voting rights

President Barack Obama calls on Congress to restore the Voting Rights Act

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President Barack Obama reflects on the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act and calls for its restoration in 50 Years After the Voting Rights Act, We Still Have Work to Do:

The right to vote is one of the most fundamental rights of any democracy.

ObamaFifty years ago today, because of the sacrifice of countless men and women, that right was secured for more Americans.

On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law — breaking down legal barriers at the state and local level that had prevented African Americans and others from exercising their constitutional right to vote.

Because of that law — one of our nation’s most influential pieces of legislation — Americans who were previously disenfranchised and left out of the democratic process were finally able to cast a ballot. The law was designed to ensure that all American citizens, regardless of the color of their skin, had an equal opportunity to make their voices heard.

But that law didn’t come to pass because folks suddenly decided it was the right thing to do.

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President Bill Clinton on the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act

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President Bill Clinton writes this essay on the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act for the Yale Law and Policy Review. (William Jefferson Clinton, The Voting Rights Umbrella, Yale L. & Pol’y Rev. Inter Alia (August 6th, 2015), http://ylpr.yale.edu/inter_alia/voting-rights-umbrella). The Voting Rights Umbrella:

BillClintonThe right to vote is both fundamental to individual liberty and to the proper functioning of representative democracy. When voting rights are denied, diluted, or restricted, the ability of government to respond to our challenges and increase our opportunities is impaired, and its legitimacy in doing so is diminished.

A major theme of American history is the steady expansion of the right to vote. Once restricted to white male property owners, the franchise has been extended to include all citizens from their eighteenth birthday on. Fifty years ago, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 sought to end practices like literacy tests that made it more difficult for African Americans to vote.

The Voting Rights Act was the result of years of struggle, paid for with the blood, sweat, and tears of Americans black and white, young and old. It was made possible by people like John Lewis, who absorbed blow after blow on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, and by the elected officials led by President Johnson willing to enact laws allowing us to live up to our founding principles.

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50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act – still necessary today

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Since our sad small town newspaper the Arizona Daily Star did nothing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, here is the editorial from the New York Times and an op-ed by Ari Berman of The Nation.

The Times editorializes, The Voting Rights Act at 50:

voting-rights-act-signed-16x91For the first 48 years of its existence, the Voting Rights Act — signed by President Lyndon Johnson 50 years ago this week — was one of the most popular and effective civil rights laws in American history. Centuries of slavery, segregation and officially sanctioned discrimination had kept African-Americans from having any real voice in the nation’s politics. Under the aggressive new law, black voter registration and turnout soared, as did the number of black elected officials.

Recognizing its success, Congress repeatedly reaffirmed the act and expanded its protections. The last time, in 2006, overwhelming majorities in both houses extended the law for another 25 years. But only seven years later, in 2013, five Supreme Court justices elbowed in and concluded, on scant evidence, that there was no longer a need for the law’s most powerful tool; the Voting Rights Act, they claimed, had done its job.

In truth, the battle for voting rights has had to be unrelenting, and the act itself has been under constant assault from the start. As Ari Berman writes in his new history of the law, “Give Us the Ballot,” the act’s revolutionary success “spawned an equally committed group of counterrevolutionaries” who have aimed to dismantle the central achievements of the civil rights movement.

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President Obama Teleconference to call for restoration of the Voting Rights Act

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Chris Wallace, moderator of The Hunger Games GOP presidential debate on FAUX News, plans ‘some doozies’ to ask the candidates.

voting-rights-act-signed-16x91Hmmm, I wonder whether he will begin by reminding the candidates that “Today is the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” and ask them where they stand on GOP voter suppression tactics enacted in Red States since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act, and whether they are willing to pledge to restore the enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act?

Bwahahaha! This is never going to happen. The last time that Chris Wallace asked a “gotcha” question in the 2012 presidential debates, disgraced former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich fed him to the rabid dogs of the FAUX News audience seated behind him. Newt Gingrich BLASTS Chris Wallace for his “Gotcha” Questions at IA Debate. Wallace’s butt-pucker expression was priceless.

Since the media villagers are all going to be focused on this clown car wreck of a GOP debate instead of the anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, the White House is doing some counter-programming of its own that will likely elicit little attention from the feckless media.

The Hill reports, Obama to call for Voting Rights Act restoration on law’s anniversary:

President Obama will call for the restoration of the Voting Rights Act on its 50th anniversary Thursday, the White House said.

Obama will hold a teleconference to commemorate the landmark legislation and call for its renewal, following a 2013 Supreme Court ruling that voided one of its central provisions.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who rose to prominence in the 1960s as a civil rights leader, will participate.

The event will allow Obama to draw a sharp contrast with Republicans, many of whom argue some provisions of the 1965 law went too far. It will take place on the same day as the first GOP presidential primary debate. 

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GOP threatens government shutdown over Confederate flags and Planned Parenthood, but will not consider a bill to restore the Voting Rights Act

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This coming Thursday, August 6, is the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in American history.

Voting-RightsWhen the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the coverage section, Section 4 of the Act, in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that Congress remained free to try to impose federal oversight on states where voting rights were at risk, but must do so based on contemporary data.

The Tea-Publican controlled Congress has failed to act on this suggestion from the Court, preferring the status quo of a gutted Voting Rights Act, followed by the largest number of voting restrictions enacted by GOP states since the Jim Crow era.

A bipartisan bill introduced by Reps. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) and John Conyers (D-Mich.) in response to the Supreme Court ruling that struck down Section 4 of the law in 2013 was introduced in 2014, and again earlier this year (The Sensenbrenner-Conyers bill, known as the Voting Rights Amendment Act). Bill To Restore Voting Rights Act Gets Another Bipartisan Push. A separate Democratic bill has also been introduced. Democrats Unveil Bill To Restore Gutted Voting Rights Act (The Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2015, which goes beyond the version introduced in 2014).

Democrats have made a push for Congress to vote on these bills on the eve of the anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, but Tea-Publican congressional leaders have refused.

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