voting rights

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:

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

Hmmm, 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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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.

Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times in a lengthy exposé, “A Dream Undone,” examines the 50 year GOP campaign to dismantle this landmark piece of legislation. A Dream Undone (excerpts):

[I]n the American South in 1956, not every would-be black voter was an Air Force officer with the wherewithal to call on the local election board; for decades, most had found it effectively impossible to attain the most elemental rights of citizenship. Only about one-quarter of eligible black voters in the South were registered that year, according to the limited records available. By 1959, when Frye went on to become one of the first black graduates of the University of North Carolina law school, that number had changed little. When Frye became a legal adviser to the students running the antisegregation sit-ins at the Greensboro Woolworth’s in 1960, the number remained roughly the same. And when Frye became a deputy United States attorney in the Kennedy administration, it had grown only slightly. By law, the franchise extended to black voters; in practice, it often did not.

What changed this state of affairs was the passage, 50 years ago this month, of the Voting Rights Act. Signed on Aug. 6, 1965, it was meant to correct “a clear and simple wrong,” as Lyndon Johnson said. “Millions of Americans are denied the right to vote because of their color. This law will ensure them the right to vote.” It eliminated literacy tests and other Jim Crow tactics, and — in a key provision called Section 5 — required North Carolina and six other states with histories of black disenfranchisement to submit any future change in statewide voting law, no matter how small, for approval by federal authorities in Washington. No longer would the states be able to invent clever new ways to suppress the vote. Johnson called the legislation “one of the most monumental laws in the entire history of American freedom,” and not without justification. By 1968, just three years after the Voting Rights Act became law, black registration had increased substantially across the South, to 62 percent. Frye himself became a beneficiary of the act that same year when, after a close election, he became the first black state representative to serve in the North Carolina General Assembly since Reconstruction.

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