Voting Rights Act is still necessary
If you want to stare into the ugly face of racial resentment, take a look at Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. His stunningly injudicious remarks about a key portion of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) laid bare the bitterness that so many conservatives harbor toward black progress.
If you want to stare into the ugly face of racial resentment, take a look at Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. His stunningly injudicious remarks about a key portion of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) laid bare the bitterness that so many conservatives harbor toward black progress.
During recent oral arguments about a challenge to the law, Scalia dismissed a critical part as a "perpetuation of racial entitlement." Given that the VRA was passed to ensure that black Americans had the right to vote - after white segregationists showed they were willing to beat, jail, and kill activists to block the black ballot - it was a chilling remark.
I'm so glad Scalia said exactly what was on his mind. It saves me the trouble of having to persuade you that many critics of the VRA are mossbacks who still resent the political transformation unleashed by the power of the black vote.
Other skeptics on the high court managed more subtle criticisms, largely built around the notion that much has changed in the decades since a young John Lewis was beaten bloody on the Edmund Pettis Bridge 48 years ago this week. It's a very seductive argument.
I was very nearly seduced by it myself. In 2005, civil-rights activists were gearing up to lobby Congress to renew the VRA, set to expire in 2006. As I considered their arguments, I looked around at a landscape that Martin Luther King Jr. would not have recognized.
With black men and women serving in major political posts, including as U.S. secretary of state, I was about to concede to the forces who argued that the VRA was no longer necessary. But the Georgia General Assembly dragged me back to reality. That year, its Republican members pushed through an odious piece of legislation requiring state-sanctioned photo IDs, such as a driver's license, for voting. It became one of the first states to do so.
Then, as now, there was no compelling argument for the requirement. Despite conservative claims about voter fraud, in-person fraud at the ballot box is virtually nonexistent. As many voting-rights activists pointed out, the law was aimed squarely at poorer voters who tend to support Democrats, especially black and brown voters. Georgia's voter-ID law, like similar ones around the country, was designed to suppress the minority vote. So instead of giving up on the VRA, I supported its renewal in 2006.
Since then, voter suppression efforts have gone into hyper-drive.
Republicans responded to President Obama's breakthrough first victory - and the realization that it was powered by voters of color - by becoming more imaginative in their tactics to discourage, inconvenience, and disenfranchise voters. Not only did they pass strict ID requirements, but they also moved to limit early voting. It's no accident that most of the marathon waits were endured at polling places with predominantly black or Latino voters.
The VRA can limit the damage of those voter suppression efforts. In the past three years, for example, the Justice Department rebuffed harsh voter-ID laws in Texas and South Carolina, and tempered early-voting restrictions in Florida.
Those examples show that the VRA, for which some brave souls gave their lives, is still necessary. Unfortunately, Scalia and his fellow partisans see the law - which ensures that voters of color can exercise their right to vote without harassment - as a giveaway to appease those uppity blacks.
