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Poll Tax Challenge
President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on August 6. According to an article by E. W. Kenworthy of The New York Times, President Johnson displayed "vigorous enforcement" of the law that he and Congress had just passed (Kenworthy 1965: 1). President Johnson announced that Federal examiners would begin registering Blacks "'in 10 to 15 counties'" that violated the new law, and that Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach would be filing suit against the State of Mississippi to challenge its poll tax under the 15th Amendment of the Constitution the next day (Kenworthy 1965). In the next week, the Attorney General would be filing suit against the states of Alabama, Texas, and Virginia as well (Kenworthy 1965). This new legal form of enforcement through the judiciary branch resulted from the Congress's finding that the poll tax was not Constitutional, and thus subject to challenge from the Attorney General through litigation, marking a historical departure from state legislative discretion to federal judiciary formation of Constitutional interpretation and enforcement. Until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the judiciary and executive branches did not assume such bold roles in shaping Constitutional interpretation and implementation, rather leaving the individual states to decide their own voting laws. The court began to form laws through precedents of interpretation on a federal level instead of just on a state or local level.
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