January 11, 2018
Amid all of the furor over Trump’s contradictory statements during his televised meeting with Congressional leaders to discuss DACA and immigration more broadly, two critical legal developments that strike at the heart of our democracy may have escaped notice.
First, on Tuesday, a federal appellate court struck down North Carolina’s gerrymandered Congressional districts on the grounds that they violated the Constitutional rights of the voters of that state. In a 191 page opinion, the three judge panel found that the gerrymandered maps violated the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection of the law by depriving non-Republican voters of the value of their votes and the First Amendment rights of those voters because the deprivation was based on their “previous political expression,” (Source: “Federal Court voids North Carolina’s GOP drawn Congressional map for partisan gerrymandering,” by Fred Barbash, The Washington Post, 1/10/18). The record in the case includes express statements by the Republicans in charge of the redistricting process that they sought to draw maps that would create 10 Republican districts and 3 Democratic ones, despite the fact that Republicans are only 30% of the registered voters in North Carolina! (Source: “North Carolina Congressional districts struck down as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders,” by Anne Blythe, The News and Observer, 1/9/18).
The Republicans’ flagrant disregard for the Constitutional rights of the citizens that they represent is sadly unsurprising. North Carolina’s politics has been marred by scheme after scheme to strip power from the duly elected Democratic governor, Roy Cooper. Their tactics have been so extreme that it led one professor who conducts research for the Electoral Integrity Project to assert that the state could no longer be considered a democracy (Source: “North Carolina is no longer classified as a democracy,” by Andrew Reynolds, The News & Observer, 12/22/16). Although Reynolds was criticized as hyperbolic at the time, the Fourth Circuit’s decision appears to validate his conclusion. North Carolina Republicans announced their intention to appeal this decision to the Supreme Court, which already has the Wisconsin partisan gerrymandering case of Gil v. Whitford on its docket for this term.
Meanwhile, yesterday, the high court heard oral arguments in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, the challenge to Ohio’s aggressive voter purging practices. In Husted, the plaintiffs asserted that Ohio’s practice of purging voters who fail to vote in two consecutive elections and fail to return a postcard verifying their address runs afoul of two federal statutes designed to increase voter participation–The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (the “Motor Voter Act”) and the Help America Vote Act of 2002. No other state is as draconian as Ohio in its voter purging practices (Source: Amicus brief of the League of Women Voters in Husted at p.20). Despite this, all signs from the oral argument indicate that the Court is inclined to permit the practice, which will open the floodgates for other states to adopt practices that convert the right to vote into a “use it or lose it” Constitutional right.
Taken together, the extreme partisan gerrymandering and aggressive voter purging are simply a more sophisticated and less violent replication of the Jim Crow disenfranchisement that pre-dated passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These practices show a Republican Party determined to maintain a death grip on power by attacking voting rights at the front end, through purging and strict i.d. laws, and at the back end, through extreme gerrymandering that renders those votes that any Democratic voter manages to cast nearly worthless.
In face of these determinedly anti-Democratic forces, our task is clear. We need to provide all the resources that grassroots organizations need in states like Ohio and North Carolina, to ensure that as many traditionally disenfranchised voters (African Americans, Latinos, students, the poor and the elderly) fulfill all of the requirements to be properly registered well in advance of Election Day. Then we need to have boots on the ground to make sure every one of those voters comes out and votes these tin-pot despots out of office. I will be in Cleveland, Ohio on November 6, 2018. Where will you be?
#Votingrights
#2018midterms