“No Escaping A Rising Tide”: Beyond Black And White, New Force Reshapes The South
The Deep South was, quite literally, a black and white world in 1965, when Congress approved the Voting Rights Act, sweeping away barriers that kept African-Americans from the polls.
And the Supreme Court decision on Tuesday, which struck down a key part of the law, is certain to set off a series of skirmishes over voting regulations between the white Republicans who control Southern state legislatures and civil rights groups seeking to maximize black voter clout.
But those who have studied the region closely say that a more unstoppable force is approaching that will alter the power structure throughout the South and upend the understanding of politics there: demographic change.
The states with the highest growth in the Latino population over the last decade are in the South, which is also absorbing an influx of people of all races moving in from other parts of the country.
While most experts expect battles over voting restrictions in the coming years, they say that ultimately those efforts cannot hold back the wave of change that will bring about a multiethnic South.
“All the voter suppression measures in the world aren’t going to be enough to eventually stem this rising tide,” said Representative David E. Price, a veteran North Carolina Democrat and a political scientist by training.
As the region continues to change, Republicans who control legislatures in the South will confront a basic question: how to retain political power when the demographics are no longer on your side.
The temptation in the short term, now that the Supreme Court has significantly relaxed federal oversight, may be to pass laws and gerrymander districts to protect Republican political power and limit the influence of the new more diverse population.
But that could be devastating to the party’s long-term prospects, especially if it is seen as discriminating against the groups that will make up an ever larger share of the future electorate.
The law guaranteeing political equality for blacks was passed nearly a half-century ago, in the wake of the startling images of violence in Selma, Ala. The nationally televised coverage shook America’s conscience and marked what President Lyndon B. Johnson would say in a speech to Congress was a moment where “history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom.”
The act eventually imposed federal oversight over nine states and other jurisdictions — among them, Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia — requiring them to seek preapproval for election laws, like voter identification measures, redistricting maps and rules related to the mechanics of elections, like polling hours.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday essentially struck down those preapproval requirements, which had deterred states and localities from passing legislation that they knew would meet with resistance from civil rights advocates and result in protracted fights.
Alabama, for example, passed a law in 2011 requiring that voters show photo identification at the polls. The state put off submitting the legislation to the Department of Justice, however — a delay some Democrats attribute to the state’s Republicans waiting for the Supreme Court decision.
But the most meaningful impact of the ruling may be seen in the decade to come, when Southern states — freed from federal preclearance requirements — take up the redrawing of Congressional and legislative seats amid much more complex racial politics than in the days of Jim Crow.
As the white share of the population shrinks, Republican leaders are going to grapple with the same problem their Democratic counterparts faced as whites drifted from their ancestral party in the 1980s and 1990s.
“The South is going to start looking more like California eventually,” said Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.
For years, black and white legislators in the South have agreed to district lines that, thanks to racial packing, create safe seats for both black Democrats and white Republicans. The Obama administration’s Department of Justice approved nearly every Southern redistricting map, written by Republicans, after the 2010 census.
The one exception, Texas, offers a window into what the future may look like in a multiracial South. With almost 90 percent of its growth owing to a mix of new Hispanic, Asian and black voters, Republican legislators in Texas drew new districts in 2011 that were rejected by a federal court as discriminatory because they didn’t sufficiently recognize the political power of the new demographics.
Just as Texas is now, Georgia will, thanks to polyglot Atlanta, eventually become a state where it will be difficult for Republicans to produce a redistricting map that protects their majority in perpetuity without drawing legal challenges.
Georgia’s Hispanic population nearly doubled between 2000 and 2010, according to federal census data. In suburban Atlanta’s Gwinnett County, the most heavily Hispanic locality in the state, the Latino population rose to 162,035 from 64,137.
“The growing nonwhite share of the electorate in Georgia and other Southern states represents a threat to the continued domination of the current majority party, which means that it is in the political interest of the majority party to do whatever it can, whether through control of redistricting or through the enactment of restrictive voter ID laws, to limit the impact of these trends,” said Alan I. Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist.
State Representative Stacey Abrams of Georgia, the Democratic leader, said such efforts would trigger a backlash.
“They’re going to be tempted to try to take advantage of this, but they risk permanently alienating a population that will eventually be able to take its revenge,” Ms. Abrams said. “Given how quickly our Asian and Latino populations are growing and how much of the electorate they’re going to represent, to constrain their voting power would be a recipe for disaster.”
Ms. Abrams’s Republican counterpart, the House speaker, David Ralston, said the Voting Rights Act decision was an affirmation that his native region “has changed, has matured,” and that his party would demonstrate that by appealing to Georgia’s changing face.
“If we’re going to govern responsibly and lead,” Mr. Ralston said, “then we have to recognize that Georgia is a big state, it’s a diverse state, and it’s a state that’s changing.”
By: Jonathan Martin, The New York Times, June 25, 2013
“The Party Isn’t White Enough”: Get Ready For More Republican Party Race Baiting
You, unsuspecting citizen, probably take the view that the Republican Party is too white. It’s the conventional wisdom, after all, and last year’s election results would seem to have proven the point resoundingly. But you’re obviously not up with the newest thinking in some conservative quarters, which is that the party isn’t white enough, and that the true and only path to victory in the future is to get whiter still. Some disagree, which gives us the makings of a highly entertaining intra-GOP race war playing out as we head into 2016. But given this mad party’s recent history, which side would you bet on winning?
The situation is this. The immigration reform bill passed the Senate yesterday. It will now go to the House. A few weeks ago, as I read things, there were occasional and tepid signals that the House would not take up the Senate bill. Now, by contrast, those signals are frequent and full-throated. For example, yesterday Peter Roskam, a deputy GOP whip in the House, said this: “It is a pipe dream to think that [the Senate] bill is going to go to the floor and be voted on. The House is going to move through in a more deliberative process.”
“Deliberative process” probably means, in this case, killing the legislation. House conservatives, National Journal reports, are increasingly bullish on the idea that they may be able to persuade John Boehner to drop the whole thing.
Last December, such an outcome was supposed to mean disaster for the Republicans. But now, some say the opposite. Phyllis Schlafly and talk-radio opponents of the bill like Laura Ingraham have been saying for a while now that the party doesn’t need Latino votes, it just needs to build up the white vote. And now, they have the social science to prove it, or the “social science” to “prove” it.
Sean Trende, the conservative movement’s heavily asterisked answer to Nate Silver (that is to say, Silver got everything right, and Trende got everything wrong), came out with an analysis this week, headlined “Does GOP Have to Pass Immigration Reform?,” showing that by golly no, it doesn’t. You can jump over there yourself and study all his charts and graphs, but the long and short of it is something like this. Black turnout and Democratic support have both been unusually high in the last two elections, which is true; Democrats have been steadily losing white voters, which is also true; if you move black turnout back down to 2004-ish levels and bump up GOP margins among whites (by what strikes me as a wildly optimistic amount), you reach White Valhalla. Somehow or another, under Trende’s “racial polarization scenario,” it’ll be 2044 before the Democrats again capture 270 electoral votes. Thus is the heat of Schlafly’s rhetoric cooled and given fresh substance via the dispassionate tools of statistics.
Karl Rove says this is bunk. He wrote in The Wall Street Journal yesterday that to win the White House without more Latino support, a Republican candidate would have to equal Ronald Reagan’s 1984 total among whites, which was 63 percent. Rove thinks this unlikely—Trende thinks it’s pessimistic—and counsels some Latino reach-out (naturally, none of them ever says anything about black reach-out). The party used to listen to Rove, but most of them have zoomed well past him to the twilight zone of the far, far right.
These Republicans and the people they represent—that is, the sliver of people they care about representing—don’t want any outreach. They almost certainly won’t let a path to citizenship get through the House. And they’ll attack minorities in other ways, too. It’s been mostly civil rights advocates who’ve denounced the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act decision, and one can obviously see why. But trust me, that decision, as Bloomberg’s Josh Green shrewdly noted the day it came down, is a “poisoned chalice” for the GOP.
Why? Just look at what’s already happened since the decision was announced—the party is launching voter-suppression drives in six of the nine freshly liberated states. All the states, of course, are down South. These drives might “work.” But they will attract an enormous amount of negative publicity, and they’ll probably induce massive backlashes and counter-movements. This effort will lead to even greater distrust of the GOP by people of color, and it will reinforce the captive Southern-ness of the party, making it even more Southern than it already is. And Republicans won’t stop, because they can’t stop. Race baiting is their crack pipe.
And here’s the worst part of this story. If the House Republicans kill immigration reform, and Republican parties across the South double down to keep blacks from voting, then they really will need to jack up the white vote—and especially the old white vote—in a huge way to be competitive in 2016 and beyond. Well, they’re not going to do that by mailing out Lawrence Welk CDs. They’re going to run heavily divisive and racialized campaigns, worse than we’ve ever seen out of Nixon or anyone. Their only hope of victory will be to make a prophet of Trende—that is, reduce the Democrats’ share of the white vote to something in the mid- to low-30 percent range. That probably can’t happen, but there’s only one way it might. Run the most racially inflamed campaign imaginable.
That’s the near-term future we’re staring at. We can take satisfaction in the fact that it’s bad for them, but unfortunately, it’s not so good for the country.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, June 28, 2013
“The Past Isn’t Dead, It Isn’t Even Past”: Can Republicans Do The Right Thing On The Voting Rights Act?
Now that the Supreme Court has severely weakened the Voting Rights Act, the president and Senate Democrats must revise it to restore its power to protect minority voters. The critical question is: What will the Republicans do?
As the Republican House leaders consider the way forward, they would do well to consider the decisions of the past two generations of top Republican legislators, without whom the Voting Rights Act would never have existed.
Most students of history know that President Lyndon Johnson’s mastery of the legislative process – and his huge Democratic majorities – were key to the bill’s original passage. But few know that the final bill was written in the office of the Republican minority leader, Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois.
President Lyndon Johnson feared a Southern filibuster might defeat the bill. To prevent a filibuster, two-thirds of the Senate would have to move the bill to a final vote, and achieving this would require Republican votes. So Johnson turned to Dirksen. “…[ Y]ou come with me on this bill,” Johnson told him, “and two hundred years from now school children will know only two names: Abraham Lincoln and Everett Dirksen.”
At first, Dirksen was reluctant, but when peaceful demonstrators were viciously attacked by Alabama state troopers and vigilantes on what became known as Bloody Sunday, he was enraged.
Now, he told associates, he was willing to accept “revolutionary” legislation. He began to work privately with administration officials to fine tune the bill. In meetings to draft the bill, Dirksen always sat next to acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, leaving no doubt who was in charge. Later some would call the legislation the “Dirksenbach bill.” Dirksen cosponsored the bill, defended it in floor fights with Southern opponents, and delivered the Republican votes to end debate.
Similarly, when the Voting Rights Act faced procedural death in the Senate Judiciary Committee during its 1982 reauthorization, Republican Senator Bob Dole broke the logjam. “The works around here get gummed up pretty easily,” he later said. Wishing to broaden the Republican Party to include blacks and Hispanics, Dole met privately with Democratic supporters of the bill and civil rights lawyers in order to fashion a compromise, which included extending Section 5, the bill’s preclearance provision, for twenty-five years. It was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan.
It is hard to see John Boehner, the current Republican Speaker of the House, or Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican Leader, playing similar roles. Both voted for extending the act in 2006 when it was enthusiastically signed into law by President George W. Bush, but now their party has changed.
In 2010, the Tea Party movement rose to power, sweeping away moderates and even old-school conservatives in primaries, on the way to helping Republicans win control of the House of Representatives and both legislative bodies and governorships in 26 states. Many in the Tea Party believed that President Barack Obama owed his election to massive voter fraud, despite all evidence to the contrary. Quickly, Republicans began passing a series of laws they felt would increase the integrity of elections, but that served mainly to make voting more difficult for many of President Obama’s core supporters: African Americans, Hispanics and Asian Americans; the poor; students; and the elderly or handicapped. These included the creation of voter photo-ID laws, measures restricting registration and early voting, and laws to prevent ex-felons from exercising their franchise.
It is hard to tell what impact these state laws have had so far, in part because many of the worst of them were overturned, thanks to litigation brought by the Justice Department, the NAACP and others under the Voting Rights Act. But now the act’s power has been substantially curtailed by the Supreme Court, and many Tea Party Republicans and fellow travelers are less likely to want to restore the act than to put in place more restrictions to secure the vote even if (perhaps especially if) they mean some eligible citizens will be disenfranchised.
Republican reactions to the Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act are not encouraging. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who attended the commemoration of Bloody Sunday in Selma last March, did call for bipartisan action to reform the act, but it appears that demography means destiny. The Republican Party now represents the white minority voter, many of whom sat out the 2012 presidential election. Reaching out to African Americans, and especially to Hispanics, is counterproductive, insists long time conservative activist, Phyllis Schafly. “There’s not the slightest bit of evidence that [Hispanics] will vote Republican,” she noted in May.”The people the Republicans should reach out to are the white voters…who did didn’t vote in the last election and there are millions of them.”
If present trends continue, a number of Republicans will obstruct any new efforts to strengthen and restore the Voting Rights Act in Congress. In doing so, they will be acting less like Dole, Dirksen, Reagan and Bush, and more, in an epic role reversal, like the Southern Democratic white hard core who opposed civil rights and voting rights in the 1950s and 1960s. Sadly, the congressional battles fought then look likely to be repeated in years to come. William Faulkner was right: “The past isn’t dead,” he once wrote. “It isn’t even past.”
By: Gary May, Salon, June 29, 2013
“John Roberts, Pitcher And Batter”: The Voting-Rights Decision Spells The End Of Fair Elections
The Supreme Court delivered a sucker punch to fair elections today, striking down a key part of the Voting Rights Act. It is a ruling that will make it much easier for partisan election officials and legislators to rig the voting system — and a lot harder for ordinary voters to participate in democracy.
The ruling is also a huge Supreme Court power grab. How big? In 2006, Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act by a vote of 98-0 in the Senate and 390-33 in the House (and President George W. Bush signed it into law). Now, five Justices have swept away the decision of all those elected leaders — over the vociferous dissent of four other Justices.
At his confirmation hearing, Chief Justice John Roberts — who wrote today’s majority opinion — famously declared that as a Justice, “my job is to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.” But in nullifying one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation in U.S. history, he picked up a bat and swung for the bleachers.
The part of the Voting Rights Act that the court held unconstitutional (Section 4) was a critical one: the formula that specifies which particular states and localities must clear significant voting changes in advance with the Justice Department. That process — “preclearance” — ensures that unfair voting rules can be stopped before they are allowed to interfere with actual elections.
An example of why it’s needed: in 2001, the all-white leadership of Kilmichael, Miss., abruptly canceled the town election when it looked like voters might elect the first black mayor. Using the Voting Rights Act, the Justice Department required that the election go forward — and a black mayor was elected. That was only one of more than 700 discriminatory voting changes the Justice Department blocked from 1982 to 2006.
The Supreme Court’s majority was troubled by the specific states and localities that the Voting Rights Act’s “preclearance” rules apply to. Why Alabama and not Vermont? Why Brooklyn and the Bronx, but not Lincoln, Neb.? The simple answer is that these are the jurisdictions Congress chose after careful consideration. It held 21 hearings and heard from scores of witnesses — it produced a 15,000-page record — before reauthorizing the law in 2006. Without doing any of that work, five Justices have said they know better.
Now that the formula has been thrown out, the whole process of preclearance is effectively thrown out as well. In theory, Congress could come up with another formula — and a list of states and localities — that the Supreme Court would find constitutional. But it would be a legislative nightmare for Congress to try to do that — and no one expects that to happen anytime soon.
So what does the gutting of the Voting Rights Act mean for American democracy? It will be easier for bad-apple election officials to revive classic vote-suppression tactics — like moving polling places at the last minute, so voters cannot find them, or getting eligible voters off the rolls. And it will be easier for state legislatures to draw district lines to divide up minority voters and dilute their power at the polls.
The majority dismisses all these very real concerns, arguing that “things have changed” since the bad, pre-civil-rights-era days. Of course, even if that were so, it would not mean that we don’t need the Voting Rights Act. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the dissenters, that sort of logic is “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” Now that the Supreme Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act, we should get ready for an antidemocratic downpour.
By: Adam Cohen, Time, June 25, 2013
“So Much For Sacred Obligations”: It’s Open Season On Voting Rights Right Now In America
Immediately after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, it was hard not to wonder how long it would take for Republican state lawmakers to begin imposing new voting restrictions on Americans they don’t like. As it turns out, GOP policymakers were apparently already revving their engines, just waiting for the green light that came 24 hours ago.
MSNBC’s Benjy Sarlin noted that the Supreme Court’s majority said the Voting Rights Act “probably wasn’t a deterrent against new restrictions.” Sarlin added, “Oops.”
Quite right. Just yesterday, Republican state lawmakers in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Texas all moved forward, with great enthusiasm, on new election measures intended to make it harder for traditional Democratic voters to participate in their own democracy. It is, as Rachel noted on the show last night, “open season on voting rights right now in America,” thanks to the Republican-appointed justices on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Of course, the responsibility for “fixing” the Voting Rights Act is now in the hands of Congress, where one GOP leader was willing to say … something.
Earlier this year, [House Majority Leader Eric Cantor] participated in the congressional delegation that Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., leads back to Selma, Ala., annually. That pilgrimage visits the sites of the civil rights movement, particularly one where, during a nonviolent demonstration, an explosion of police brutality erupted that left Lewis, then a young activist, with severe injuries.
“My experience with John Lewis in Selma earlier this year was a profound experience that demonstrated the fortitude it took to advance civil rights and ensure equal protection for all,” Cantor said. “I’m hopeful Congress will put politics aside, as we did on that trip, and find a reasonable path forward that ensures that the sacred obligation of voting in this country remains protected.”
That wouldn’t be especially noteworthy were it not for the fact that Cantor, to his credit, was literally the only member of the House congressional leadership — in either party — to issue a statement in response to the high court ruling. John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and John Cornyn all said nothing.
Looking ahead, to put it mildly, this matters.
Indeed, why is it they were so reluctant to say anything at all? One of their colleagues was willing to explain the situation fairly accurately.
Most House Republicans were relatively subdued in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Tuesday decision to strike parts of the Voting Rights Act.
Conservative Arizona Rep. Trent Franks said that was no accident, but the result of a fear that their remarks would be interpreted as racism.
I suspect that’s a fair summary of the party’s fears, but I hope Republican lawmakers will consider the larger context. If they’re afraid of commenting for fear of looking racist, how do they suppose they’ll look when they reject efforts to “fix” the Voting Rights Act itself?
Boehner, McConnell, and company may not have a plan just yet, and they very likely would have preferred that the Supreme Court not drop this in their laps, but they’re going to have to come up with a strategy very soon.
And while they’re at it, I’d also encourage the Republican National Committee to think long and hard about voting rights in the coming months. Reince Priebus has been on a “listening tour” in recent months, making what appears to be a sincere effort to reach out to minority communities.
But whether the RNC realizes it or not, the party is in an untenable situation — Republicans can’t reach out to minority communities with one hand and wage a war on voting with the other, at least not if they expect their outreach efforts to be taken seriously.
Put it this way: if Republicans think they have a demographic problem now, imagine what it’ll look like after the party refuses to back a revamped Voting Rights Act.
No wonder Boehner and McConnell were feeling shy yesterday.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 26, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 