
Fannie Lou Hamer
In a town that lives on connections, it seems strange that just before a crucial election no one has linked two events: the Supreme Court decision on the Texas redistricting fiasco and the renewal of the Voting Rights Act. Together they tell us a great deal about the weakening of the Liberal American cornerstone of voting rights. Fannie Lou Hamer would have seen the connections, but then she always had a talent for putting two and two together. Her comment might have echoed the words written on her tombstone, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
When President Bush signed the Voting Rights Act renewal on the White House lawn with members of Hamer’s family looking on, it had the appearance of a lovefest celebrating that finally this country–after over two centuries of finding various excuses not to allow certain races, classes and genders of citizens to step up the ballot box–had finally learned its lesson. It took the old warrior John Lewis to remind us of what that first Voting Rights Act cost, graphically painting a picture of events less than half a century old. For those who think we have some inherent democratic genes that make us somehow superior to those warring factions in Iraq or Lebanon, Lewis’ words provided a sober tallying of the costs of democracy.
We cannot separate the debate today from our history and the past we have traveled. When we marched from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, it was dangerous. It was a matter of life and death. I was beaten, I had a concussion at the bridge. I almost died. I gave blood, but some of my colleagues gave their very lives.
In one of the most important and eloquent speeches given in the House this year–and one that deserves far greater attention than it received in the media– Lewis made the past live again. My son, who was interning in DC, heard the entire speech including Lewis� fiery exchange with a Georgia representative who stupidly sought to twist the Old Warrior’s words along with his convictions. I quote Lewis at length because we need to never forget the passions and convictions that inspired the courageous acts of an Era whose promise still remains unfulfilled:
Before the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, all across the American South very few African Americans were registered to vote. Men and women of color stood in unmovable lines. In Lowndes County, Alabama, between Selma and Montgomery, more than 80 percent of that county was African American, but not a single African American was registered to vote. Many people were harassed, jailed, beaten, and some were even shot and killed. I cannot forget that in 1964, three young men that I knew, James Cheney, Mickey Schwerner, and Andy Goodman, two were white, one was black, they went out to investigate the burning of a church, a church that was to be used to prepare people to pass the so-called literacy test. These three young men were arrested, jailed, they were taken from the jail by the sheriff and his deputy, beaten, shot, and killed. They were killed for trying to help people become participants in the democratic process.
During that dark period in our recent past, black men and women who were teachers in public schools, colleges and university professors were told that they could not read well enough and they failed their so-called literacy test. On one occasion a would-be voter was asked to name the number of bubbles in a bar of soap. On another occasion, a person was asked to count the number of jelly beans in a jar. Yes, we have made some progress. We have come a distance. We are no longer met with bullwhips, fire hoses, and violence when we attempt to register and vote. But the sad fact is, the sad truth is discrimination still exists, and that is why we still need the Voting Rights Act. And we must not go back to the dark path.
Yet those who inhabit that dark path once again emerged from the shadows, emboldened by a party and an administration that had fed their unnatural wants since the days of the Southern Strategy. All the so-called bipartisan goodwill exhibited on the White House lawn at the final signing of the Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King Voting Rights Act ignored the tortuous and tangled path the GOP forced Voting Rights renewal to navigate. Should anyone doubt what the Counterrevolution plans or the values it holds, take a walk in the land of shadows that hover like wraiths above both the renewal of the Voting Rights Act and the Supreme Court’s Texas redistricting decision.
For anyone who has studied the 1960s, the sheer thought that anyone would still be opposed to the Voting Rights Act seems anachronistic, so when the time came for renewal, most of us assumed that it would sail through without much trouble. However, a sizeable number of Republicans had other ideas. In a closed-door meeting of the Counterrevolutionary caucus, those from the dark side essentially forced their colleagues to delay and perhaps even scuttle or emasculate the renewal. That this strategy should occur a full forty years after the passage of the original bill and come from the party of Abraham Lincoln only adds to the unreal atmosphere of our times. The Washington Post called it a rebellion, which is the way the GOP tried to spin it, but the party and the White House could have put a stop to it had they been so inclined, as many media pundits recognized.
Two basic objections to renewal emerged from the infighting. The first sought throw a bone to what had now become the Republican South, a makeover detailed in The Strange Death of Liberal America and other books. The strategy was to either remove the Southern states identified in the original Act altogether or to shorten the time of the Act’s enforcement provisions. The second objection shows just how little has changed since 1965. Led by Iowa representative Steve King, 80 Republicans signed a letter that asked that the provision for foreign language ballots be removed. King’s key role gave the lie to the press interpretation that this was a “Southern conservative” uprising. Blaming Dixie seemed almost quaint, but it quickly became an explanation that either did not understand what was going on or refused to acknowledge the broad, GOP support that favored emasculating the bill. As the renewal worked its way through the Congressional process, the Rules Committee–which could have put a stop to the entire sordid mess– agreed to allow both objections to be brought to the floor in the form of amendments. The amendments strategy represents a very clever ploy for it allowed the GOP to claim it sill supported voting rights–if only for some people. It reminds me of the old farmer who kept a wrecked car in his back forty and insisted it was still a car even thought it no longer had an engine or much else beyond a faded and rusting body.
The arguments of amendment supporters have eerie echoes with the defenses used by segregationists in the 1960s. Here is King, “I simply want to lift the mandate. I want to allow localities to make the decision on whether they need to provide foreign language ballots,not the Federal Government.” As one who spent a great deal of time studying the story of Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), that statement sent chills down my spine, for it recalls the infamous states’ rights arguments used by generations of Southern politicians. It is a mark of how the Counterrevolution has transformed this country that an Iowa congressman could sound like Strom Thurmond and no one bat an eye.
Other comments made by King remind you of the kind of arguments people like Theodore Bilbo used to make in favor of segregation. “If you go places today, and follow the English language wherever the English language is, you will find freedom, also”� lectured King. King’s remarks offer yet another piece of evidence for the argument I made in The Strange Death of Liberal America that Thurmond’s 1956 Southern Manifesto has become the blueprint for the modern Republican Counterrevolution.
Few in the media pointed out the sordid history of the GOP�s attempts to deter the poor, people of color, and the elderly from voting. How soon we forget the conclusions issued about the 2000 Florida vote count by the Civil Rights Commission:
Restrictive statutory provisions, wide-ranging errors and inadequate and unequal resources in the election process denied countless Floridians the right to vote. The disenfranchisement of Florida’s voters fell most harshly on the shoulders of African Americans. Statewide, based upon county-level statistical estimates, African American voters were nearly ten times more likely than white voters to have their ballots rejected in Florida.
The Commission went on to point out the Governor Jeb Bush and elections supervisor Katherine Harris bore particular responsibility for what happened. Neither Bush nor Harris has been brought before Congress, investigated by the Justice Department nor spent so much as one minute in court answering these charges based on extensive investigations and the testimony of hundreds of witnesses. That Harris is now a candidate for the United States Senate illustrates how crazy things have become in this Era of Bad Feelings.
As we know, things did not get much better in 2004. There were voting irregularities across the country as the Counterrevolutionaries sought to intimidate potential Democratic voters. The Tom Paine web site has an extensive list of these in a post titled “Best Of 2004: Election Irregularities.” The site summed up the multiple techniques the Counterrevolution has used to keep voters from the polls, “Redistricting, electronic voting machines, voter suppression campaigns, provisional ballots. If your vote doesn’t count, neither does our democracy.”
When it came time to vote on the Voting Rights Act “amendments,” the margin of victory turned out to be a lot narrower than that lovefest on the White House lawn suggested. King’s amendment went down 238 to 185 with 9 abstentions. As progressives and liberals rally their troops for the coming elections the names of those 185 ought to be broadcast throughout the country, for they represent an organized attempt to weaken one of democracy’s most important cornerstones. Supporters of the King amendment included three Republicans from my home state of Minnesota: Kennedy, Gutknecht and Kline, all of whom are in contested reelection contests.
For those keeping score here is the roll of infamy straight from the pages of the Congressional Record. Mark these names well, for this fall they should have a large target on their backs representing their willingness to undermine one of this country’s most important cornerstones. As we shall see, Latino voters should be especially concerned:

That the language argument should figure so strongly so strongly in the Voting Rights debate, should come as no surprise to those who followed League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) v. Perry, the Supreme Court case focusing on the infamous Texas redistricting fiasco. The apocryphal story of Tom DeLay redrawing the Texas congressional map on a napkin may or may not be true, but the results certainly looked like they had been sketched by someone who had more than three martinis. The prime victims, of course, were Latinos, which is why LULAC filed their suit, stating that the redistricting involved a violation of�guess what�the Voting Rights Act. The Texas NAACP also joined the case arguing that a similar violation of the Act had occurred in the Fort Worth area where DeLay and his henchmen tried to dilute the power of African-American voters.
The decision, like too many recent ones from this court, resembled a phrase someone once used to describe a platypus�an animal drawn by a committee. This current Supreme Court seems to have two irritating habits: first, issuing multiple opinions that force the rest of us to figure out the exact nuances of “the law of the land” and second, a tendency to give with one hand while it takes away with the other. In LULAC v. Perry six justices wrote opinions. The opinion summary stated in blunt, plain English the 132 pages representing the current nature of this Court:
KENNEDY, J., announced the judgment of the Court and delivered the opinion of the Court with respect to Parts II�A and III, in which STEVENS, SOUTER,GINSBURG, AND BREYER ,JJ., joined, an opinion with respect to Parts I and IV, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and ALITO, J., joined, an opinion with respect to Parts II�B and II�C, and an opinion withrespect to Part II�D, in which SOUTER and GINSBURG, JJ., joined. STEVENS,J., filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, in which BREYER, J., joined as to Parts I and II. SOUTER, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, in which GINSBURG, J., joined. BREYER, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part. ROBERTS, C. J., filed an opinion concurring in part, concurring in the judgment in part, and dissenting in part, in which ALITO, J., joined. SCALIA, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part, in which THOMAS, J., joined, and in which ROBERTS, C. J., and ALITO, J., joined as to Part III.
Anyone who can figure all that out deserves a JD just for the effort. Trying to keep score, the media read the tea leaves follows: DeLay�s napkin play was legal, even though the plaintiffs argued that it was done to blatantly increase the political power of his party and departed from precedent by ordering a mid-decade redistricting. However, LULAC prevailed in the case of one particularly bizarre-looking district which the Court ruled violated the Voting Rights Act by systematically discriminating against Latino voters. Unfortunately the NAACP did not. Justice Kennedy delivered the majority opinion, noting “changes to District 23 served the dual goals of increasing Republican seats and protecting the incumbent Republican against an increasingly powerful Latino population that threatened to oust him.” Were someone like Molly Ivins or her Texas colleague Jim Hightower to describe this they would say, “The minions of the Hammer and the Shrub decided to pull the equivalent of a bad land deal, swindling Latino voters by giving them a piece of desert full of tumbleweeds.”
LULAC’s press release trumpeted these results, “Today’s decision by the US Supreme Court in the LULAC vs Perry Texas Redistricting Case has vindicated our position that the plan drawn up by the Texas legislature eroded minority voting strength in Texas and is therefore illegal and unconstitutional. We demand immediate relief based upon the Supreme Court�s findings and we call upon the lower court to adopt a plan that is fair for all Texans not just those favored by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.”
he rest of the opinion still has even seasoned legal scholars scratching their heads. The results resembled those pornography cases when the court would throw up its hands and say, “I know when I see it.” Justice Scalia went so far as to assert that the Court had no business considering any redistricting cases, which of course negates all of the important �one man; one vote� voting rights decisions of the past half-century, such as Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Sims. It was in the latter that Chief Justice Warren wrote,
Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests. As long as ours is a representative form of government, the right to elect legislators in a free and unimpaired fashion is a bedrock of our political system. It could hardly be gainsaid that a constitutional claim had been asserted by an allegation that certain otherwise qualified voters had been entirely prohibited from voting for members of their state legislature. And, if a State should provide that the votes of citizens in one part of the State should be given two times, or five times, or ten times the weight of votes of citizens in another part of the State, it could hardly be contended that the right to vote of those residing in the disfavored areas had not been effectively diluted. Of course, the effect of state legislative districting schemes which give the same number of representatives to unequal numbers of constituents is identical. Weighting the votes of citizens differently, by any method or means, merely because of where they happen to reside, hardly seems justifiable.
Would that today’s justices could write so eloquently and clearly. That Scalia would have us abandon these principles and return us to the days when the Court refused to hear reapportionment cases, represents yet another example of why I call the current usurpers of the Republican Party Counterrevolutionaries, because they seek to return our country to the days before the New Deal and the Progressive Era when Liberal America�s bedrock principle of a level paying field found itself frozen out by those who felt that the rich and powerful knew what was best for us all.
Where Justice Scalia would take us back to the Nineteenth Century, Justice Stevens, who seems to be the most prescient member of the current Court, noted ominously the creation of an increasing number of “safe districts.” “Members of Congress elected from such safe districts,” says Stevens, “need not worry much about the possibility of shifting majorities, so they have little reason to be responsive to political minorities within their district.” He goes on to provide a cogent analysis of why the majority party today is the nonvoters, why we live in an Era of Bad Feelings in which elected officials feel little need to compromise or even behave civilly towards their colleague, “In addition, Democrats will surely have a more difficult time recruiting strong candidates, and mobilizing voters and resources, in these safe Republican districts.” While the full implications of this are a topic for another blog post, suffice it to say that Stevens brought attention to the increasing use of sophisticated techniques such as demographic cluster analysis that enable the creation of districts where everyone thinks alike. As The Strange Death of Liberal America pointed out, “Welcome to the Stepford congresswoman.”
The most bizarre and disruptive part of the decision lies in the majority’s view that states no longer need undertake redistricting after each census, but could change district boundaries virtually on a whim, any time a state could make a case for such a need. Instead of solving a problem, this Court has created one where none existed. This could cause restaurant napkins to become scarce commodities and lead to replays of the tragic-comic Texas soap opera that involved the Texas Rangers, The Department of Homeland Security and some highly irregular motel stays. Look for the plot to show up on the newest “reality” show or perhaps a game show featuring party members throwing darts at a map as well as each other.
So we have in the connections between a Supreme Court decision and a Congressional vote a clear picture of the world the Counterrevolution seeks to create for us. By undermining the cornerstone of voting rights, it would tilt the playing field even more severely. Had Representative King and his 184 collaborators in infamy prevailed, the Voting Rights Act on which LULAC depended�and which a majority of the Court supported�would have been gutted. Should Justice Scalia’s view that the Court should no longer serve as the final arbiter of reapportionment plans prevail, then we will return to the days when those who had power and money could freeze the rest of us out of the process.
For this reason Latinos have special cause to be worried about the Counterrevolutionary agenda. In many states, particularly red states located in the Southwest, the increasing numbers of Latino voters may soon make them a majority, putting the GOP in the position of the Dixiecrats in the 1940s and 50s. Meanwhile the Democrats wander in a fog. As I read over Congressional record reports of the Voting Rights renewal debate what most amazed me was how little reference was made to LULAV v Green. The LULAC suit threw a fat pitch across the middle of the plate–a pitch which offered the Democratic Party a chance to hit a hit run by standing with the Latino community�and the Democrats never lifted the bat off their shoulders. The blogs also largely remained silent. Maybe they should all read Jorge Ramos� The Latino Wave.
In the long run the ominous stands on voting rights taken by Congress and the Court will have a larger impact on the future of our democracy than the outcome of Iraq. We could bring the troops home tomorrow but if they come home to a country that is run by the 21st century equivalents of Boss Hogg, they will be coming home to a situation not that far from the one they left. It is now gospel that World War II, helped to propel the Civil Rights movement because people of color who had risked their lives to fight for their country were also willing to risk their lives to insure that country stand for what it had said about freedom during the war. Perhaps Iraq will have a similar impact, as troops coming home from trying to reform a corrupt and religiously-divided nation will seek to address similar issues in our own nation.
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