President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Martin Luther King, Jr. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By The Editorial Board

When five justices of the Supreme Court disabled the Voting Rights Act last Tuesday, they left it to Congress to find a new formula to restore one of the great landmarks of equality and once again protect the nation’s most fundamental democratic right. That is unlikely for the moment given Congressional dysfunction, as the justices certainly knew, but it is hardly impossible in the months and years to come.

What is needed now is a new coalition — as loud and as angry as the voices of 1965 — to demand that Republican lawmakers join Democrats in restoring fairness to the election system. Discrimination at the ballot box continues and is growing.

It comes in more forms than it did a half-century ago, but it is no less pernicious. Instead of literacy tests, we now have rigid identification requirements. Instead of poll taxes, we now have bans on early voting, cutbacks in the number of urban precincts, and groups that descend on minority districts to comb the registration rolls for spelling errors.

These measures, largely undertaken to reduce Democratic votes in the Obama period, have a direct impact on minority voters in dozens of states. But they also affect the poor of all races, older people, students and legal immigrants, increasing the need for expanded legislation.

Fortunately, the court did not throw out Section 5 of the act, which allows the Justice Department to invalidate discriminatory voting practices, but it got rid of the formula that determined where the department could act. That leaves Congress and the Justice Department several ways to restore the government’s jurisdiction.

Read More The Future of Voting Rights – NYTimes.com.