Bolden or City of Rome, only that he did so in Beer, where he effectively inserted “retrogressive” before “effect” in reading the law and ignored explicit, contrary language in the Court’s original reading of the VRA in South Carolina v. Katzenbach.[14]  Far from explaining Justice Stewart’s opinion in Beer, the Justice’s silent joining of the majority opinion in White v. Regester, as I point out in my Article, was inconsistent with it, as his silent assent in Allen v. State Board of Elections[15] was inconsistent with his plurality opinion in Bolden.[16]  And Bickerstaff errs in touting Justice Stewart as the source of the “elect” language favored by civil rights forces in the congressional consideration of the VRARA in 2006, because that phrase originated in minority voting rights in White v. Regester, a case that Bickerstaff condemns me for undervaluing, three years before Beer.[17]