“Winning Against The Oligarchs”: Getting Just A Fraction Of The 94 Million Adults Who Didn’t Vote In 2012 To Start Casting Ballots
Last week our Supreme Court let stand Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s voter suppression law, one of a host of such laws enacted in the North from Idaho to Michigan to New Hampshire, and everywhere below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Do not be lulled into inaction by that decision. Do not accept that a rich minority will rule America and remake it to their liking. Even with faithful allies on the Supreme Court, the oligarchs win only if you let them.
The factual basis for this and other decisions upholding voter suppression laws is specious, especially for the kind of photo identification requirements at the polling booth that Walker signed into law. Rigorous research into voter impersonation, the only illegal voting technique which photo identification can stop, found just 10 cases in America from 2000 to summer 2012.
Walker is, of course, a loyal vassal of the Koch brothers and their confreres, who works diligently to impose their minority views through laws under which all of us must live.
Those rules include low taxes for oligarchs and enabling dynastic wealth; diminishing worker rights, job safety laws and reliable pensions; repealing environmental protections while tightly restricting your right to challenge polluters in court; and gutting public education at every level while converting universities from centers of inquiry into job-training programs.
All of this can be stopped. All that is required is getting just a fraction of the 94 million adults who did not vote in 2012 to start casting ballots.
Poll after survey after focus group shows little public support for Kochian ideas, especially when they are described in neutral and accurate language.
A plethora of polls shows broad support for progressive policies including higher tax rates on million-dollar-plus incomes and stopping corporate welfare. Three of four Republicans favor increasing Social Security benefits, yet congressional Republicans — and scared Democrats — are moving to cut them at the behest of the ultra-wealthy and their minions.
Making majority wishes into law will be more difficult in the near term thanks to a series of Supreme Court and lower court rulings since 2008. The courts have shown expansive tolerance for a wide variety of voter suppression laws. And the judiciary has done nothing to stop voter-roll purging so ham-handed that former congressman Lincoln Davis was among 70,000 Tennesseans barred from voting in 2012.
Two years ago, on a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court nullified a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Chief Justice John Glover Roberts Jr. declared, “Our country has changed.” We saw change immediately. Southern state legislatures changed their laws to make sure fewer black Americans voted or did so in heavily black jurisdictions.
The important lesson here is that just sitting back and accepting these rulings, behaving as if you are powerless, would be a disaster for five and possibly all six noble purposes of our nation.
Yes, the voting standards the court majority has set, often by a one-vote margin, make it easier for a shrinking minority to impose its will. But it does not mean that minority will impose its will.
The unlimited money that the Supreme Court ruled can legally be poured into election campaigns under Citizens United is a threat to democracy.
That 2010 decision expanded campaign finance loopholes so much that the ban on government contractors donating to politicians has evaporated. Oil giant Chevron was among those contractors making huge contributions to politicians loyal to them by funneling the money through affiliates called LLCs, limited liability corporations.
Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey said last October that if Republicans won 2014 gubernatorial elections, they could control “voting mechanisms.”
“Would you rather have Rick Scott in Florida overseeing the voting mechanism, or Charlie Crist? Would you rather have Scott Walker in Wisconsin overseeing the voting mechanism, or would you rather have Mary Burke? Who would you rather have in Ohio, John Kasich or Ed FitzGerald?” Christie, the president of the Republican Governors Association, told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce last October.
About the only thing the courts will not abide is honesty by those who sponsor laws to rig elections by suppressing voters.
Anyone who doubts that should click on this brief 2012 video of Mike Turzai, the Pennsylvania House Republican leader. Turzai told the party faithful that his state’s voter ID law “is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.”
A state judge struck down that law and savvy GOP politicians decided not to appeal. Romney then lost Pennsylvania by more than 5 percentage points, evidently because the majority was not suppressed.
The awful truth is this: So long as politicians don’t boast about their real intentions, they can enact voting laws that rig elections in favor of an influence-buying minority that cannot win any other way.
So that’s the lesson. What are you going to do about it? Yes, you. Not somebody else. You.
You have more than enough power to make sure that we do not head back toward the rules of the late 19th century, when hunger and disease ravaged the poor, as Jacob Riis documented in How the Other Half Lives. We need not indulge the vanity and greed of men like Henry Clay Frick, which grew so unrestrained that on a single day his pleasures cost more than 2,200 lives.
People just like you got women the right to vote, child labor laws, collective bargaining laws, and environmental laws. It took time. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton devoted their whole lives to suffrage. But in the end they and others persuaded male office holders to extend voting rights to women.
Will you do what is required to reverse our slide into the awful grip of a 21st-century oligarchy?
It’s not that hard. Really. And it does not require much money, either.
What it does require is these virtues — focus, diligence, and persistence.
There is one more crucial element: persuasion. That means winning people over by showing them a better alternative than the slickly marketed Kochian vision that sounds appealing unless you understand that it means a future in which a few gain at the expense of the many.
Making fun of the often laughable and crazy statements of Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Michele Bachmann, Mike Huckabee, and their like is counterproductive. It makes people think they are being looked down upon, including many people who do not share those laughable and crazy ideas, but are put off by the way progressives talk.
A better vision is a society where we all gain if we work, save, and act prudently, and where we all share the burden of caring for those who cannot care for themselves.
A better vision is one in which the bottom 120 million Americans own more than a third of one percentage point of all assets. A better vision is one where corporations are vehicles to encourage risk taking and wealth creation, not tools to mine the public treasury, pick consumer pockets, and stealthily prosper on the dole.
What is required to achieve a vibrant, free and broadly prosperous America is this:
- Register millions of people to vote, paying scrupulous attention to both the registration rules and following up to make sure the names actually show up on the voting rolls.
- Maintain contact with these new voters, which can be done at low cost with emails, neighborhood meetings and knocking on doors.
- Get people to the polls on Election Day and, where it is still allowed, help them vote in advance.
- Tell politicians you support to stop wasting money on television and radio ads, which are sold at the highest rates, and to invest most of their campaign dollars into getting out the vote.
Going along with the television and radio ad game is playing by the Koch brothers’ rules. That is a contest they will win because they have the money. Instead, do what the Kochs and other smart businesspeople do: Change the game. Play your own game. And don’t worry about right-wing voter registration drives, because numerous polls show that among those not voting, their appeal is narrow, while yours is broad.
It would also help to organize supporters to follow watchdog news outlets, an issue for a future column.
As a guest on call-in radio and answering audience questions after my many lectures across the country, I hear a constant refrain that nothing can be done, that the anti-democratic interests are so rich and powerful that they must win.
Wrong. That’s utter nonsense. Don’t think like a victim. Take charge.
America is still the democratic republic where the majority of people who cast ballots choose our elected leaders. Get more people to the polls on the only day that counts – Election Day – and we can change everything for the better.
All that is necessary is for you to do the work.
By: David Cay Johnston, The National Memo, March 28, 2015
“A Rare Victory For Black Voting Rights In The South”: SCOTUS, Individual Majority-Minority Districts Were Racially Gerrymandered
In 2010, Republicans gained control of the Alabama legislature for the first time in 136 years. The redistricting maps drawn by Republicans following the 2010 election preserved the thirty-five majority-minority districts in the Alabama legislature—represented overwhelmingly by black Democrats—and in some cases actually increased the number of minority voters in those districts.
For example, State Senator Quinton Ross, a black Democrat elected in 2002, represented a district in Montgomery that was 72 percent African-American before the redistricting process. His district was under-populated by 16,000 people, so the Alabama legislature moved 14,806 African-Americans and thirty-six whites into his seat. The new district was now over 75 percent black and excluded white neighborhoods that were previously in Ross’s district.
Republicans claimed they were merely complying with the Voting Rights Act. Black Democrats challenged the redistricting maps as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander and took the case to the Supreme Court. Today the Court, in a 5-4 decision written by Justice Breyer, sided with the black plaintiffs and ordered a district court in Alabama to reexamine whether specific districts, like Ross’s, were improperly drawn with race as the predominant factor. The decision was released, interestingly enough, on the same day as the fiftieth anniversary of the march from Selma to Montgomery.
“The record indicates that plaintiffs’ evidence and arguments embody the claim that individual majority-minority districts were racially gerrymandered, and those are the districts that the District Court must reconsider,” Breyer wrote. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (which the Supreme Court gutted in 2013, in another case from Alabama) did not compel the legislature to preserve the exact number of minority voters in a given district or inflate those numbers. “Section 5 does not require a covered jurisdiction to maintain a particular numerical minority percentage. It requires the jurisdiction to maintain a minority’s ability to elect a preferred candidate of choice,” Breyer said. The court’s majority—joined by Justice Kennedy—sympathized with the plaintiffs’ claim that Alabama’s interpretation of the VRA may “harm the very minority voters that Acts such as the Voting Rights Act sought to help.”
Justices Scalia and Thomas dissented. “We have somehow arrived at a place where the parties agree that Alabama’s legislative districts should be fine-tuned to achieve some ‘optimal’ result with respect to black voting power; the only disagreement is about what percentage of blacks should be placed in those optimized districts. This is nothing more than a fight over the ‘best’ racial quota,” wrote Thomas.
The ruling could have important ramifications, since the strategy followed by Alabama Republicans—packing minority voters into heavily Democratic seats in order to weaken white Democrats—was replicated throughout the South after the 2010 elections. I wrote about this trend in a 2012 feature for The Nation, “How the GOP Is Resegregating the South”:
In virtually every state in the South, at the Congressional and state level, Republicans—to protect and expand their gains in 2010—have increased the number of minority voters in majority-minority districts represented overwhelmingly by black Democrats while diluting the minority vote in swing or crossover districts held by white Democrats. “What’s uniform across the South is that Republicans are using race as a central basis in drawing districts for partisan advantage,” says Anita Earls, a prominent civil rights lawyer and executive director of the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice. “The bigger picture is to ultimately make the Democratic Party in the South be represented only by people of color.”
White Democrats have become the biggest casualty of the GOP’s new Southern strategy. As Jason Zengerle wrote in The New Republic, “Prior to the 2010 election, the Alabama House had sixty Democratic members, 34 of them white and 26 black. Afterward, there were 36 Democrats—ten white, 26 black. Meanwhile, in the Alabama Senate, the number of black Democrats remained seven, while the number of white Democrats fell from 13 to four.” After the 2014 election, there are now only seven white Democrats in the Alabama legislature—one in the Senate and six in the House.
There are no longer any white Democrats from the Deep South in Congress, following the defeat of Georgia Congressman John Barrow in 2014. Georgia Republicans moved 41,000 black Democrats out of his Savannah-based district to make him more vulnerable to a Republican challenge.
The elimination of white Democrats has also crippled the political aspirations of black Democrats. For years, black Democrats served in the majority with white Democrats in state legislatures across the South. Today Republicans control every legislative body in the South except for the Kentucky House. Before the 1994 elections, 99.5 percent of black Democrats served in the majority in Southern state legislatures. After the 2010 election, that number dropped to 4.8 percent, according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. “Black voters and elected officials have less influence now than at any time since the civil rights era,” the report found.
In the 1990s, some black Democrats formed an “unholy alliance” with white Republicans to create new majority-minority districts in the South. Republicans supported these districts for black Democrats in select urban and rural areas in exchange for an increased GOP presence elsewhere, especially in fast-growing metropolitan suburbs. With Democrats grouped in fewer areas, Republicans found it easier to target white Democrats for extinction.
But that unholy alliance ended after 2010, when black Democrats across the South, like Georgia Senate minority leader Stacey Abrams, denounced the GOP’s redistricting strategy. They found it especially ironic that Republicans were using the VRA as a rationale for marginalizing black voters while at the same time pushing the Supreme Court to gut the most important part of the VRA—the requirement that states with the worst history of voting discrimination, like Alabama, clear their voting changes with the federal government.
Even though Southern states like Alabama no longer have to have their redistricting maps approved by the federal government, the Court’s decision today could open the door for additional challenges to GOP-drawn racial gerrymanders in states like Virginia and North Carolina. “Today’s Alabama decision gives these challengers a new tool, making it harder for states to use compliance with the Voting Rights Act as a pretext to secure partisan advantage,” writes Rick Hasen.
It’s a modest victory, but perhaps the best that can be expected from the current Supreme Court.
By: Ari Berman, The Nation, March 26, 2015
“Those Bad Things Are Gone Now”: How The Supreme Court Is About To Explode America’s Racial Wealth Gap
When discussing race, the conservative argument is best expressed by the famous words of Chief Justice John Roberts: “The best way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Translation: America has done bad things in its history, but those bad things are gone now, so we should move past those horrors and look forward.
Conservatives believe that if blacks and Latinos simply work hard, get a good education and earn a good income, historical racial wealth gaps will disappear. The problem is that this sentiment ignores the ways that race continues to affect Americans today. A new report from Demos and Brandeis University, “The Racial Wealth Gap: Why Policy Matters,” makes this point strongly. The report shows that focusing on education alone will do little to reduce racial wealth gaps for households at the median, and that the Supreme Court, through upcoming decisions, could soon make the wealth gap explode.
Wealth is the whole of an individual’s accumulated assets, not the amount of money they make each year. As such, in his recent book, “The Son Also Rises,” Gregory Clark finds that the residual benefits of wealth remain for 10 to 15 generations. To understand why that matters, consider the fact that Loretta Lynch, Obama’s recent nomination for U.S. attorney general, is the great-great-granddaughter of a slave who escaped to freedom. (That’s four generations). Consider also that most people on Social Security today went to segregated schools. (That’s two generations.) If Clark is correct in his thesis, then the impacts of wealth built on the foundations of American slavery and segregation will continue to affect Lynch’s great-great-great grandchildren.
It is therefore unsurprising that addressing just one aspect of this disparity cannot solve racial wealth gaps. Demos/Brandeis find that equalizing graduation rates would reduce the wealth gap between blacks and whites by 1 percent, and between Latinos and whites by 3 percent at the median. Equalizing the distribution of income would only reduce the wealth gap by 11 percent for blacks and 9 percent for Latinos. Part of the durability of wealth gaps is the disproportionate benefits that whites still enjoy: They face less job market discrimination and are more likely to reap a big inheritance, for example. This means that the returns to education and income are generally higher for whites. But even after controlling for these returns, income and education can’t explain the entire wealth gap.
Because America’s primary vehicle for wealth accumulation is our homes, much of the explanation of the racial wealth gap lies in unequal homeownership rates. According to the Brandeis/Demos analysis, equalizing homeownership would reduce the racial wealth gap by 31 percent for blacks and 28 percent for Latinos. This effect is muted because centuries of discrimination—including racial exclusion from neighborhoods where home values appreciate, redlining, and discriminatory lending practices—mean that people of color are segregated into relatively poor neighborhoods. Indeed, in 1969, civil rights activist John Lewis bought a three-bedroom house for $35,000 in Venetian Hills, Atlanta. He and his wife were the first black family in the middle-class neighborhood. In his book, “Walking with the Wind,” he notes that, “within two years… the white owners began moving out.” Had the value of his house simply kept up with inflation, it would be worth $222,881 today. But Zillow shows that three-bedroom houses in Venetian Hills, Atlanta, are currently selling for around $65,000 to $100,000.
Systematic disinvestment in communities of color means that even when blacks and Latinos own their homes, they are worth far less than white homes. In addition, blacks and Latinos are targets of shady lending. They are more likely to be offered a subprime loan even if they are qualified to receive a better rate. In the wake of the financial crisis, big banks like Blackstone scooped up foreclosed homes and are now offering them to people of color to rent, further pulling wealth out of these communities to benefit rich whites.
The financial crisis had a disparate impact on people of color. A Center for Responsible Lending report examined the loans originated during the subprime boom (2005 to 2008), and found that blacks and Latinos were almost twice as likely to have foreclosed during the crisis. The New York Times reported that Wells Fargo “saw the black community as fertile ground for subprime mortgages, as working-class blacks were hungry to be a part of the nation’s home-owning mania.” They discovered that loan officers “pushed customers who could have qualified for prime loans into subprime mortgages” and “stated in an affidavit… that employees had referred to blacks as ‘mud people’ and to subprime lending as ‘ghetto loans.’”
These problems are troubling, but, as unlikely as it seems, things are about to get even worse. The Supreme Court is set to decide Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, a landmark case challenging the disparate impact test, which allows a practice to be considered discriminatory if it disproportionately and negatively impacts communities of color, even if a discriminatory intent can’t be proven.
The case involves an excellent example of why disparate impact is so important: Nearly all of the tax credits that the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs had approved were in predominantly non-white neighborhoods. At the same time, the department disproportionately denied the claims in white neighborhoods. A federal judge decided that regardless of racial intent, the result had a “disparate impact” and increased neighborhood segregation. As Nikole Hannah-Jones has extensively documented, disparate impact has been crucial in holding banks accountable. For instance, the Justice Department used it to settle with Bank of America for $335 million after it was discovered that a mortgage company purchased by BofA had been pushing blacks and Latinos into subprime loans when a similar white borrower would have qualified for a prime loan. Because there was no official policy that required blacks and Latinos to get worse loans, the case would not have been won but for the disparate-impact statute.
The Supreme Court has already decimated the Voting Rights Act, opening the door for onerous restrictions on voting. They upheld a law banning affirmative action at state universities and have already crushed integration efforts at K-12 schools. Worryingly, as Demos Senior Fellow Ian Haney López told ProPublica, “It is unusual for the Court to agree to hear a case when the law is clearly settled. It’s even more unusual to agree to hear the issue three years in a row.” Given the importance of neighborhood poverty to upward mobility and wealth building, this case had the potential to be the most destructive, dramatically curtailing opportunity and making the wealth gap into a chasm. As Patrick Sharkey notes, “Neighborhood poverty alone accounts for a greater portion of the black-white downward mobility gap than the effects of parental education, occupation, labor force participation, and a range of other family characteristics combined.”
Demos and Brandeis suggest policies to boost homeownership, like better enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, lowering the cap on the mortgage interest deduction so blacks and Latinos can benefit and authorizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to allow homeowners to modify their loans. In addition, America needs to systematically invest in poor neighborhoods. Equalizing public school education funds for poor and nonwhite schools would increase home prices in poor neighborhoods. In addition, a baby bond program would directly reduce wealth gaps by giving children money that could be used for a down payment on a house or an investment in their education. What’s clear is that we cannot simply hope that wealth gaps will disappear. These gaps were created by racially biased federal policies and need to be remedied by public policy as well. Government created the white middle class in the 1950s; now it’s time to create a black and Latino middle class. The Supreme Court, with its supposedly race-neutral philosophy, will only make it more difficult to close racial wealth gaps.
By: Catherine Ruetschlin, a Senior Policy Analyst at Demos & Sean McElwee, Research Assistant at Demo: Salon, March 14, 2015
“Photographer Helped Expose Brutality Of Selma’s Bloody Sunday”: The ‘Segregation Beat’ That Helped Shape American History
This month Selma, Ala., will mark the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday.” That’s the day police beat demonstrators attempting to march to Montgomery in support of voting rights. Some of the most iconic images of that day were captured by a white photographer — the late Spider Martin.
Spider Martin’s real introduction to the civil rights movement came on a late night at home in February 1965. He was 25, a photographer for The Birmingham News. He explains in a video from 1987 that he got the call because he was the youngest staff member and no one else wanted to go. That assignment would lead to his most famous work.
“About midnight I get this phone call from the chief photographer and he says ‘Spider, we need to get you to go down to Marion, Ala.’ Says there’s been a church burned and there’d been a black man who was protesting killed. He was shot with a shotgun. His name was Jimmie Lee Jackson.”
James “Spider” Martin grew up near Birmingham. Small in stature, he earned the nickname “Spider” for his quick moves on the high school football field. He said while he grew up with a few black friends, he was largely ignorant of the injustice blacks faced. That changed once he started covering the Jimmie Lee Jackson case, according to his daughter Tracy.
“He realized that it was history and that it was important,” she says. “He got wrapped up in it.”
Jackson’s killing helped spur the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights marches a few weeks later. Martin was in Selma for Bloody Sunday when state troopers attacked protesters. Holding a camera made him just as much a target. He recounted in an interview with Alabama Public Television, what happened when a police officer saw him.
“He walks over to me and, blow! Hits me right here in the back of the head,” he said. “I still got a dent in my head and I still have nerve damage there. I go down on my knees and I’m like seeing stars and there’s tear gas everywhere. And then he grabs me by the shirt and he looks straight in my eyes and he just dropped me and said, ‘scuse me. Thought you was a nigger.'”
Martin kept covering the marchers until they reached Montgomery two-and-a-half weeks later.
Martin’s collection contains thousands of photographs, clippings and other notes — much of it previously unpublished before it was purchased by the University of Texas. Even producers of the movie Selma used his pictures to recreate scenes for the film. Exhibitions of his work are going up around in Selma for the anniversary, at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, and in New York.
The exhibit at ArtsRevive includes his most noted pictures from the marches. Executive director Martha Lockett says some of her favorites are less recognized including a close-up of an officer’s leg with his billy club.
“It’s very still, but very energetic,” she says. “You know what’s getting ready to happen and to me that’s one of the most dynamic pictures that’s in the show.”
That artistry was calculated, according to Morehouse College history professor Larry Spruill. He says Martin was one of a handful of photographers on what’s dubbed the “segregation beat.” They were mostly college-educated, white men in their 20’s who reflected the liberal optimism of a post-World War II generation.
“They took complex issues layered in race and made them very simple,” he says.
Spruill says the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., understood the power of visuals and tipped off photojournalists. And while the optics of Bloody Sunday were credited with shocking middle America — leading to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act — back then the pictures were considered disposable. That was partly because in the mid-’60s, photojournalism was beginning to take a backseat to the flash and immediacy of television. Spruill says he found pictures newspapers didn’t run with holes punched through them.
“It’s like finding original copies of important American history documents trashed,” he says.
A similar thing happened to the photographers. Martin’s daughter says it was decades before he became known for his civil rights pictures. He died in 2003 and she says he’d be excited about exhibiting his work around this 50th anniversary. But in his interview it’s clear he was uncomfortable with the attention.
“I mean it’s kind of fun sometimes being a celebrity, you might say, or a little bit famous. But then again, I’d rather not be famous,” he said.
Still the attention he offered through his camera, helped shape American history.
By: Andrew Yeager, Code Switch; Cross Posted at NPR, March 6, 2015
“Universal Suffrage Is Still Under Assault”: Some Long For The Old Order Where Certain People Controlled All Levers Of Political Power
Historians refer to that day 50 years ago as “Bloody Sunday” because of the indelible images of brave men and women beaten to their knees — some knocked unconscious — as they tried to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. It hardly seems possible, now, that they were attacked so viciously for something that seems so ordinary: the right to vote.
In fact, universal suffrage isn’t ordinary or mundane or inconsequential. It’s a radical notion, still rejected in much of the world. And the legacy of those marches in Selma proves that the opponents of black voting rights were right about at least this much: If they allowed black citizens to vote, the nation would be changed.
The most obvious symbol of that powerful tide of progress, President Barack Obama, occupies the Oval Office. But the inheritance that those marchers bequeathed to the nation is evident in so many other subtle and not-so-subtle changes in our political and civic life. If the election of a black governor or U.S. senator, for example, is still unusual, it’s no longer historic. Nor is the elevation of a black secretary of state or attorney general.
But that progress has not pleased all Americans. Some long for the past, for an old order in which certain people controlled all the levers of political power, where only those who looked and spoke a certain way were allowed to hold political office, where many citizens were excluded from a government allegedly by and for them. That helps to explain why reactionary forces have spent the last 15 or so years snipping at the universal franchise, cutting away at the edges of the right to vote.
Conservative Republicans label their campaign — which centers around strict voter ID laws — “voter integrity,” as if it’s a righteous project designed to uplift democracy. It’s just the opposite: It’s designed to block the ballot for a few voters, mostly poor and black, who are inclined to support Democrats. In close elections, a few votes can decide the outcome.
To be sure, no voters get their heads bashed in. No state troopers or sheriff’s deputies wait with billy clubs to attack those who dare exercise their constitutional rights. No would-be voters are asked to number the bubbles in a bar of soap in order to register.
Still, the voting restrictions that have been passed over the last several years are just an updated version of the poll tax. Make no mistake about it: The universal franchise is under assault.
Just take a look at the U.S. Supreme Court’s astonishing ruling in 2013, which gutted a significant portion of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the key federal legislation prompted by the Selma marches. An ultraconservative majority did a most unconservative thing: It tossed out a law overwhelmingly passed by Congress, declaring, in effect, that the legislative branch was wrong.
The Supreme Court had earlier endorsed voter ID laws, ruling in 2006 that an Indiana requirement for photo identification at the polls was in keeping with the state’s “legitimate interest” in protecting against voter fraud. But the fraud such laws are intended to prevent — in-person voter impersonation — is as rare as the northern white rhino. It’s pretty clear that blocking the ballot is the aim here, as Republican factotums have occasionally, if inadvertently, admitted.
In reality, they don’t want certain voters to have the ballot because it has the potential to upend the old order. Think about it: If the black citizens of Ferguson, Missouri, which is 67 percent black, start to religiously exercise their right to vote, they can change the town’s leadership — and change a police department and court system that are shot through with racial bias, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Justice.
There is power in the franchise, which is why its expansion has met resistance throughout American history. Courageous patriots have given their lives to secure the ballot for every citizen.
But the struggle is not over.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Pulitzer Prize Winner for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, March 7, 2015
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