Deeper coverage
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has written extensively about the Voting Rights Act, including a series of stories last year that studied its impact in advance of the U.S. Supreme Court’s hearing on whether to strike pre-clearance. To see them, go to MyAJC.com.
After more than two sometimes testy hours of testifying Wednesday in front of the U.S. Senate, the president of the Georgia NAACP remained hopeful that Congress would rebuild a portion of the Voting Rights Act.
“This should not be a partisan issue,” Francys Johnson said.
But it is. And that’s why the bill is all but dead this year.
Republicans are balking at handing new power to controversial U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and question the necessity of strict federal oversight at a time when voting discrimination is far less prevalent than in 1965, when the Voting Rights Act became law.
Thus, after mostly quiet attempts to forge bipartisan consensus for months went nowhere, the voting rights debate has become infused with partisan election-year messaging. About 150 supporters of the bill who gathered Wednesday afternoon for a Capitol Hill rally were whipped up by a parade of Democratic legislators.
“For Republicans to win, they can’t have all Americans vote because they’d never win,” said U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn. “And the only way they can win is to stop us from getting to the ballot and letting just simple democracy and freedom prevail.”
At the Senate hearing, U.S. Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Al Franken, D-Minn., got in a spat over whether the bill applies to the whole country or singles out certain states.
“The statement that support for the Voting Rights Act is bipartisan is true,” said Cornyn, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate. “I would say that bipartisanship — or lack of partisanship — is at risk in the way that this legislation has been framed.”
It has been a year since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the formula requiring Georgia and several other states to submit any voting changes to the federal government before they go into effect. Anyone still can file a lawsuit against a discriminatory voting practice, and a court can still impose federal “pre-clearance” on a jurisdiction in extreme cases — but no longer do wide swaths of the country have to submit voting changes to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Civil rights advocates, who say small-scale voting discrimination is flowering in the formerly covered states, pushed for a bill to revive pre-clearance under a new formula that could pass Supreme Court muster. The companion bills introduced in January by U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and U.S. Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., base their pre-clearance formula on whether a state has had more than five voting rights violations in the previous 15 years.
Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas would be covered at first, based on their records. That has not gone over well with the states’ Republican leaders, including Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who wrote a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee saying the bill “ignores the tremendous progress that Georgia and the rest of the nation have made in the past 50 years and seeks to reinstate an outdated and obsolete formula.”
State leaders and the conservative Heritage Foundation have opposed the bill in public and behind the scenes, with Holder — a Republican lightning rod — and his aggressive enforcement of the remaining sections of the Voting Rights Act serving as a powerful talking point.
The bill’s proponents say that, while powerful Voting Rights Act tools are still in effect, pre-clearance is necessary to nip in the bud under-the-radar voting changes in places such as rural Georgia, where several counties have considered getting rid of polling places that are convenient for black voters.
Civil rights groups such as the NAACP and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, traditionally close with Democrats, hoped a low-key approach would help the bill build steam among both parties in Congress, especially considering that the 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act passed with overwhelming majorities.
They sought to avoid the partisan controversy over voter ID laws by writing into the bill that even if a court rules a voter ID law is discriminatory, it will not count as a demerit against a state for pre-clearance.
But activists have become more vocal of late.
U.S. Rep. John Lewis, an Atlanta Democrat, has offered his moral suasion and tales from the civil rights era to the cause.
Asked Tuesday whether the new activity was a result of frustration for the lack of progress, Lewis responded “absolutely.”
The effort suffered a blow when House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., lost his re-election bid and announced he would step down from leadership. Cantor had gone to Selma, Ala., twice to walk with Lewis over the Edmund Pettus Bridge to re-enact a seminal moment in the civil rights struggle when Lewis was beaten by police. Cantor had expressed support for a Voting Rights Act rewrite after the Supreme Court decision but did not specifically endorse the proposed bill.
Lewis said newly elected Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., has been to Selma and he would meet with McCarthy soon to talk about voting rights.
The bill now only has a handful of House GOP supporters, and no Republicans in the Senate have signed on.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said he will “carefully consider” any voting rights proposals, but his committee has not scheduled any action on the issue. Wade Henderson, the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said Goodlatte asked him for detailed information about ongoing discrimination, which Henderson provided.
Henderson acknowledged in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that time is running short and activists’ initial hope that the House would move first is not coming to fruition, but he said he is still hopeful there is time to move the bill this year.
“If this becomes a partisan scrum,” Henderson said, “the chances of it becoming law are almost nonexistent.”
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