September 7, 2017
It is difficult, amid the deafening cacophony of our chaotic daily news cycle, to take the time to consider all of the forces that had to align to bring us to this point, or to see a path forward for our nation, beyond resistance to reclamation of our vaunted national values. We can argue that the combination of decades long coordinated attacks on the Constitutional right to vote, together with the abdication of the duty to check majoritarian abuses of power by co-equal branches of government, has landed us here. Given the mountain of evidence supporting this view, this will be a multi-part post.
Part I – Voting Rights
All honest students of the politics of the last fifty years know that the expansion of civil rights for African Americans resulted in a re-alignment of party allegiances. Republicans have gained and maintained power by appealing to the base fears and prejudices of a dwindling white majority. LBJ presaged as much when he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and stated, “There goes the South for a generation.” Aided by Fox News, the white grievance echo chamber masquerading as a news network, Republicans have stoked an ahistorical sense of white victimhood, encouraging Republican voters to see people of color as lazy, entitled takers who mooch off of hardworking salt of the earth real Americans. Republicans rode resentment over issues like affirmative action and marriage equality to electoral victory in the early 2000s. The Bush Administration Justice Department then tried to cement those electoral gains by inventing the myth of “voter fraud” to invalidate African American and Latino votes in the minds of their supporters. We would do well to recall that the U.S. Attorney scandal that led to the downfall of Alberto Gonzales stemmed, in part, from the Bush Justice Department’s ham-handed effort to discipline U.S. Attorneys who refused to prosecute frivolous voter fraud cases.
On the state level, Republican State Attorneys General chafed at the restrictions imposed by the pre-clearance requirements of the Voting Rights Act. They continually litigated in an effort to free themselves of the statutory constraints on their inventive disenfranchisement schemes. Their prayers were answered in 2013 in Shelby Cty v. Holder, when a conservative majority of the United States Supreme Court invalidated the coverage formula which determined the jurisdictions that were subject to pre-clearance. Within hours of the decision, Texas enacted the most restrictive voter I.D. law in the nation, which federal courts have repeatedly found was expressly designed to disenfranchise Black and Latino voters.
An intransigent refusal to view Black and Latino Americans as equal citizens entitled to a proportionate share of political power is behind the myriad efforts to disenfranchise them. Between 1965 and 2010, there has been a stratospheric increase in diverse elected officials, made possible by the Voting Rights Act. Between 1965 and 2010, the number of African American elected officials went from less than 1000 to over 10,000. The number of Latino elected officials went from a small number to over 6000 and the number of Asian American elected officials went from under 100 to almost 1000. (Source: “50 Years of Voting Rights: The State of Race in Politics,” Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies) Republicans recoil at these gains and are doing everything in their power to reverse them.
We need to view these assaults on the franchise for what they are: evidence of greater fealty to white supremacy than to democracy. That is what every policy from felon disenfranchisement to the refusal to enact immigration reform is grounded in. Those of us who truly believe in the principles laid out in our Declaration of Independence and our Bill of Rights are doomed to fail unless we fight for full citizenship rights for EVERY American, starting with their right to vote.