Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne seeks legitimacy in every presentation by invoking the Rev. Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Tom C. Horne-Only in Arizona by Rodolfo F. Acuña.
In fact, if you go to the Arizona Attorney General Employment Discrimination Fact Sheet http://www.azag.gov/civil_rights/EmploymentDiscrimination.pdf there it is in the very first paragraph:
In 1963, I marched with thousands of people on Washington, D.C. to hear Martin Luther King give his transformational “I have a dream” speech in which he said all people should be judged by the “content of their character.”
Mr. Acuña questions the veracity of this story. "Given Horne’s propensity for exaggeration it is a wonder that no one has questioned his claim. A high school student at the time, it would have seemed that his parents would have taken him there, he lived in New York. He has never produced any photographs or other documentation."
Even if true, Tom Horne certainly failed to learn the lessons of Dr. King's sermon that day. If Horne truly wants to be judged by the content of his character, he comes up woefully short. Horne was banned for life by the Securities and Exchange Commission for securities fraud. As Superintendent of Public Instruction, he engaged in a crusade against the La Raza program at TUSD, a crusade to demonize Mexican-American ethnic studies that he continues to this day as Attorney General. Horne has been an avid supporter of Arizona's racial profiling law, SB 1070, which makes Hispanic citizens suspects simply for "breathing while brown." Horne should ask himself, WWMLKD — "what would Martin Luther King do?" Certainly not what Tom Horne has done.
Now Horne seeks to remove the crown jewel from the crowning achievement of the Civil Rights Movement that many, including Dr. King, fought and died for — the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — and he did so just days before the scheduled dedication of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial in Washington, D.C. This was a metaphorical spitting in the face of Dr. King and spitting upon the memory of all those who fought and died to achieve voting rights for all Americans.
Don't claim Dr. King as a transformational figure in your life when you debase his memory and reject his teachings. I find it highly offensive that a man who epitomizes the very notion of white privilege in Arizona seeks to appropriate Dr. King and to distort his teachings beyond all recognition in support of white privilege. As Joseph Welch asked of Sen. Joe McCarthy, "Have you no decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
Stephen Lemons at the Phoenix New Times has this excellent post on this politically motivated lawsuit. Tom Horne Sues to Overthrow Voting Rights Act: What's Next, the De-Abolition of Slavery?:
Arizona has earned itself the moniker of "the most racist state in the nation" for a reason. Not a day goes by that its public officials fail to concoct some new, bigoted outrage as manna for Sand Land's wingnut masses.
The outrage du jour? Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne is suing the federal government, seeking to overturn the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the law that essentially enfranchised America's minorities and prevents states from coming up with ways to keep them from the ballot box.
Civil rights workers in the South and elsewhere died at the hands of white racists while working for the kind of change the VRA made real. Before the VRA, many states had poll taxes, literacy tests and a whole array of schemes and gimmicks to make sure that whites of a certain status were the only ones allowed to vote.
Arizona was one of these. Its legacy of disenfranchising minorities put it on a list of states that must seek preclearance from the feds regarding anything to do with voting, including redistricting.
States can "bail out" of their preclearance status by meeting certain requirements. But, significantly, Horne is not attempting to do that. He in fact wants to overturn the portions of the law having to do with preclearance and have them declared unconstitutional.
Horne argues that the standards Arizona must meet are archaic and no longer apply. Golly gee, he seems to be saying, Arizona in 2011 is a veritable model of inclusiveness.
That is, if you ignore Senate Bill 1070, the constant barrage of anti-immigrant laws, the general anti-Latino sentiment, the attack on ethnic studies (authored by Horne, natch), the rise in hate crimes, the race-based murders by minutewomen and assorted hate-filled Anglos, and on and on and on.
Sure, minorities have nothing to worry about in a state run by right-wing Anglo politicians who bank on the exploitation of rampant xenophobia and the fomenting of racial and ethnic discord.
Riiiiight.
Ironically, Arizona's Attorney General gives evidence of why the preclearance is still needed in his press release, and in the suit itself.
* * *
Why is AG Horne doing this? Is he in fact a racist? No, he's not a racist, but his actions are meant to assuage the fears of many Anglos in this state that they are losing their political hegemony due to an increased Latino presence.
WWMLKD?
There is reason to be concerned about this miscreant's politically motivated lawsuit: the "Felonious Five" of the U.S. Supreme Court, the conservative activist Justices who seek to transform this country from a democratic Republic into a plutocratic corporatocracy through the destruction of campaign finance laws and voting rights. The Felonious Five invited just such a challenge to the Voting Rights Act in 2009 in NAMUDNO v. Holder. Arizona Lawsuit Takes Aim At Voting Rights Act | ThinkProgress:
Two years ago, the Supreme Court surprised most Court watchers by not striking down Section Five of the Voting Rights Act, which requires voting districts who have historically engaged in discrimination to “preclear” any new voting rules with a federal court or the Department of Justice before those rules can go into effect. Yet, while the justices allowed the law to survive, they dealt it a severe blow — permitting voting districts to “bail out” of the law if they can show that they have not recently engaged in race discrimination and are not likely to do so in the future.
Yesterday, Arizona decided that being able to bail out isn’t good enough. They want one of the backbones of American civil rights law tossed out entirely:
Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne, a Republican, said that the portion of the law requiring the state to get prior approval from the Justice Department for any changes to the state’s election laws exceeds Congressional authority and is unconstitutional.
“The portions of the … Act requiring preclearance of all voting changes are either archaic, not based in fact, or subject to completely subjective enforcement based on the whim of federal authorities,” Horne said in a statement.
The Arizona lawsuit mostly apes the claims from the 2009 decision that weakened the law. It argues that Section Five unfairly singles out certain states without requiring every voting district in the country to seek preclearance. Yet Arizona also raises a new and deeply radical objection to the law, claiming that the VRA “exceeds Congress’s authority under the 14th and 15th Amendments because it suspends all changes to state election law – however innocuous – until preclearance is given by the federal government.” If this theory were actually adopted by the Supreme Court, it would mean that the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional the day it was first signed in 1965.
There is legitimate reason to fear that Arizona will win its claim, however, at least on the somewhat narrower grounds that Congress was wrong to apply the law to some states and not others. In the 2009 oral argument, the Court’s conservatives were very skeptical of Congress’ decision to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act without updating the list of states subject to preclearance to reflect which states are currently most guilty of voting rights violations. Supreme Court uberlawyer Tom Goldstein predicted back then that the Court was simply giving Congress a brief window to update Section Five before they take a hatchet to it; “[i]f the statute remains the same by the time the next case arrives,” Goldstein warns, “the Court will invalidate the statute.”
The conservative activist Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court have shown no restraint in their desire to transform America by judicial fiat. The Felonious Five have already disenfranchised millions of voters through approval of unduly burdensome Voter I.D. requirements, and gutted campaign finance laws by approval of millionaires and corporations spending unlimited amounts of money in campaigns without any public disclosure.
It would not surprise me if the Felonious Five engaged in historical revisionism, and denied the reality that is Arizona today, by striking down one of the most important achievements in American political history — the right of the franchise to vote extended to all Americans.