Fifty years ago almost to the day, Martin Luther King Jr, civil rights leaders and hundreds of thousands of Americans participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Today, Dr. King’s righteous dream lives on but has yet to be fully achieved.
Sadly, this past June, an activist Supreme Court dismantled perhaps the most effective single piece of civil rights legislation passed by Congress. In Shelby County v. Holder, the court invalidated the most important and effective sections of the Voting Rights Act.
After the VRA passed, it brought immediate relief to minorities across the nation. Data from the Department of Justice estimated that in the five years after the passage of the VRA, almost as many blacks registered to vote in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina and South Carolina as in the entire century before 1965.
The VRA has several different sections containing provisions with which jurisdictions must comply. Section 2 prohibits voter discrimination on a nationwide scale. It is also permanent, unlike other sections of the VRA.
Another important provision of the VRA is Section 4, which was ruled unconstitutional in Shelby County v. Holder. Section 4 contained a formula intended to identify areas of the country with a history of voter suppression and discrimination. Additionally, it required the jurisdictions identified under the formula to go under a review process, known as preclearance (Section 5).
The preclearance requirement freezes election laws or changes in covered jurisdictions before they are implemented and become law. The changes may not be legally enforced before they are approved by the United States Department of Justice or after a lawsuit before the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
Despite the fact that the law has been renewed by a bipartisan Congress four times, the court’s conservative majority in Shelby County declared unconstitutional Section 4, therefore invalidating Section 5 preclearance of the Voting Rights Act. Chief Justice Roberts argued that Section 4 was outdated. However, Justice Ginsburg – citing the 15,000 pages of congressional record compiled in the 2006 renewal – disagreed.
Ginsburg is right. Current conditions in voter discrimination justify the DOJ to require some jurisdictions to comply with the preclearance process. In fact, during the hearings for the 2006 reauthorization, Congress found that there were more DOJ preclearance rejections between 1982 and 2004 (626) than there were between 1965 and the 1982 reauthorization (490).
It is important to note that despite the progress made since 1965, the number of DOJ objections (under both Republicans and Democrats) due to racial discrimination has only increased over time. Preclearance is important because it blocks discriminatory laws before they go into effect.
Before the ink was even dry on the Shelby County decision, states such as Texas and Mississippi began to implement discriminatory voter identification laws that the DOJ had either rejected or not yet approved. North Carolina enacted by far the most discriminatory legislation.
According to Ari Berman of The Nation, the bill mandates strict voter ID to cast a ballot (no student IDs, no public employee IDs, etc.), even though 318,000 registered voters lack the narrow forms of acceptable ID according to the state’s own numbers and there have been no recorded prosecutions of voter impersonation in the past decade.
The bill also cuts the number of early voting days by a week, even though 56 percent of North Carolinians voted early in 2012. The bill eliminates same-day voter registration during the early voting period, even though 96,000 people used it during the general election in 2012 and states that have adopted the convenient reform have the highest voter turnout in the country.
The Voting Rights Act should not be a partisan issue – it hasn’t been since 1965. However, Republicans are intent on keeping it dead. We all knew the RNC’s $10 million “minority outreach” plan was a sham. If they think they’re going to win minority voters by bringing back Jim Crow, I guess the current party is a little more tone-deaf than I expected. We need the Voting Rights Act, and it’s time for Congress to bring it back.
