Salon.com > Gary May

GOP and the Voting Rights Act: Can these Republicans do the right thing?

Sat, 29 Jun 2013 13:00:00 +0000

Now that the Supreme Court has severely weakened the Voting Rights Act, the president and Senate Democrats must revise it to restore its power to protect minority voters. The critical question is: What will the Republicans do?

As the Republican House leaders consider the way forward, they would do well to consider the decisions of the past two generations of top Republican legislators, without whom the Voting Rights Act would never have existed.

Most students of history know that President Lyndon Johnson’s mastery of the legislative process – and his huge Democratic majorities – were key to the bill’s original passage. But few know that the final bill was written in the office of the Republican minority leader, Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois.

President Lyndon Johnson feared a Southern filibuster might defeat the bill. To prevent a filibuster, two-thirds of the Senate would have to move to the bill to a final vote, and achieving this would require Republican votes. So Johnson turned to Dirksen. “…[ Y]ou come with me on this bill,” Johnson told him, “and two hundred years from now school children will know only two names: Abraham Lincoln and Everett Dirksen.”

How conservatives invented “voter fraud” to attack civil rights

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 16:00:00 +0000

Just when it seemed that the democratic process had reached its apotheosis with the election of America’s first black president, a political earthquake occurred in 2010 that threatened all that had been accomplished since 1965. Two years after Obama’s election, the midterm elections saw a conservative backlash that swept Republicans back into office in droves. As the media focused on the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives and increases in the Senate, more important developments were occurring closer to home. Republicans now controlled both legislative bodies in 26 states, and 23 won the trifecta, controlling the governorships as well as both statehouses. What happened next was so swift that it caught most observers off guard — and began surreptitiously to reverse the last half-century of voting rights reforms.

How to fight voter suppression

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 19:49:00 +0000

Forty-eight years to the day after Bloody Sunday, a seminal tragedy that paved the way for the Voting Rights Act, there are key lessons we must remember and heed, in order to strengthen that now-threatened legislation.

Every year, as February turns to March, thousands return to Selma, Ala., to commemorate the moment President Lyndon Johnson later compared to Lexington and Concord, calling it “a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom.” But few know that this important event was the result of a series of accidents and almost did not occur. More important, it suggests that change in America is not inevitable and comes only when determined people risk their lives to achieve it.

On Sunday, March 7, 1965, peaceful demonstrators attempting to cross Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge were attacked by Alabama State troopers armed with bats, electric cattle prods and tear gas. “I’m going to die here,” thought John Lewis, one of the march’s leaders, as he fell to the ground, concussed by a trooper’s bat.

Could SCOTUS indirectly help the civil rights movement?

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 18:18:00 +0000

It’s no secret that the Voting Rights Act is in trouble. Conservative activists, long opposed to affirmative action and voting rights protections for minorities, argue that the blatant disenfranchisement that drove the act’s creation is a thing of the past. Where poll taxes, literacy tests and sheer terror kept African-American voters from the polls, now they enjoy unprecedented access to the ballot, black candidates across America hold office in record numbers, and Barack Obama easily won a second term as president. “We are now a very different nation,” Chief Justice John Roberts himself has observed. “Things have changed in the South.”

But have they? In 2008, Shelby County’s own city of Calera eliminated a black majority district by adding white subdivisions, defeating its only black councilman, until the Justice Department stepped in under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Section 5 requires nine states (including Alabama and others mostly in the South) and places in seven other states with past records of discrimination to submit proposed changes to voting practices to the federal government. Calera was required to revise its boundaries to include the black voters it had eliminated and the black councilman was easily reelected. Nevertheless, Shelby County litigators now insist that Section 5 is no longer necessary and claim that Congress acted improperly when it last renewed the act in 2006.