Wednesday is the 60th anniversary of the day President Lyndon Johnson made his way to the U.S. Capitol and, with Martin Luther King Jr. standing behind him, signed the Voting Rights Act into law.
The act protected the right to vote and ensured the government would fight efforts to suppress it, especially those aimed at Black voters. For many Americans, it was the day U.S. democracy fully began.
That was then.
The law has been slowly eroding for more than a decade, starting with the 2013 Supreme Court decision ending the requirement that all or parts of 15 states with a history of discrimination in voting get federal approval before changing the way they hold elections. Within hours of the ruling, some states that had been under the preclearance provision began announcing plans for stricter voting laws.
Those changes have continued, especially since the 2020 presidential election and President Donald Trump’s false claims that widespread fraud cost him reelection. The Supreme Court upheld a key part of the Voting Rights Act in 2023, but in its upcoming term it’s scheduled to hear a case that could roll back that decision and another that would effectively neuter the law.
Voting rights experts say those cases will largely determine whether a landmark law passed during a turbulent era decades ago will have future anniversaries to mark.
“We’re at a critical juncture right now,” said Demetria McCain, director of policy at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “And, let’s be clear, our democracy is only about to turn 60 when the Voting Rights Act anniversary gets here. I say that because there are so many attacks on voting rights, particularly as it relates to Black communities and communities of color.” --->READ MORE HERE
The battle between Texas and Democrat states over gerrymandering seems likely to touch on the biggest driver of Democrat gerrymandering which fundamentally altered the political balance of power in state after state. Louisiana v. Callais is likely headed for a big Supreme Court decision that will fundamentally change how the Voting Rights Act enforces minority districts.
There’s nothing to celebrate about the 60th anniversary of the VRA, a civil rights era relic which long ago stopped fighting segregation and instead enforced partisan gerrymandering with no end in sight. When the Supreme Court began allowing VRA ‘monitoring’ of elections in some states to sunset, Democrats cried that segregation and slavery were about to come back.
But for all the talk of democracy and racism, Louisiana v. Callais shows what keeping the zombie VRA alive is really about. The case is about whether federal courts can force Louisiana to create two Democrat congressional seats under the guise of creating two black seats. It’s a common form of gerrymandering that uses race as a trojan horse for mandating Dem seats.
When heavily gerrymandered Democrat states like California, New York and Illinois eliminate Republican seats, that’s not seen as a Voting Rights Act violation even though much as Democrat seats are disproportionately minority, Republican seats are disproportionately white.
Democrats are not fighting to keep the VRA alive because they care about black people, but because they care about maintaining the racially gerrymandered seats produced by VRA abuses. A New York Times column by Jamelle Bouie complained that “the current Supreme Court’s vision of a rigidly colorblind Constitution” would lead it to reject the notion that the Constitution mandates majority black and therefore Democrat districts. But if the issue were about racial disenfranchisement, Democrats would try to boost the power of black voters by making them a crucial swing bloc in key races instead of apportioning guaranteed seats to senile members of the Congressional Black Caucus who hardly bother running anymore.
Over in Texas, at the center of a national gerrymandering civil war, did the increasingly demented Rep. Al Green, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who died last year, only to be replaced by Rep. Sylvester Turner, who died this year do any more for black people than their white opposite numbers have done for white people? The amount of scandals, ethics violations and criminal investigations that follow Congressional Black Caucus members is ample evidence of that. The average age of CBC leaders with a lifetime sinecure is in the 70s.
Abusing the VRA to create minority seats for Democrats who couldn’t lose an election unless they were actually locked up for their criminal careers didn’t empower black people, it empowered the Democrats. And that racial gerrymandering gave Democrats guaranteed seats. --->READ MORE HERE
If you like what you see, please "Like" and/or Follow us on FACEBOOK here, GETTR here, and TWITTER here.
No comments:
Post a Comment