Congress Begins Work On The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act

Tierney Sneed at Talking Points Memo Reports, Congressional Push To Restore The Voting Rights Act Picks Up:

While Democrats’ sweeping democracy overhaul HR 1 has run into obstacles in the Senate [- ahem, Joe Manchin’s and Kyrsten Sinema’s inexplicable devotion to the Jim Crow relic Senate filibuster rule -]  attention has turned to the separate legislative push lawmakers are making to restore [Section 4] of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013.

A subcommittee for the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing Thursday to discuss the need for that provision to — which determined which states were required to get federal approval for changes to their election practices — to be revived. Restoring the VRA has long been on Democrats’ agenda, but the current wave of restrictive voting measures, propelled by President Trump’s lies about fraud in the 2020 election, has added new urgency to that effort.

“Congress cannot continue to let these challenges to the VRA go unanswered,” Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, making an appearance to make an opening statement at the subcommittee hearing, said Thursday.

The hearing comes as some members of the Congressional Black Caucus have suggested, according to a Politico report Thursday, that the VRA restoration legislation — known as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act or HR 4 — should take more of a short-term priority over HR 1, which also includes ethics and campaign finance reforms in addition to its national mandates for ballot access.

“I certainly think our focus ought to be on [the Lewis bill] and voting rights,” Rep. Anthony Brown (D-MD) told Politico.

HR 4 has proceeded on a slower track than HR 1 in part because lawmakers want to create a congressional record that will make Voting Rights Advancement Act more resistant to legal challenges like the one that gutted the VRA in 2013.

Thursday’s hearing was part of that effort. The subcommittee’s majority hosted several witnesses to testify about the suppressive voting measures statehouses have passed since the 2013 Supreme Court decision, known as Shelby County.

I strongly recommend, as I have before, that the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act must contain a provision stripping Article III courts of jurisdiction to review the statute. As Christopher Sprigman explains, A Constitutional Weapon for Biden to Vanquish Trump’s Army of Judges (excerpt):

[A]s it happens, [there’s] a deeper reform that the Constitution specifically authorizes. Article III of the Constitution gives Congress substantial power to strip federal courts’ jurisdiction: a power that can be employed to rein in politicized courts and even to override judicial decisions, at least when courts are standing in the way of change that a substantial and enduring political coalition wants.

How would jurisdiction-stripping work? Start with the source of Congress’s authority. Article III, section 1 gives Congress complete discretion on whether to create the lower federal courts, a power that Congress has used from the founding to limit lower courts’ jurisdiction. And Article III, section 2, clause 2 explicitly empowers Congress to make “exceptions” to the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction—that is, to pick and choose for approximately 99% of the Supreme Court’s total docket what cases the Court has the power to hear. As I explain in this article, to be published in December in the New York University Law Review, under its Article III authority, Congress can remove the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction over particular cases, or particular issues, largely without constraint. 

Congress also has the power to limit the jurisdiction of state courts to hear federal questions, including constitutional claims. But on a practical level, it would not matter much even if state courts still hear federal constitutional claims. State courts lack both the authority to enjoin federal officials and the practical institutional power to counter a determined federal government. 

The implications of Congress’s Article III power are potentially profound. Congress’s power over courts’ jurisdiction means that it can claim for itself authority to interpret the Constitution in particular cases.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who has spent his entire professional legal career seeking ways to undermine the Voting Rights Act of 1965, would be defanged, powerless to inflict any more damage on voting rights. Congress must safeguard the fundamental constitutional right to vote from right-wing reactionary judge’s attempts to preserve a tyranny of white Republican minority rule in an increasingly diverse America.

The Voting Rights Advancement Act is named after the late Georgia representative who, as a young civil rights activist, was famously beaten while participating in 1965 Selma, Alabama march that jumpstarted in the passage of the Voting Rights Act.  Lewis first introduced VRA restoration legislation after previously covered states rushed to pass restrictive voting measures immediately after Shelby County. Versions of it have been reintroduced, but failed to move forward in the House while Republicans held control of the chamber.

According to Politico’s report, the legislation’s drafters are still making tweaks to the version they want to advance now that Democrats have full control of Congress. But some members of CBC are growing antsy, particularly with a redistricting process that, in most states, will start in earnest in late summer. This coming redistricting cycle will be the first one since Shelby County, meaning several states will, for the first time in decades, be able to draw their maps without the federal government confirming that those maps don’t illegally dilute the electoral power of minorities.

There is also a belief among some that HR 4 stands to get at least a few Republican votes in its favor, particularly from the Republicans who supported the 2006 VRA authorization. [This is a misguided belief.] Republicans have remained united in their opposition to HR 1 and it does not even have the support of all 50 Democrats in the Senate, let alone the buy-in from them that would prompt Democratic centrists to blow up the filibuster to pass it. HR 1, which has already passed the House, will get a Senate mark-up next month. The exact timeline for passing the HR 4 out of the House and getting it over to the Senate remains unclear.

Are Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema really willing to step into the shoes of Southern Dixiecrat segregationists to use the Jim Crow relic Senate filibuster rule to kill the renewal of a landmark voting rights act now named after their beloved colleague who spent his entire life fighting for the “sacred right” to vote? Will they stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their white nationalist Jim Crow 2.0 voter suppression Republican colleagues?

Here is a reminder from Congressman John Lewis (D-GA), speaking on the House Floor about protecting and strengthening the right of all Americans to vote, especially in the face of the threats facing American democracy today,  then in support of H.R. 12, the Voter Empowerment Act.

Contact your member of Congress and your senators and tell them that they have a “moral obligation, a mission, and a mandate tp empower all of the America people, not just a select few” to “do what is right, what is fair, and what is just.”

This bill needs to be passes A.S.A.P.  Redistricting will begin shortly, this summer. Section 5 DOJ Preclearance needs to be restored and in effect by then.