In her book, Christina R. Rivers makes a case for a “race-conscious, originalist approach” to interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA). This approach, she contends, justifies “remedially race-conscious” voting rights policies. Rivers casts the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) as chief advocate of this theory of constitutional and statutory interpretation, and presents the CBC as protectors of the Radical Reconstruction Congresses' intent to facilitate racial equality through race-based remedies. Drawing from case law, congressional hearings, interviews, legislative action, and amicus curiae briefs submitted by the CBC, she depicts the caucus as the protagonist locked in a rhetorical and textual battle with the U.S. Supreme Court (principally from Shaw v. Reno onward), which is determined to cement color blindness as the only appropriate path to ending racial discrimination. By casting the Court's conservative majority as the antagonist, the author is then able to portray the Court as fixated on color blindness at the expense of the protection of racial and ethnic minorities from discriminatory electoral processes, of fidelity to the Equal Protection Clause, and of due deference given to legislative intent.

Rivers attributes this hostility between the Supreme Court and the Congressional Black Caucus to the former's fundamental misreading of legislative history and judicial precedent. Giving primacy to the desires of the congressional majorities who debated, drafted, and passed the Fourteenth Amendment, she confronts head-on the textualist and contextual pillars of color-blind originalism. Rivers contends that a true read of nineteenth-century legislative history leads one to see the Fourteenth Amendment as not merely a “race-neutral, individualist, and procedural guarantee of equal protection” but as also being “framed in a very race and group-conscious context” (p. 21). Here political context matters: The framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were keenly aware that previous Civil Rights laws were ineffective at protecting former slaves and their descendants from state-sanctioned discrimination. They were also keen to make it difficult for either the states or the judiciary to thwart the reach of the federal government's protection. From Rivers's perspective, the first Supreme Court decision to tackle the Fourteenth Amendment, the Slaughter-House Cases (1873), both limited the scope of the amendment (by applying the “privileges or immunities clause” protections to the rights of U.S. but not state citizens) and affirmed its original, race-conscious, group-oriented purpose. By partitioning protections based upon whether the aggrieved alleged misconduct stemmed from a federal or state entity, the Slaughter-House precedent thus gave judicial license to state discriminatory action under the guise of protecting federalism. For Rivers, the Slaughter-House majority rightly affirmed race consciousness, but wrongly theorized the Fourteenth Amendment. She maintains that color-blind originalism equally misses the mark by sidestepping context and text in order to discount the substantive and procedural guarantees demanded by signatories to the VRA and its amendments and reauthorizations.

The author masterfully reviews congressional hearings on the VRA reauthorizations (in 1975, 1982, and 2006) and selects CBC amicus curiae briefs to illustrate the caucus's “race-conscious advocacy” as it relates to majority–minority districting and federal preclearance. Not only do the reauthorization hearings enable CBC members to place their opposition to the Court's color-blind election-related jurisprudence into the Congressional Record, but the hearings also enable Congress to modify the language of the VRA, to compile evidence on the enforcement and limitations of the VRA, to reverse the precedential weight of judicial decisions, and to clarify legislative intent. For instance, the CBC-led congressional modifications of Section 2 repudiated Mobile v. Bolden and reaffirmed Congress's resolve to prohibit discriminatory intent and effects. Congress's reauthorization of Section 5 for 25 years in 1982 and again in 2006 reflected its careful consideration of the enforcement record and its opinion that the persistence of race-based discriminatory election processes warranted further extraordinary oversight by the federal government. Likewise, the CBC utilizes amicus curiae briefs to joust with the Court about the continued necessity for federal abrogation of local control over election procedures.

The book suffers, however, from a baseline supposition that the Court must have considered the CBC's amicus curiae briefs. Although Rivers acknowledges that “the Court does not explicitly refer to the CBC or any of its amicus arguments in its opinions,” she asserts that the joust is discernible and is largely a two-way exchange (p. 146). Yet such an assertion neglects the multiple-actor nature and gamesmanship of interest group conflict via friend briefs. Rivers does not analyze non-CBC friend briefs to explore how other stakeholders have engaged the cases. She also fails to detail which amicus arguments the Court did reference in its opinions. Consequently, no broader picture emerges of the actors contending to define race-conscious remedies for electoral malfeasance.

Moreover, I wish Rivers had interrogated the jurisprudential implications of the 2008 presidential election of Barack Obama. Not only was Obama's election the most historic victory in contemporary American politics, but the Court's granting of a writ of certiorari in the Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District case came only days before the 2009 inauguration. Skeptics of Section 5's prophylactic remedies hail the Age of Obama as proof that preclearance has outlived its constitutionality (and the most virulent Jim Crow activists). Many also cite the growth in black elected officialdom as another reason for the Court to strike down preclearance as incongruent and nonproportionate to current evils. Other skeptics find it paradoxical that Obama and Eric Holder, America's first president and first attorney general of African American heritage, respectively, defended a race-based remedy after the former so strongly embraced a deracialized campaign posture. The rhetorical and textual dynamics of legislative–judicial jousting over race-conscious voting rights certainly changed after Obama's 2008 victory.

Despite the aforementioned limitations, The Congressional Black Caucus, Minority Voting Rights, and the U.S. Supreme Court represents an important contribution to scholarship on Congress, race, and representation and on statutory and constitutional interpretation. The author's presentation of a “race-conscious” interpretation of the Slaughter House Cases and of Strauder v. West Virginia (1879) as precedents that serve, rather than undermine, “affirmative uses of race” is sure to provoke further debate about the corporate/group conceptualizations of black political interests in the Age of Obama.

This book should also inspire readers to take a broader, more integrative approach to understanding the legislative and extralegislative efforts of the Congressional Black Caucus. In this regard, Rivers's treatment of early black political thought and activism is particularly illustrative, and she unearths present-day externalities associated with the CBC's full-throttle embrace of a nineteenth-century race-conscious politics. Although the VRA facilitated the growth of the CBC after 1992, those gains enlarged Republican officeholding, emboldened resistance to the caucus's goals, and increased calls by conservatives for color-blind jurisprudence. For Rivers, the Court has raised the costs of race-conscious advocacy. It simultaneously rebuffed and embraced notions that racial equality required race-based remedies to race-based discrimination. By scrutinizing how race-conscious policies may discriminate against nonblacks, the Court has hoisted “the CBC onto its own race-conscious petard” (p. 126).