It is perhaps paradoxical that the Supreme Court’s decision in 2013 to strike down portions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act was itself a victory over injustice and discrimination.

The key sections of the VRA at issue, Section 4 and 5, were hopelessly anachronistic. Section 4, the article of the VRA that mandated states and municipalities seek preclearance from the Justice Department for changes to districts or voting laws, was crafted to address the racial tensions that dominated in 1965. Section 5 of that law identified those portions of the country that were the most racially discriminatory in that same period. Though they were initially set to expire, the VRA’s coverage and preclearance requirements were reauthorized on a variety of occasions. Despite the fact that the precise conditions this law was crafted to address long ago ceased to exist, the politically fraught nature of reforming the VRA prevented it from being comprehensively refined by successive Congresses.

In the interim, the law only became more onerous. Its provisions were selectively enforced by a deeply politicized Civil Rights Division of the DOJ. Section 5 was designed to prevent the systematic disenfranchisement of African-Americans in the South but, as the Supreme Court observed in 2013, the black voting population in the former Confederate states now often exceeds the number of white voters. Rather than update the formula through which the law covers municipalities with a history of racial discrimination (or other disenfranchisement tools like English-only ballots), Congress merely created a “bailout” provision that allows those portions of the country that have exhibited good behavior for a time to be exempt from that preclearance provision.

The pre-2013 VRA not only violated the principles of federalism, but it also resulted in the Balkanization of the American electorate. Writing in The Atlantic in 2013, Steven Hill observed that Republicans in the South have often been the beneficiaries of VRA legislation that mandated the creation of majority-minority districts. “The drawing of majority-minority districts not only elected more minorities, it also had the effect of bleeding minority voters out of all the surrounding districts,” he observed. “Not only has the drawing of majority-minority districts led to fewer elected Democrats, but today single-seat districts themselves have become a huge barrier to Democrats retaking the House.”

As an unintended consequence of the VRA, Republican collusion with African-American Democrats in the South has resulted in the virtual eradication of the white Southern Democrat. Today, centrist congressional districts are increasingly hard to find. Representatives are beholden to constituencies that are reflective of only the most intemperate elements of their districts. If the parties have grown more “extreme” in the modern era, as centrist pundits often lament, they have the VRA to thank for much of that condition.

The Supreme Court righteously gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, but they did not overturn the law. In the majority opinion, the Court advised the Congress to get to work reforming this law so that it could be reflective of 21st Century realities. Unfortunately, that work has yet to be inaugurated.

50 years after the passage of that landmark civil rights law, The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent issued the compelling observation that the Republican Party is disinclined to begin the politically perilous work of reforming the VRA. He submitted that the Republican Party has little to gain and much to lose by investing in the process of reforming voting rights laws.

“A strong plurality of House Republicans are from the south, and their strategy has been to pack African Americans into one district across some southern states, and preserve every other district for themselves,” The Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman told Sargent.

“House Republicans are pretty happy with the status quo in the south — particularly the fact that packing African Americans has led to safe Republican surrounding districts,” Wasserman continues. “Any efforts to newly implement a pre-clearance regime could interfere with that status quo.”

But Republicans do have an incentive to reform the gutted VRA while they have the ability to lead that process: Politics.

Writing in National Review last year, Roger Clegg observed that the VRA stripped of preclearance provisions is functioning just fine as a legal tool for the prevention of racial discrimination. Moreover, Democratic efforts to replace the VRA with an updated version are nothing more than thinly veiled efforts to codify liberal demagoguery and impugn the opposition. More nefariously, they also inculcate an absurd and unfounded persecution complex among progressives and minority voters.

“[T]he Justice Department and civil-rights groups are now using those other provisions to try to advance their agendas, which amount to a war on voter-ID requirements and ensuring the continued racial gerrymandering and segregation of voting districts,” Clegg wrote. “There’s no evidence that the Left needs more weapons in its arsenal; all that’s different in the post–Shelby County world is that now its lawyers have to prove racial discrimination before they can get court relief, which is the way that every other civil-rights law works.”

The New York Times editorial board confirmed Clegg’s suspicions when they asserted that a new and more robust VRA would be necessary to tackle the disenfranchising effects of voter identification laws. This assertion was humorously contradicted in another section of The New York Times, one more grounded in empirical data and less obliged to reinforce liberal shibboleths, which discovered after the midterm elections that voter identification laws are a terrible mechanism for disenfranchising African-American voters.

A bipartisan bill sponsored early last year by Reps. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and John Conyers (D-MI) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) is an imperfect attempt to reform the VRA. Its critics on the left and the right view the measure as a suboptimal attempt at addressing the gaps created in the voting rights law by the Supreme Court, but to do nothing on this matter would do the Republican Party no benefits in the long-term.

The GOP will not be in control of both chambers of Congress forever. Though they cannot pass an ideal reformation of the VRA today that would be signed by President Barack Obama, the party in power in Congress can reset the terms of the debate and establish a more equitable and federalist approach to addressing racial disparities. One that does not wallow in identity politics or demands remedial justice for racial offenses committed generations ago.

I have argued in the past that Republicans should propose an expanded rather than a narrower map for reapportionment preclearance that is focused on the urban municipalities, in both the North and the South, where minorities are most likely to face discrimination. The GOP would also be well-served to back a VRA reform that allows courts to impose federal supervision on states and municipalities that change voting laws to observe their effects – something that the USA Freedom Act would do.

What the GOP should not do is nothing at all. They have a window of opportunity today that affords them great leeway in reframing the terms of the debate over voting rights and racial politics in America, and it would be foolish to squander it. Also of great importance to Republicans is the opportunity they presently have to address genuine anxieties among Democratic-voting black Americans. Republicans should not engage in the reformation of the VRA with the expectation that it will yield electoral benefits in the form of increased support from African-Americans. It will not. But the GOP will get some credit just for showing up at the table, and that goes quite a ways toward combatting the toxic and malicious stereotypes about Republicans advanced by partisan liberals.

Many Republicans believe that America no longer needs a VRA. They are not without evidence when they make this claim. The progress toward racial parity of opportunity in America in the last 50 years has been stunning. Likewise, the enforcement of the taboos prohibiting racial discrimination or even casual prejudice in this nation since the mid-1960s is remarkable. It may even be unparalleled in human history. But racial disparity persists, and laws like the VRA do continue to serve a purpose. Republicans would be best served if they acknowledged that fact and embraced meaningful reforms that address modern racial grievances. If they do not, it will not be long before the left has the opportunity to repair invented disparities, enforce the equality of outcomes, and pillory their fabricated vragi naroda.

When liberals are again empowered by the public, they will not pass up the chance to pursue reparative social justice and avenge the perceived grievances of generations long deceased. When that time comes, conservatives will greatly lament their failure to close that window when they had the opportunity.