Hard times are coming with the Trump administration.
Many will suffer.
Now some observers are concerned that this may be the beginning of the end of the Second Reconstruction:
“My concern is that this might be a signal that we will see an assault on voting rights,” Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told me today. “Claims of nonexistent voter fraud and non-citizen voting are precisely the kinds of baseless justifications that we’ve seen for the wave of laws in the past couple of years restricting voting access.”
Trump’s choice of Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions as Attorney General makes this more plausible. As a U.S. Attorney in the mid-1980s, Sessions tried to prosecute three civil rights activists for voter fraud, when they were trying to help poor, elderly, and illiterate people to vote. They were acquitted.
The Plum Line
Here are four possible ways that Trump’s administration may restrict voting rights:
1) The Department of Justice might decline to enforce remaining portions of the Voting Rights Act.
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2) The DOJ could aggressively pursue crackdowns on voter fraud to harmful effect.
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3) The Trump administration could push to nationalize voting restrictions.
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4) Trump’s Supreme Court nominations might be hostile to voting rights.
The Plum Line
There are more details in the article under each section listed above.
This could amount to huge rollbacks in what was achieved in the last 50 plus years.
Bruce Ackerman, a constitutional law scholar at Yale University, tells me he worries it could all amount to the “beginning of the end of the Second Reconstruction.”
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“The rest of the Voting Rights Act will become a dead letter,” Ackerman suggested, adding that he expects nothing less than a wholesale rollback of “the fundamental achievements of the Second Reconstruction.”
We must ally together to protect the achievements of the Second Reconstruction.