Our republic was born on July 4, 1776. But in the opinion of Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian Jon Meacham, our democracy was born on Aug. 6, 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA). For the first time, all Americans had the right to vote, the racist segregation of Jim Crow was curtailed, and the promise of equality for all was kept.
The formal name of the VRA is “an Act to Enforce the Fifteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.” The 15th Amendment prohibits the federal government or any state from denying or abridging a citizen’s right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
The U.S. Department of Justice has described the VRA as the most effective civil rights legislation of all time. The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) found the Act and/or parts of it to be constitutional six times. Until the John Roberts court came along. That court has gutted the VRA with the patience and effectiveness of the GOP 50-year campaign against Roe v. Wade.
Roberts, as a Ronald Reagan administration lawyer in 1982, wrote that the VRA was “the most intrusive interference imaginable by federal courts into state and local processes.” However, during his successful 2006 confirmation hearing for Chief Justice of the SCOTUS, Roberts testified under oath that as to the constitutionality of the VRA being upheld, “I don’t have any issue with that.”
The VRA was updated unanimously in the U.S. Senate and overwhelmingly in the House (393-33) in 2006. Five Republican jurists disagreed and gutted the VRA in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder.
The Roberts 5-4 Shelby ruling said that while the Act was immensely successful “at redressing racial discrimination and integrating the voting process,” Congress should have realized that racial discrimination in 2006 was not as bad as it was in 1965 (white people in black robes know best) and that continuing to impose federal law on historically racist local voter registrars was “unfair” because it destroyed the equal balance of laws between the federal government and the states.
The federal constitution, however, originally and continuously, mandates that federal election law trumps state law. There is no equal balance between the laws. Preventing lynchings and “Whites Only” primaries does not, in and of itself, prevent racial discrimination. It only provides opportunity for clever racists to do their harm in other insidious ways, such as lying under oath. And the Constitution gives Congress the authority to determine the facts on which it bases its laws, not the courts.
The Roberts’ court criticism of insufficient facts is insultingly hypocritical. That court is infamous for ignoring facts in rushing to judgment through its GOP-supporting “rocket docket.” In one of those premature decisions, Louisiana v. Callais, SCOTUS ruled this year that creating a majority Black voting district based on race was unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. It also confirmed it’s prior holding that gerrymandering through reliance on political party registration is legal. Red states are now carving up predominately Black cities using political party registration, dumping slivers of Black voters from a predominately Black Democratic district into several rural white districts, diluting the Black Democratic vote.
And while racial gerrymandering is still illegal, SCOTUS says that racial animus cannot be proven solely with indirect or circumstantial evidence (witness testimony, videos, expert reports) in these civil cases. The fact that Blacks overwhelmingly vote for Democrats isn’t enough. Instead, apparently, Republicans must be caught publicly telling the truth about their illegal racist intentions.
It’s like preventing a murder conviction without the defendant’s confession. Criminal prosecutors use circumstantial evidence to convict people of intentionally killing others, including in death penalty cases. Does it make sense that circumstantial evidence can be used to prove a man’s motivation to deny another his right to life, the ultimate act of discrimination, but not his motivation to deny another person’s right to vote?
Welcome back, Jim Crow.
— Chuck Wieland,
Madera