“Disenfranchisement Persists”: The Supreme Court Must Defend The Voting Rights Act
Today, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Shelby County v. Holder, a case concerning the constitutionality of key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark law that outlawed discriminatory voting practices that disenfranchised African-Americans.
Shelby Country lies just south of Birmingham, Ala. One of its largest tourist attractions is the American Village, a nationally recognized citizenship education center whose mission is to teach visitors good citizenship and remind them of the price of liberty—that freedom isn’t free.
Shelby County wants the Supreme Court to declare a part of Section 4 and Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional. Section 4b codifies a formula to identify parts of the country where political discrimination based on race is high. Section 5 requires the Justice Department to “preclear” any changes to voting rules made in nine states, mostly in the South, and by areas in seven others.
The justices will consider an ultimate constitutional question: Does voter discrimination persist to the point where legal protections must remain in place to prevent it? The question, of course is rhetorical. It does. We only need to look at the long list of recent state-level legislative activity, both in and out of the South, that targets minority voters. Just in the last decade, lawmakers have broken up majority-minority districts with questionable redistricting practices. African-American and Latino voters have seen their names purged from voter lists under the guise that election officials were cleaning them up, and restrictive voter ID laws implemented. Laws, some argue, are the modern day equivalent of poll taxes.
If today was the opposite day, Shelby County’s case would have merit. They’d rightly argue that voting rights are color-blind. But it isn’t the opposite day, nor will that be the case for a long time to come. Shelby County ignores this fact. It forgets about Alabama’s long history of using violence fraud, poll taxes, and literacy tests to keep African-American’s from the polls.
The justices must avoid the same amnesia. In 2006, the House of Representatives voted 390-to-33 and the Senate 98-to-zero to renew the Voting Rights Act until 2031. These lawmakers, after a significant amount of testimony and impassioned debate, recognized that the threat of disenfranchisement persists. Some of the justices, however, have already signaled that it doesn’t. Justice Anthony Kennedy has questioned the fairness of the Voting Rights Act, and Justice Clarence Thomas has said flat out said that it’s unconstitutional.
Shelby County v. Holder targets the very heart of American democracy. If the justices rule in Shelby County’s favor, the right to vote will most certainly not be free. The American Village will have one more reminder to give its visitors.
By: Jamie Chandler, U. S. News and World Report, February 27, 2013
“Indifference To The Truth”: Modern-Day Know-Nothings Take Control In The South
For as long as I’ve lived in Arkansas — most of my adult life — people like the now-famous state senator Jason Rapert have made most of the noise and lost most of the elections. Now they’ve come to power, courtesy of Southern Republicans’ cult-like rejection of President Obama and large infusions of corporate campaign cash. And with the state legislature in session, the tragi-comedy is under way.
It’s happening all across the South. Sample news story: “Representatives approved a bill titled ‘The Church Protection Act of 2013′…85-8, to permit concealed handguns in churches and other houses of worship.”
Because Jesus, of course, was all about smiting them dead before thou art smitten.
Anyway, “famous” may be an exaggeration with regard to Sen. Rapert. But a YouTube clip of the man haranguing a 2011 Tea Party gathering about his anger at “minorities” running the country has gotten Arkansas lots of unfavorable national attention. Meanwhile, his indignant, if not particularly honest, denials have succeeded only in generating more ill will and bad feeling.
Full disclosure: this same Jason Rapert is also my neighbor in rural Perry County, AR. He invited us to a Memorial Day Picnic three years ago, where his bluegrass band provided the entertainment. He’s a genial host and a terrific country fiddler and guitarist. A few days later, his wife graciously dropped off a CD the band had recorded. She pretended not to mind when my horse left deep hoofprints in their yard. The couple has two lovely young daughters.
However, the same fellow is also a stone religious crank who’s absolutely certain that God agrees with every one of his opinions; also that everybody who disagrees with God and him is going straight to hell. Jason’s not shy about telling you about it, either. He once advised me to leave the U.S. on account of supporting Obamacare. I reminded him that my side had won the 2008 election. (And good luck finding a country without “socialist” health care and with indoor plumbing.)
But I’d never have suspected him capable of the kind of insidious rhetoric he displayed for the Tea Partiers. The video, first unearthed by Lee Fang in The Nation, captures Rapert in full revivalist mode. No, his speech wasn’t “racist” in the simplistic way liberals often charge. I’m confident he’d vote for Condoleezza Rice, for example.
It’s not President Obama’s color that offends Rapert’s sensibilities—although I’m less sure about his audience’s. It’s everything else about the man that makes him suspect from a paranoid, neo-nativist perspective.
Delivered in a countrified drawl that’s more his preacher’s voice than the one he uses in his daytime job as an investment advisor, Rapert’s speech hits all the conspiratorial high spots: Obama’s supposedly missing birth certificate; his sympathy with gay rights; also, most ominously, his secret belief in the wrong God.
Anyway, here’s the business end of Rapert’s speech:
“You’ve got to change the hearts and minds of the people that live around you. You’ve gotta pray. It says ‘Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.’ And I wonder sometimes when they invited all the Muslims to come into the White House and have them a little Ramadan supper, when our president could not take the time to go attend a National Prayer Breakfast — I wonder what he stands for.
“You know what, what they told us is …what you do speaks so loudly that what you say I cannot hear. I hear you loud and clear, Barack Obama. You don’t represent the country that I grew up with. And your values is not goin’ to save us. We’re gonna try to take this country back for the Lord. We’re gonna try to take this country back for conservatism. And we’re not going to allow minorities to run roughshod over what you people believe in.”
Does it help to know that President George W. Bush never missed a Ramadan dinner? Nor has President Obama skipped a National Prayer Breakfast. New York magazine posted photos of him presiding at every single one.
What’s most alarming isn’t Rapert’s racial views, but his continuing indifference to the truth and his disdain for religious liberty. His views are scarcely distinguishable from those of the Know-Nothing party of the 1850s. Then it was German and Irish Catholics who were suspect; today, it’s Muslims.
Over time, it’s a losing strategy. Eventually, Americans come around to supporting the First Amendment and rejecting religious bigotry.
How things will play out in the shorter term is harder to say. It’s one thing to dislike Obama, quite another to embarrass an entire state, region and political party. Arkansans in particular have been touchy about their image dating back to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and beyond.
If politicians like Rapert don’t learn to moderate their tone, even in the South their ascendancy could be a short one.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, February 6, 2013
“White Districts And White Sensibilities”: The Real Problem Republicans Have, They Don’t Want To Change Their Policies
You may have heard that in the incoming Congress, white men will constitute a minority of the Democratic caucus for the first time. That’s an interesting fact, but it’s only part of the story. At National Journal, Ron Brownstein and Scott Bland have a long, Brownsteinian look at how “the parties glare across a deep racial chasm” not only in the members of Congress themselves, but in the people they represent. “Republicans now hold 187 of the 259 districts (72 percent) in which whites exceed their national share of the voting-age population. Democrats hold 129 of the 176 seats (73 percent) in which minorities exceed their national share of the voting-age population. From another angle, 80 percent of Republicans represent districts more heavily white than the national average; 64 percent of House Democrats represent seats more heavily nonwhite than the national average.”
The implications for the GOP of the fact that most of their members represent mostly white districts are profound, touching on the continuous interaction between individuals and policy. Politicians are shaped by their political environments and the things they have to do to win, and the fact that most GOP members represent overwhelmingly white districts means that as they rise through the ranks, the time they’re going to have to spend talking to and listening to non-white people is going to be limited. Brownstein and Bland talked to some of the few Republicans who represent more diverse districts:
But even some House Republicans from racially diverse districts worry that many of their colleagues representing more monolithically white areas aren’t doing enough to court minorities. “Honestly, I don’t believe they are,” says Rep. Joe Heck, who won reelection in a diverse district outside Las Vegas.
Heck says he’s established beachheads among minority voters by working first with ethnic chambers of commerce. “For me, meeting with the members of the chamber was a door to building relationships with members of those communities,” he says. Then he hired aides to coordinate outreach to Hispanic and Asian constituents; during his campaign, he organized coalitions in those communities. “When I’m home in the district, we would do entire outreach days, visiting multiple Hispanic businesses, even ones outside of my district.”
As it happens, Joe Heck is an extremely conservative Republican. But he does all that outreach because he has no choice. And over time, that will make him more understanding of, and sensitive to, the concerns of people who aren’t white. It means that he’ll have a better awareness of the things that piss Hispanics off, and learning how not to piss different kinds of people off—with both substance and symbolism—is a big part of politics. This is important for both sides, and with a variety of constituencies. For instance, one of the first things you learn working on a Democratic campaign is that every piece of printed material you produce, from brochures to door hangers, has to have on it the tiny union “bug” that shows it was printed at a union shop. If it doesn’t, you can be damn sure you’ll get some angry phone calls from union members and representatives, because they notice. Republicans have I’s to be dotted and T’s to be crossed for their own constituencies as well. But somebody coming up through Republican politics in an overwhelmingly white district won’t have to learn, for instance, what pisses off Hispanics. So when they talk about immigration their speech is peppered with terms like “illegal aliens” that Hispanics find, well, alienating.
The advantage Democrats have is that nobody has to teach them how to talk to white people, because you learn that no matter where you live. It’s the same reason colleges don’t offer courses in White History or White Literature—you’re already learning it. Yes, there are subgroups of whites whom you can fail to understand, but it’s a lot less likely that you’re going to alienate them and end up losing the White House because of it.
So the real problem Republicans have isn’t that they don’t want to recruit minorities, because they do. They don’t want to change their policies to do it, of course, but they’re pleased as punch when they find someone like Tim Scott or Ted Cruz, a real-live minority who also happens to be rabidly right-wing, whom they can hold up as an example. Their problem is that they don’t know how to attract minority voters, because where most of them come from, they don’t have to.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January, 15, 2013
“A Dark Vein Of Intolerance”: Colin Powell Calls Out The GOP’s Racism Problem
On Sunday, during an appearance on Meet The Press, Colin Powell condemned the GOP’s “dark vein of intolerance” and the party’s repeated use of racial code words to oppose President Obama and rally white conservative voters.
Without mentioning names, Powell singled out former Mitt Romney surrogate and New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu for calling Obama “lazy” and Sarah Palin, who, Powell charged, used slavery-era terms to describe Obama:
POWELL: There’s also a dark — a dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the party. What do I mean by that? I mean by that that they still sort of look down on minorities. How can I evidence that?
When I see a former governor say that the President is “shuckin’ and jivin’,” that’s racial era slave term. When I see another former governor after the president’s first debate where he didn’t do very well, says that the president was lazy. He didn’t say he was slow. He was tired. He didn’t do well. He said he was lazy. Now, it may not mean anything to most Americans, but to those of us who are African Americans, the second word is shiftless and then there’s a third word that goes along with that. The birther, the whole birther movement. Why do senior Republican leaders tolerate this kind of discussion within the party?
Watch it:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-sffvkqWgA
Powell added that the Republican Party is “having an identity problem,” noting that its significant shift to the right has produced “two losing presidential campaigns.” “I think what the Republican Party needs to do now is a very hard look at itself and understand that the country is changed,” he said. “If the Republican Party does not change along with that demographic, they a going to be in trouble.”
Powell also called on Republicans to focus on a more equitable and progressive economic policies that help middle and lower income Americans, as well as immigration reform. “Everybody wants to talk about who is going to be the candidate,” Powell said. “You better think first about what’s the party actually going to represent.”
By: Igor Volsky, Think Progress, January 13, 2013
“Guns, Slavery And The Holocaust”: The Nonsensical, Offensive Argument That Gun Rights Help Protect Minorities From Oppression
They still save the Hitler invocations for the special occasions, so you could tell earlier this week when Matt Drudge went with his absurd Hitler and Stalin homepage about Obama and guns that we are at what the paranoid right thinks of as a watershed moment. Let’s hope to God it is. Drudge’s page was of course crazy: The whiff of fascism in this gun debate sure isn’t emanating from the White House, but from the direction of the forces using the techniques for which Hitler was famous during his rise to power—accusing the other side of doing precisely what he and his henchmen were doing, inverting the truth on its head in ways that offended common sense and morality at every turn.
Let’s start with yesterday’s news about Gun Appreciation Day, the invention of a certain Larry Ward. He is planning the big day to coincide with the president’s inauguration, set for Monday, January 21. When reminded by a CNN interviewer that this was also the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, Ward, like all propagandists, was ready with an answer: “I think Martin Luther King, Jr. would agree with me if he were alive today that if African Americans had been given the right to keep and bear arms from day one of the country’s founding, perhaps slavery might not have been a chapter in our history.”
It’s always a tip off when they say King “would have agreed with me.” We’re about to endure another round of this again, when King day comes and conservatives dish out the obligatory “King would be a conservative today” columns. It’s completely ridiculous, as is the idea that armed slaves would have managed anything more than the wholesale slaughter by their far better-armed masters of many of their number.
But Ward, it turns out, walks a well-worn path of gun advocates trying to pretend that they pursue the policies they pursue for the sake of the powerless. In the 1970s, the first big gun debate in the country after the 1968 Gun Control Act—which the NRA supported—concerned Saturday Night Specials, the small, cheap handguns used in many crimes in that decade when street crime skyrocketed. The NRA needed an argument that might land sympathetically on the ear of a natural foe, and then-leader Harlon Carter, the man who politicized and radicalized what had theretofore been a moderate and sensible group, found one. As Rick Perlstein notes in The Nation, Carter dubbed the Saturday Night Special “the girl’s best friend,” arguing that it was “small enough to fit into a woman’s purse.”
This all brings us back to Hitler himself. He’s been used before by gun advocates, as Gavin Aronsen wrote in Mother Jones, and in the same way as above: If Hitler hadn’t barred Jews from owning guns, then the Holocaust might never have happened. Wayne LaPierre took up this line of argument in the mid-1990s.
So there you are—guns, you see, aren’t merely or even really for sportsmen, or for homeowners seeking to protect their property and family. They’re for oppressed minorities to fight off the oppressor; and even to make revolution. To believe that armed Jews could have prevented the Holocaust requires so many gargantuan leaps of faith about how that might have happened that it’s completely fantastical and ridiculous. No one can seriously believe this. They say it purely for propagandistic purposes. A person who can use the Holocaust for present-day propaganda purposes will do pretty much anything.
In a rational world, in the wake of the massacre of 20 six- and seven-year-old children, the NRA would be saying: You know, you’re right; we more than anyone else advocate safe and legal gun use, and we more than anyone else have an interest in seeing to it that things like this don’t happen. So let’s sit down and craft some laws. That was what the NRA did, in fact, until the 1970s, when the right-wing started smelling political advantage in pressing the many fronts of the culture war. But that isn’t our world, and so we have the grotesque spectacle of the NRA using this massacre and the government’s attempt to do something about it to rile gun owners to the point of insurrection.
I hope Biden comes out with tough recommendations Tuesday. Even if the administration has to back down from a couple of things eventually and settle for less than it wanted—and less than we need—I hope at least that Obama and Biden are willing to do us all the simple honor of speaking the truth about the gun lobby. If they can’t be defeated just yet, they can at least be spoken of as the monsters they are. And if Newtown is not fated to result in wholesale changes in gun laws, at least it might be remembered 10 or 20 years from now as the beginning of the end of the NRA, the start of a period when the lies lost some of their force.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, January 12, 2013
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