For many years now, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been under assault. The law requires that any changes in voting rules in certain states, mostly in the South, be “pre-cleared” by the Justice Department, to make sure that they do not impinge on the voting rights of minorities. Many people in these states and elsewhere have argued that the law is now obsolete and that its pre-clearance provisions stigmatize and demean places that have long ago reformed from their racist pasts. In the 2009 case of Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder, the Court had a chance to invalidate the law—and ducked. Instead, by a vote of 8-1, the Justices disposed of the case on procedural grounds and left the larger fight for another day. (Clarence Thomas dissented, arguing that the Voting Rights Act is indeed obsolete and unconstitutional.) The Voting Rights Act, and its pre-clearance provisions, remained intact.
The importance of the Northwest Austin case was apparent last week when the Justice Department rejected South Carolina’s new law to impose a photo-identification requirement for voters in 2012. “According to the state’s statistics, there are 81,938 minority citizens who are already registered to vote and who lack D.M.V.-issued identification,” Thomas E. Perez, the chief of the department’s civil-rights division, said in a letter to South Carolina officials. The only reason the Justice Department had the chance to rule on the South Carolina changes is because of the pre-clearance rules. (South Carolina may challenge the Justice Department decision in court, thus possibly setting up another test of the Voting Rights Act in the Supreme Court.)
The Justice Department action in South Carolina underlines the continuing necessity for the Voting Rights Act, nearly four decades after it was first passed. The South Carolina law is part of a wave of new rules, passed in the wake of the 2010 Republican landslide purportedly to stop vote fraud, that limit the right to the franchise. As many independent studies have found, “voter fraud” is a cure in search of a disease. There is no significant voter-fraud problem in the United States. Rather, these laws are transparent attempts by Republican majorities to stifle and suppress the number of minorities and poor people (mostly Democrats) who go to the polls. Thanks to the Voting Rights Act, the Justice Department has the tools to stop this travesty—at least in states like South Carolina, which are still subject to “pre-clearance.”
But a recent speech by Eric Holder, the Attorney General, suggests that the Justice Department may be looking to attack these “voter fraud” laws in other states as well. Earlier this month in Austin, Holder delivered a ringing defense of the right to vote and quoted Congressman John Lewis, who said that voting rights are “under attack … [by] a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students, [and] minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in the democratic process.”
Notice the use of an important word: “deliberate.” Even in states that are not covered by the pre-clearance requirements, the Justice Department has the right to sue to stop intentional—deliberate—attempts to limit voting rights. Holder’s speech suggests that his Department might do just that in states like Wisconsin, Kansas, and Tennessee, which have new photo i.d. requirements.
This is a chance for Holder to define his legacy as Attorney General—as something more than the guy who tried, and failed, to have Guantánamo Bay detainees tried in federal court in New York. There is a purity, a simplicity, about the voting-rights fight that is sadly absent from many modern civil-rights battles. This is not about special privileges, or quotas, or even complex mathematical formulae. It’s about a basic right of American citizenship, which is being taken from large numbers of people for the most cynical of reasons. The laws are, quite literally, indefensible—so Holder ought to make the states that have them try to defend them. That would be a legacy that would make any Attorney General, and any American, proud.
Original Article
Source: New Yorker
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