Sixty years ago this week, on Aug. 6, 1965, surrounded by such civil rights titans as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.
It was a transformative moment in American politics: The Texas Democrat had just signed a law intended to fulfill the constitutional promise of equality for every citizen.
And for a long time, it seemed to work.
In the four years after its enactment, nearly 1 million Black Americans had registered to vote. And after the 1966 elections, the ranks of Black elected officials in the South had more than doubled, going from 72 to 159, according to an analysis by The Brennan Center.
But as he surveyed the nation’s fractured political landscape this week, with a contingent of Texas lawmakers in Boston to protest a Republican-led redistricting effort that they say diminishes representation for Black and brown voters, Jeremy R. Paul saw that legacy under threat.
“I’m not a great metaphor person, but I think it’s pretty fair to say that certain aspects of the Voting Rights Act are on life support,” Paul, a constitutional law professor at Northeastern University, told MassLive this week.
He’s not the only one. Where it once used the law to combat discrimination, litigating 16 cases under the act in the last decade, the American Civil Liberties Union says it’s now fighting to save the law itself.
“I’ve seen what happens when this pillar stands strong. I’ve watched judges strike down discriminatory laws, jurisdictions open polling places under threat of litigation and citizens previously denied access cast their ballots,” Sophia Lin Lakin, the director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, wrote in a commentary piece posted to the civil rights group’s website this week.
But Lin Lakin said she’s also seen “what happens when we can’t use it — voters turned away, communities silenced, democracy denied."
“Since a deeply consequential 2013 Supreme Court decision, state legislatures have mounted a coordinated attack on voting access and introduced hundreds of voter suppression bills,” she continued. “Each case represents thousands of voters — real people whose fundamental rights hang in the balance."
Republicans on Capitol Hill, meanwhile, are increasingly “bullish” that they can undercut the law and the decades-long protections that it has offered, according to The Hill, a publication that covers Congress.
Most of those battles will be fought in the courts, including a significant case that’s currently before the U.S. Supreme Court.
More on that later.
But first, here’s how the nation got to where it is now on the law.
The high court’s ruling a decade ago in a case known as Shelby County v. Holder struck down a key component of the law that required some states and local governments to get federal approval before they were allowed to make changes to their voting laws.
That process, known as “pre-clearance,” was intended to ensure that those policies were not racially discriminatory, according to the Brennan Center.
The impact of that ruling was immediate and lasting, Northeastern’s Paul said.
That’s because it’s opened the doors to voter suppression efforts intended to drive down participation among the very voters the law was supposed to help.
Officials in Texas, for instance, announced they would implement the most restrictive voter identification law in the nation. It was later struck down by a federal court, but other states rushed to implement other restrictions.
In the decade since the Shelby ruling, states have added nearly 100 restrictive voting laws to the books.
As is the case mostly recently with Texas, and likely Missouri, as soon as this fall, those civil rights battles have also been waged over district maps and accusations of gerrymandering — or the process of unfairly drawing legislative and congressional boundaries to advantage one political party or another.
In Boston this week, Texas Democrats who had left the state to frustrate those Republican redistricting efforts evoked the legacy of the Voting Rights Act as they justified their fight.
“Y’all, 60 years ago today, the Voting Rights Act was signed into law by a great Texan president, Lyndon Baines Johnson,” state Sen. Carol Alvarado, whose district includes parts of Houston, said during a rally on the State House steps on Wednesday.
The law is a “landmark of civil rights achievement forged in the fire of protest and sacrifice,” Alvarado continued.
“It was meant to protect every American citizen’s right to vote, no matter their color, their ZIP code, or their party ... But that promise is once again under attack ... We came to Boston to remind America we don’t have a king here. We have a Constitution,” she continued. “The spirit of rebellion that was born here lives in every community that refuses to be silenced. We’re here to say that Texas will not go quietly into the night, and neither should you.”
The next big test could come in a case now before the U.S. Supreme Court known as Louisiana v. Callais.
The case is based on a lawsuit that non-Black voters filed against the state over the creation of a second majority Black district for the state in the U.S. House of Representatives, the Louisiana Illuminator reported.
At issue in the Louisiana lawsuit is Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting laws or procedures that purposefully discriminate against voters based on their race, color, or their membership in a language minority group, the Illuminator reported.
Last week, the high court asked the parties in the case to explain whether the state’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violated the U.S. Constitution’s 14th or 15th amendments, which gave formerly enslaved people the right to vote, the online news site reported.
According to Paul, while states can gerrymander for partisan reasons — which happens all the time — “they are not free under current law to gerrymander on the basis of race.”
And that makes the outcome of the Louisiana case particularly critical, he said.
And in the end, the biggest question is one of fundamental fairness and honoring the promise of “One person, one vote.” And while much of this may seem arcane, that’s why the average voter needs to care, Paul said.
“It turns into a situation in which, instead of the voters choosing who will represent them in various legislatures, the legislators are choosing [their] voters,” he said. [And] that turns elections into much more foregone conclusions. And it’s extremely unhealthy for our democracy."
Read more analysis from John L. Micek
Read the original article on MassLive.
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