The signal!
Today the Supreme Court of the United States sent a signal to all who would like to set voting rights in the United States back into the 1950’s by their five to four decision to gut the Voting Rights Act.
The court completely gutted the fourth section of the act which placed some of the worst offenders from the past under federal justice department supervision. That supervision was brought about because of onerous laws and defacto actions to prevent minorities, almost all black, from having access to the polls. Poll taxes and other acts of intimidation were used to prevent and hold down the black vote in some of the uglier sections of the south that had existed since the end of reconstruction in 1877.
The court apparently thinks, on the surface, that “times have changed” and that this supervision is no longer necessary in the parts of the south where its jurisdiction lay. They are correct. Times have changed, but, not for the better. In many places across the country not covered by the voting rights act, governors and legislatures in Republican controlled areas have been enacting laws and provisions meant to suppress not only the black vote, but, also, the surging Latino vote as well.
In the state of Pennsylvania in the 2012 presidential election, one state legislator publicly stated on the house floor that the suppressive legislation that they had passed would guarantee the election of Mitt Romney to the presidency. In the state of Florida, the suppression of the vote by limiting the number of days that early voting could take place, combined with the limitations on the number of voting machines and polling places in predominantly black areas caused some black voters to stand in line for up to six to ten hours in order to be able to vote. There is one famous incident where a black woman over one hundred years old was helped by others to stand hours in the sun in order to be able to place her “I voted” sticker on her dress. The estimated of those who did not vote due to the long lines varies from several hundred thousand to over a million across the United States in areas where there were deliberate attempts to suppress the vote. There were many who stood in long lines only to discover that when they reached the polls, they had already been disenfranchised by voters registration purges that they knew nothing previously about. The long standing black tradition of “souls to the polls” which occurred after black church services on a Sunday morning during the early voting period was stopped cold when the Florida Republican governor stopped early voting on Sundays in October.
There have been many other cases across the Republican controlled areas of the nation that have involved such things as requiring picture identification which is hard for senior citizens to come by, particularly when they are of an advanced age and have problems getting to places to achieve this requirement. In other similar suppression tactics, some states are requiring certified birth certificates in order to receive the proper identification in order to be able to vote. Many elderly black people never got a certified birth certificate assigned to them at birth so they have no way of being able to meet this criteria due to their age and circumstances at birth.
If one thinks that the situation has been rectified in the areas covered by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, we feel that this action, strictly taken along partisan lines, has simply sent a signal to those areas to resume the activities that they had been prevented from engaging in during the past.
This Supreme Court action cuts very deeply into the fundamental underpinnings of this democracy. The four white justices and the one Uncle Tom justice--Clarence Thomas--are trying to continue the rear guard action taken by the shrinking white population to try to guarantee its supremacy over the government. That white population is predominantly older and Republican and has used every means at its disposal to continue its hegemony over the rising tide of the rainbow coalitions represented by the democratic party and others in this nation.
The very idea that a Republican controlled congress would do anything to change the Voting Rights Act to broaden its scope is farcical thinking. The whole concept is to disenfranchise the black and Latino voters and they were keenly aware of that fact when they, along with other ethnic groups such as Asians, voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic candidate--Barack Obama-during the 2012 election cycle.
What the Supreme Court’s actions amounted to today is a continuation of a white verses non white standoff that the white population has been steadily losing ground with over the last several election cycles. The Republican party has lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections and this simply reflects the changing dynamics of the nation and its electoral mix. The United States is changing from a majority white nation to a brown and black nation and the next few election cycles will further reflect those changes and the majority on the Supreme Court knows it as well as anyone. What the court did today, along with a deadlocked federal congress, practically guarantees that voter suppression efforts will escalate unhindered by federal intervention even beyond what we have previously discussed in this piece. The Voting Rights Act was passed, in 1965, by a coalition of progressive Republicans and Democrats over the objections of the “solid south”. President Lyndon Johnson made the statement at the time of the acts passage that, by doing so, that the Democratic party had lost the south for a generation or more. And now, the south has been joined by disaffected whites across the country to broaden the problem even further than it originally was.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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