Electing Barack Obama Did NOT Solve Racism

The Voting Rights Act was a significant step forward to black people in this country who had been disenfranchised after slavery by Jim Crow laws and other institutional shenanigans that all but ensured we were not allowed to vote for the people who were governing us. I have personal experience with this as my grandfather who grew up and lived his whole life in Mississippi died without ever being allowed to cast a vote. Well now we see in the Washington Post that there is a Challenge before the Supreme Court looking to strike the VRA down in part because our country electing Barack Obama to the Presidency shows that federal mandates and oversight are no longer needed.

The Supreme Court agreed yesterday 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.

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.

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."

"It has the potential to be the most important election-law case this court has heard," said Richard L. Hasen, an elections expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, adding that it raises the possibility that "the remedy that was once constitutional is now unconstitutional."
The case comes to a court, led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., that has become increasingly skeptical of race-based remedies.

So in 40 years supposedly our country has changed in such a major way that the provisions of the act are no longer warrented and are outdated? Well let's see the reason for the act in the first place.

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.

So this act is intended to ensure that all eligible citizens are allowed to vote and that they will not be subjected to any arbitrary measures which can be used to exclude them from voting as it has in the past. Sounds like a good idea to me. With charges of voter disenfranchisement still being thrown around in almost every election cycle including many just last year I would think it a no brainer to keep these measures in place. Now the curious thing about the case in my opinion and the premise that the nation has changed are the actual states that were originally named in the VRA.

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.

So out of the original nine states named in the act all of one actually went for Barack Obama. Now mind you I am not necessarily assigning racist motives to every voter in the states that did not vote for Obama, after all everyone has the prerogative to vote for whomever they want to. I just find it ironic that the folks who brought this challenge actually invoked the name of Barack Obama as being part of a justification for their position when just one of the states on that list even voted for him. Hell I seriously doubt the guy who made the comment voted for President Elect Barack Obama. And there is also no doubt in my mind that race DID play a factor on at least some of the voters in those states. Do I really need to give a run down of the "Southern Strategy"?

Now let me say this, I personally think that the act SHOULD be reviewed. But not in the way the conservatives want. The reason why it needs to be reviewed in my honest opinion is not because there has been less racism over the last 40 years, I don't necessarily know that there has. But because the places in this nation where blacks and minorities might have been disenfranchised since 1965 has spread since the implementation of the act. So if any thing I think the act should be broadened to include reviews of the policies and practices of all 50 states and then reevaluate which ones still need the pre-clearance and which ones on the original list might not.

It occurs to me that this is just another form of deregulation for Republicans. But having seen the problems with the voting in the Presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 I just don't see how anybody could think its a good idea to deregulate voting rights at this point. It is an unfortunate but apparent truth that in this country it is not wise for us to leave it up to individuals to simply do the right thing when it comes to situations where personal and or political biases may come into play.

Now in all likely hood this challenge will get no where because of the politics of the situation. Whether people want to admit it or not the Supreme Court does have a political component to it and the truth is this. If the Conservative led Supreme Court strikes down the law that gave black people the right to vote in this country the very few minorities who support the Republican party will dwindle to almost nothing. And that is why its untenable for them to do so no matter what John Roberts thinks. But just the fact that the challenge was brought in the first place is irritating as hell to me. I wonder if next they will try to challenge the Emancipation Proclamation because hey there aren't slaves any more in this the "rebellious states"*, are they?





*Thats excepting the real and serious problem this country has with the sex slave trade.