Every black voter in the United States must pay attention to the latest case brought before the United States Supreme Court. The court has agreed to examine whether a central component of landmark civil rights legislation enacted to protect minority voters is still needed in a nation that has elected an African American president. I fully expected that this would pop up again.
The court will decide the constitutionality of a provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that seeks to protect minority voting rights by requiring a broad set of states and jurisdictions where discrimination was once routine to receive federal approval before altering any of their voting procedures. Funny, wasn’t there evidence of discrimination in the last general election? There were cases across the United States and in predominantly black areas–fewer voting booths, rigid polling hours, less staff and so on.
The Supreme Court has upheld the requirement in the past, saying the intrusion on state sovereignty is warranted to protect voting rights and eliminate discrimination against minorities. But challengers say it ignores the reality of modern America and “consigns broad swaths of the nation to apparently perpetual federal receivership based on 40-year-old evidence.”
The outcome will be very interesting because the court, led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., has become increasingly skeptical of race-based remedies. With Uncle Clarence Thomas on the bench, only too happy to get rid of any provisions to protect blacks, I can only imagine what the outcome is going to be.
The Voting Rights Act was enacted in 1965, at a time when literacy tests and other schemes were routinely used, especially in parts of the deep South, to intimidate and exclude black voters. Its Section 5 “pre-clearance” requirements, which compel the Justice Department or a court to sign off on any changes to voting procedures, were intended to last for five years. Instead, the law was expanded to include other minorities, and its duration was extended four times, most recently in 2006 by overwhelming congressional majorities.
The pre-clearance requirements apply to nine states — Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia — as well as counties and towns in seven others. Fifteen jurisdictions in Virginia, including the city of Fairfax, have been allowed to “bail out” of the requirement with the agreement of the federal government.
Challengers say the Section 5 designations are an outrageous “badge of shame” on jurisdictions that have never discriminated, at a time when minorities have been elected to public office in record numbers.
“The America that has elected Barack Obama as its first African-American president is far different than when Section 5 was first enacted in 1965,” wrote Gregory S. Coleman, a former Texas solicitor general who brought the suit on behalf of a tiny utilities district in Austin that is covered by the law.
The district was created in the late 1980s to provide sewer services to a new subdivision, and there has never been a charge of discrimination in the way the now-3,500 residents elect their five-member board of directors. But any changes the district makes — such as moving its elections from a resident’s home to a local school — require Justice Department approval.
Coleman, a politically active lawyer who once clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, testified to Congress in opposition to extending the Voting Rights Act in 2006. He recruited Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 for a test case after Congress extended the law for another 25 years. Source: Washington Post
Why am I not surprised that someone associated with Clarence Thomas brought this suit? Clarence Thomas acts as though racism was never a problem of untold proportions in the United States. He acts as though he coasted through college because of his educational merits, rather than with the assistance of Affirmative Action. Clarence Thomas and Gregory S. Coleman are real Uncle Toms in every sense of the word. So, because Barack Obama will become the first African American president of the USA, that means we should discard all protections in place for blacks in America, in terms of suffrage rights? There has been more display of racism towards Barack Obama from the moment he declared his intentions to run for the presidency. He was the first to receive Secret Service protection. So the notion that the playing field has been leveled is furthest from the truth and actually insulting on so many level.
Filed under: Barack Obama, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., Clarence Thomas, Discrimination, Gregory S. Coleman, of 1965, US Supreme Court, Voting Rights Act
Black Political Thought 