In his testimony, Lewis described how he almost died fighting for the right to vote in 1965 and how friends of his never made it out of Mississippi alive. “I remember these problems and this struggle like it was yesterday,” Lewis said. He noted the “deliberate and systematic” attempt to make it harder for voters to participate in the last election, when nineteen states passed twenty-five new voting restrictions, saying “the Voting Rights Act is needed now like never before.”
His colleague Representative Sensenbrenner called the VRA the most important civil rights law of the twentieth century and said, “We cannot afford to lose it now.” The court’s decision presents Congress with a “historic opportunity” to draft a revised Section 4 of the VRA, he said, covering jurisdictions with “recent and egregious voting records.” Sensenbrenner mentioned that he proudly displays the pen Ronald Reagan used to sign the 1982 reauthorization of the VRA. “Though the Voting Rights Act has been enormously successful, we know our work is not complete,” he said. The key will be whether Sensenbrenner can bring fellow House Republicans along with him, like he did in 2006. “I’m certainly on board to put something together that will last for a long time,” he said.
Tomorrow, the House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on the Constitution will hold its first hearing on the VRA, which will give a good indication of where House Republicans stand on the issue. The subcommittee chairman, Representative Trent Franks of Arizona, was one of only thirty-three House Republicans to vote against the VRA’s reauthorization in 2006.
Beyond Sensenbrenner, there wasn’t much enthusiasm among Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to revise the VRA. Only two Republicans attended the hearing, Senators Grassley and Cruz, neither of whom stayed the full time. Cruz praised the Supreme Court’s decision, while Grassley and witness Michael Carvin, a prominent Republican lawyer at Jones Day, suggested that Section 2 would be an adequate replacement for Sections 4 & 5. (Section 4 determines how states are covered under Section 5, which requires that states with the worst history of voting discrimination clear their voting changes with the federal government.)
Luz Urbáez Weinberg, a Republican city commissioner in Aventura, Florida, in Miami-Dade County, strongly disagreed with that argument. “Section 5 has no peer,” she said. “Section 2 is not sufficient.” Section 5 puts the burden of proof on targeted jurisdictions to show that their voting changes are not discriminatory before they go into effect, whereas Section 2 forces plaintiffs to show that a voting change is discriminatory, usually only after it has gone into effect, following lengthy, expensive litigation. It’s the difference between stopping a crime before it exists versus forcing the victim of the crime to seek justice afterward.
Not only is Section 5 far more effective than Section 2, it has accurately targeted those places with the worst history of voting discrimination. According to voting rights historian Morgan Kousser, “From 1957 through 2006, almost 94 percent of all voting rights minority lawsuits, legal objections and out-of-court settlements occurred in jurisdictions now subject to federal oversight under the Section 4 formula.”
So what can Congress do now? It can draft a revised Section 4 based on more current data. It can make it easier to “bail-in” states with recent voting violations under Section 3 (which MSNBC’s Adam Serwer called a “secret weapon”) and make it easier for voting rights groups and the DOJ to win Section 2 cases.
it faces a tremendous amount of pressure to do so. Voting rights supporters, as I wrote recently, have a four-pronged strategy for responding to the Court’s decision:
Challenge new voting restrictions through preliminary injunctions and Section 2 of the VRA (which applies nationwide, but puts the onus on plaintiffs to prove that a law is discriminatory after enactment); pressure Congress to reconstruct the VRA; draft a new coverage formula for Section 4; and mobilize indignant voters to make their voices heard, starting with the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington on August 28.
The need for Congress to act is clear. The Justice Department blocked 1,116 discriminatory voting changes from taking effect under Section 5 from 1965 to 2004 and objected to thirty-seven electoral proposals after Congress reauthorized the law in 2006. Immediately following the decision, five Southern states rushed to implement new voter-ID laws that disproportionately affect young and minority voters. A sixth covered state, North Carolina, is on the verge of passing a new voter ID law by the end of this week. According to the state’s own numbers, 316,000 registered voters don’t have state-issued ID; 34 percent are African-American and 55 percent are registered Democrats. Of the 138,000 voters without ID who cast a ballot in the 2012 election, 36 percent were African-American and 59 registered percent Democrats. A number of other harsh voting restrictions—such as cutting early voting, ending same-day voter registration and penalizing the parents of students who vote where they go to school—could be added to the bill.
Simply looking at what’s happened since the Court’s decision—not to mention the four overwhelming reauthorizations of the VRA in 1970, 1975, 1982 and 2006—should give Congress ample evidence on which to act.
Original Article
Source: thenation.com
Author: Ari Berman
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