Ever been lost and didn’t have a map to find your way home? Welcome to what remains of the Voting Rights Act.
This week’s Supreme Court decision on Voting Rights Act was a cop-out with a pinch of judicial activism. (Cheers to Ginsburg for holding nothing back in her dissent, though.) What a strange note in our anecdotal history that in one week SCOTUS threw out the blueprint for voter protection in this country, while also paving the way for gay rights… Voting for inequality one day, and equality the next. That the very building is currently shrouded in scaffolding somehow seems appropriate.
Voting Rights Act Section 5 without a Section 4: What It Means
Voter suppression has always been a political tactic of any political party that has a homogenous base. The very day the Supreme Court threw out the pre-clearance map defined in Section 4, handfuls of the heavily red states started going into overdrive to put the very voter restriction bills that they knew would never pass under the VRA onto their dockets – push through voter suppression laws while the window is still open… and many are bragging about it... bragging about restricting civil rights… terribly strange this country has turned.
Republican-led state houses are passing voting laws today which were illegal yesterday… all because the map no longer exists. Thank you SCOTUS! Section 5 still exists, but by throwing out the map to which it applies (Section 4)… no one is actually covered by the protections of the VRA. And so, republican majority state houses are already going nuts trying to drive through voter suppression laws. All those states and counties that couldn’t manage going 10 years without trying to pass a racist law are now planning on having a good ‘ole time restricting voting while the Voting Rights Act is without its map.
“…wait… ten years?” some might ask. Yes, ten years. On aspect of the Voting Rights Act is that every location on its list can get out of the pre-certification requirement… if they don’t try to pass that unfairly infringe voting rights for a period of ten years. That’s it. Ten simple, short years. A lot of localities did just that and are now exempt from the pre-clearance requirement… but all those who simply couldn’t stop their addiction to voter suppression found another way around those pesky voting rights by using SCOTUS and a totally inept Congress.
If you can’t win, rig the game… the Republican Party modus operandi in the Obama era.
Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act still exists, that’s an important point to reiterate. However, the map, the formula, the list of counties that are required to get pre-clearance for changes to their voting laws has been thrown out by SCOTUS. The VRA has the pre-clearance requirement, but it applies to no one… until Congress can find a replacement the formula that determined which localities are required to have voter law pre-clearance… voting rights in America is lost on a dirt road in the middle of the desert… without a map.
Never mind that very maps and formula that the Court threw out protected literally millions of voters in the 2012 election. As Chief Justice Roberts claims, the U.S. “is a different country now.” It’s different because the Voting Rights Act existed, not because people wanted to change. Different now because one millionaire can decide who gets elected via blind campaign donations. Different now because when the Apple CEO comes to Congress everyone asks “What can we do for you?” but when countless people who have lost loved ones to gun violence come to Congress they can’t get meetings, and are lied to to their faces.
The Supreme Court left the rather important issue of, “should Americans actually have a right to vote?” to Congress, which as we all know means nothing whatsoever will get done. The immature Congress that votes against its own bills. It is now open season for republican-led states to pass as many voter restriction laws as they can. It’s open season for the Republican Party to once again prove to the world that is is a party of exclusion rather than inclusion; the political party of Get Off My Lawn, and rich people are better than everyone else.
…and so, the 2014 election battle begins: can the Republican Party pass enough laws between now and the 2014 election to suppress enough voters to stay in charge of the House and win seats in the Senate? Based on the speed at which they’ve moved since the Court gave its decision, they certainly seem to think so.
Personally, I don’t wholly disagree in that the formula used for maps could use an update; we can be much more efficient with the whole process – but to completely throw it out leaving no safety net to protect against voter supression… that allows a free-skate-for-all (counterclockwise) for republicans to pass voter restriction bills is quite possibly one of the worst decisions ever made. Between Citizens United and now the Voting Rights Act without a damn map, the conservative members of the Supreme Court appear hell-bent on destroying democracy and adding to the continued absurdity that is the U.S. political system. Thank you Supreme Court of the United States for helping our election system fall deeper into the abyss.
SCOTUS has managed to give a decision that results in a law that covers no one… moronic and bitterly ironic from the highest court in the land. SCOTUS now leaves it up to Congress to fix… doubly moronic… and all the while deep red states are clamoring over one another to see who can pass the most voter restrictions laws now that there’s no way for the VRA to protect voters. “A great day for Alabama!” said one very happy Alabama official via phone.
Much like reproductive choice, your rights will be very different depending on in which state you live. Basically, with their super-fast-paced rush to pass new voter restriction laws we once again have the South saying to people who live there: if you’re poor and not white: please will y’all leave. It really is amazing. The rights of an American citizen are different depending on the state in which you live… that should strike all of us, regardless of political party affiliation, as flat out wrong. Once again as time march forward, the scared and ignorant try to not only stop the clock, but build a time machine that only goes backwards.
Now for democrats: getting people educated, registered, and motivated to vote is more important than it has ever been… otherwise the conservative institutionalization of voter suppression will take hold… and we’ll be stuck in that morally dark place for decades to come.
