Yet another article in the Washington Post, this one by Hamil Harris (though with assistance from our familiar friend, Darryl Fears), reports on efforts to preserve several controversial parts of the Voting Rights Act that are due to expire in 2007.
The march in Atlanta was led by “Civil Rights Icons” Rep. John Lewis, Jesse Jackson, “former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young,” and ” the Rev. Joseph Lowery, the former president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference” (perhaps “former icons” would have been a more accurate head).
The parts of the 1965 act that are due to expire require the covered jurisdictions, mainly in the South, to secure Justice Dept. approval for any changes in voting rules, procedures, or regulations, and it mandates that states draw “minority-controlled districts” where possible.
Jesse Jackson demanded that the act be renewed in order to “Keep hope alive.”
“Many people have died for us to have the right to vote. We can’t lose that,” said Carolyn Chester, 42, who works at an assisted-living facility in Baltimore and came to Atlanta by bus with a group sponsored by the Service Employees International Union….
Lewis, who was a key leader of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and participated in a 1965 protest in Selma, Ala., in which state troopers attacked marchers as they sought to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, gave the Saturday Democratic radio address on the topic.
“We were beaten, tear-gassed and trampled by horses on that bridge,” Lewis said. “We paid a price, but that’s what it took to bring voting rights for people of color in America. The events of ‘Bloody Sunday,’ as it came to be known, aroused the conscience of the nation” and led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
He noted that there are 81 members of Congress of African American, Latino, Asian and Native American descent, and thousands of minorities in elected offices across the country.
“Our democracy depends on protecting the right of every American citizen to vote in every election,” Lewis said. “We must honor the legacy of all who died in the struggle for civil rights.”
But where is the evidence that “the right to vote,” as marcher Chester put it, or “the right of every American citizen to vote in every election,” as Rep. Lewis put it, is threatened anywhere today, much less threatened in a manner that is protected in any way by the particular sections of the Voting Rights Act that are set to expire? Letting those sections expire, after all, would in no way legalize voting discrimination.
I think the problem we have is revealed by Rep. Lewis’s reference — which one sees everywhere — to the number of minority officeholders who have been elected as a result of the Voting Rights Act. What that reference reveals is the shift in the very definition of discrimination from barriers or burdens imposed on the basis of race to any practice or procedure that prevents minorities from receiving some proportion of results that they seek — whether in college admissions, jobs, or, in this case, elected representatives. As the Southern Regional Council (a leading proponent of the guaranteed results approach) explained,
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act still makes it unlawful to adopt a redistricting plan that denies minority voters an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.
Although the Voting Rights Act in theory protects everyone from discrimination, I’m not aware that any other groups have a right “to elect candidates of their choice.” As amended and enforced and interpreted by its defenders, the Voting Rights Act now has more to do with guaranteeing the election of a sufficient number of minority politicians than it does with preventing discrimination against voters.
An example of how silly this is getting: http://libertyblog.com/archives/006499.html#006499
“Debra Ness [National Partnership for Women]: … the right of women to vote, the right to privacy, all of these are rights that Americans hold dear, but, some might argue, are not rights that can be easily found in the Constitution.”
So Debra Ness actually believes that the right of women to vote is NOT easily found in the Constitution.
It’s as though some people are so well-versed in finding things that are NOT there, that they can’t see things that are.
Dom writes:
>>>”So Debra Ness actually believes that the right of women to vote is NOT easily found in the Constitution.
It’s as though some people are so well-versed in finding things that are NOT there, that they can’t see things that are.”
Actually, the Founders didn’t believe in the right of all American citizens to vote. If the original intent of the framers was recognized today, only white male landowners would have be accepted at the polls.
–Cobra
Cobra,
The “original intent of the framers” was that the Constitution be modified by subsequent generations of American citizens as they saw fit. That would be why the rules for modification are right there in the document.
If you or Ms. Ness really think that the right of women to vote is “not easily found in the Constitution,” I really think you both need copies printed post-1918.
I wonder why these provisions up for renewal are being lumped together as a single yes-or-no package. Can’t we extend some, perhaps those pertaining to federal oversight; make a separate debate of language accessibility, as a law set to expire seems a strange solution, assuming a solution is needed, for what is hardly a transitory problem; and let die the mandated minority-controlled districts, which I don’t see clearly in the law itself (though I’m no lawyer) and can only assume are the result of judicial interpretation?
Michelle writes:
>>>If you or Ms. Ness really think that the right of women to vote is “not easily found in the Constitution,” I really think you both need copies printed post-1918.”
That makes my point about original intent even stronger. It was a LONG time between 1787 and 1918.
–Cobra
Jeez, Cobra. If a community votes to be ruled by a document, and provides rules by which the document can be changed, and those rules are actually used to expand the rights of members of the community, is it reasonable to argue that the drafters of the original document didn’t “intend” that the resulting society came out the way it did? I am sure that the framers didn’t forsee female suffrage, but they would certainly have admitted that the Amendment was passed, according to the rules they had themselves established. That’s the whole point of having a Constitution susceptible to amendment.
Michelle, I don’t know that they would have foreseen universal suffrage for women, but New Jersey allowed women to vote from the time of Independence through to the early 19th century, and so the notion couldn’t have been entirely inconceivable to the Founders, on account of some of the delegates to ratify the Constitution having been, in part, elected by women.