Pres. Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King, Jr. after the Voting Rights Act is signed.
Conservative America is hell-bent on turning the nation's clock back to the 1950s, when there were only incandescent light bulbs, "bad" girls were always punished, and "undesirables" were kept away from the ballot box. The Right is fighting modernity with everything it's got right now, and that includes an
intensified battle in the courts over voting.
An intensifying conservative legal assault on the Voting Rights Act could precipitate what many civil rights advocates regard as the nuclear option: a court ruling striking down one of the core elements of the landmark 1965 law guaranteeing African Americans and other minorities access to the ballot box.
At the same time, the view that states should have free rein to change their election laws even in places with a history of Jim Crow seems to be gaining traction within the Republican Party.
“There certainly has been a major change,” said Rick Hasen, a professor of election law at the University of California at Irvine. “Now, you have a whole bunch of credible mainstream state attorneys general and governors taking this view. … That would have been unheard of even five years ago. You would have been accused of being a racist.” [...]
The issue has surfaced in the Republican presidential contest, including at one of the televised debates, and could move to the front burner within weeks as a federal appeals court in Washington prepares to rule on the leading lawsuit against the Voting Rights Act. That case, brought by Shelby County, Ala., is backed by the attorneys general of Alabama, Arizona and Georgia. At least three similar constitutional challenges are pending.
There's a difference between "credible" and "elected," and what we're now seeing is an extreme Republican party that is by no means mainstream any more. It's such an extreme party that it isn't afraid of pursuing policies that are and have been identified by plenty of observers as racist, all in the name of "states rights" and the "will of the people."
Several cases are quickly working up through the courts, challenging Section 5 of the VRA. This is the provision that requires states covered by the act to receive pre-clearance from the Justice Department or a three-judge District Court in Washington for any election law changes that affect minority voters. It's the provision that at least five states are challenging as unconstitutional.
There's a multi-pronged attack on the most basic element of citizenship, and it's not about the people's will or state's rights, the ultimate code words for racist policies. It's about Republicans fighting progress and fighting politically the only way they can. With demographics against them, they either have to change, or eliminate as much of the voting population as possible. They've chosen their path. It's a path that an increasingly conservative, activist court could clear for them.