One of the surest signs of a weak, unappealing argument is the propensity of its advocates to misstate it, substituting high-sounding shibboleths for substance. A good example is Josh Gerstein’s “Voting Rights under siege” on Politico yesterday.
“The view that states should have free rein to change their election laws even in places with a history of Jim Crow seems to be gaining traction within the Republican Party,” Gerstein writes.
“There certainly has been a major change,” said Rick Hasen, a professor of election law at the University of California at Irvine. “Now, you have a whole bunch of credible mainstream state attorneys general and governors taking this view. … That would have been unheard of even five years ago. You would have been accused of being a racist.”
Surely Hasen, who is indeed a highly regarded election law expert (although not without a critic), knows that one big thing hasn’t changed at all in the past five years: Section 5’s critics will be called racist just as loudly now as then, as evidenced by Gerstein’s article itself, whose last line quotes Juan Williams asserting that “there’s a racial element” to the current criticism. For what it may be worth, this is the same Prof. Hasen who has recognized how radical and utterly unique Section 5 is: “Never before or since,” he has written, “has a state or local jurisdiction needed permission from the federal government to put its own laws into effect.” [Quoted in Abigail Thernstrom’s masterful “Redistricting, Race, and the Voting Rights Act,” the best short overview of the Voting Rights Act available.]
The best example of misleading voting rights obfuscation in Gerstein’s article, however, comes from Gerstein himself. “An intensifying conservative legal assault on the Voting Rights Act could precipitate what many civil rights advocates regard as the nuclear option,” he asserts: “a court ruling striking down one of the core elements of the landmark 1965 law guaranteeing African Americans and other minorities access to the ballot box.”
No one — I repeat: no one — these days objects to minorities having “access to the ballot box.” What conservatives criticize is the “construal” of the Voting Rights Act that converted its original guarantee of non-discriminatory access into a charter granting minorities the right to elect “candidates of their choice” and requiring, as Thernstrom put it in the article linked above, “racially gerrymandered districts carefully drawn to ensure that minorities are elected to public office roughly in proportion to their share of the population.”
No wonder liberals want to put the lipstick of “equal access” on that pig.
