The Courts: Challenge to 4(e)

With an eye to tens of thousands of Spanish-speaking Puerto Ricans in New York City who were disenfranchised by a 44-year-old state law requiring that voters demonstrate literacy in English, New York Senator Robert Kennedy last spring pinned a shirttail amendment on the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Labeled Section 4(e), it provided that no U.S. citizen could be denied the vote through a literacy test if he could prove he had a sixth-grade education in any "American flag school"—including the Spanish-language schools in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, where residents have long elected their own Governor and legislature.

As a result of Section 4(e), some 8,000 Spanish-speaking Puerto Ricans registered to vote for the first time in the Nov. 2 elections. Last week, however, a three-judge Federal District Court in Washington ruled that the amendment was unconstitutional. A suit challenging the section claimed that, under Article I of the Constitution, Congress had no right to impose laws governing voter qualifications in any state. Government attorneys had argued that New York violated the 14th Amendment's "equal protection" clause by disenfranchising Puerto Rican voters, pointing out that Congress acted years ago to encourage cultural autonomy in Puerto Rico by allowing Spanish to be the primary language in school.

The majority decision, written by Judge Alexander Holtzoff, 79, said that the 14th Amendment was beside the point, declared flatly that Section 4(e) "transgresses the powers granted to Congress and, therefore, is repugnant to the Constitution and invalid." The "appropriate recourse," said the court, would be an amendment to the constitution of the State of New York. Instead, the Justice Department planned to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, where a hearing on the full Voting Rights Act is scheduled on Jan. 17, as the result of another suit.