That's John Lewis in the foreground getting his skull cracked in Selma, Alabama, 1965.
At a
teleconference this afternoon marking the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, President Obama, Georgia Rep. John Lewis, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett will join in stressing the "importance of restoring the landmark law and reaffirming the principle at the heart of our democracy—that all of us are created equal and that each of us deserves a voice," the White House announced. A key element of the Voting Rights Act was eviscerated by the Supreme Court in 2013.
Lewis, a leader of the 1960s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who was beaten several times and nearly killed during a peaceful 1965 march that police turned into a bloody confrontation, co-wrote with Vermont Sen. Pat Leahy a Thursday Los Angeles Times op-ed on restoring the VRA with the Voting Rights Advancement Act:
The impact of the Voting Rights Act was immediate. The first year after it was signed, 302,000 Americans who previously had been denied access were registered to vote. The power of the Act was not only that it made illegal old devices designed to exclude certain eligible voters, but also that new tactics were prevented from becoming law.
Every time sections of the act came up for renewal in Congress, Democrats and Republicans jointly supported improvements to ensure that the law remained strong to protect the rights of all voters. Evidence from hearings held across the country made it clear that efforts to impede voting access had not ended, and demonstrated how the act had effectively deterred voter discrimination. That's why the bill enjoyed bipartisan support no matter which party controlled Congress or the White House.
But that bipartisanship has faded. As Ari Berman
points out Thursday in
The New York Times, from 1965 to 2013, "the Justice Department and federal courts blocked more than 3,000 discriminatory voting changes." But state voting restrictions in the wake of the Supreme Court's gutting of the VRA barred thousands of people from voting in 2014 in Texas, North Carolina and other states. And the Government Accountability Office concluded in 2014 that voter ID laws in Kansas and Tennessee cut turnout by 2 to 3 percent during the 2012 election, "with the highest drop-off among young, black and newly registered voters."
Republicans are blocking the VRRA, a tougher version of a 2014 bill co-authored by Wisconsin Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner. He has said he will not support the new version. Even getting a hearing on the subject will be tough because the chairman of the Judiciary Committee is Republican Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, who said earlier this year that it’s not necessary to restore the law.
As Stephen Wolf noted earlier today in what promises to be an excellent Daily Kos series on fighting the oligarchy that has steadily engulfed American politics, the nation needs a new approach on voting rights, including the adding of a Voting Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That's something Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley supports. That, of course, would require, short of a constitutional convention, a big change in Congress and at the state level, where Republicans now control 69 of 99 legislative bodies. An uphill battle, to be sure. But the Freedom Riders like John Lewis and the thousands of other civil rights activists also faced tremendous odds ... and bullets, too. It was and is an essential fight.
While backing the Voting Rights Advancement Act today, the White House should also give a boost to the concept of a constitutional voting rights amendment.