Campaign Action
Democratic Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer penned a perfectly on point op-ed piece Thursday calling on Congress to take action against the continuous effort to rob people of color of their right to vote in this country. Donald Trump's morally bankrupt response to Charlottesville, says Schumer, is the wake up call that lawmakers must act to both block Trump's voter suppression efforts and shine a light on the issue of voting rights.
And what troubles so many Americans every bit as much as the president’s shocking response to this national tragedy is the methodical and pernicious way in which his administration is promoting discrimination, both subtle and not so subtle, in its policies and actions — especially when it comes to undermining the universal right of every American to vote. [...]
In late June, the President’s unwarranted “Election Integrity Commission,” established to investigate the President’s baseless and absurd claim that 3 to 5 million people illegally voted in the 2016 election, joined Attorney General Sessions in sending letters to the states asking for detailed voter information. This effort to intimidate voters and purge them from the rolls through a national voter database of personal information is unprecedented and was met with bipartisan opposition from Republican and Democratic Secretaries of State. [...]
The president’s “Election Integrity Commission” and the actions of the attorney general are wolves in sheep’s clothing. [...] Under the guise of voter fraud, which experts agree is practically non-existent, conservative forces in the administration, cheered on by white-supremacy-stoking publications like Breitbart News, are reviving the old playbook of disenfranchising minority voters.
Schumer says Trump must rescind his executive order that created the sham commission and, if he cannot make that good faith effort, Schumer puts the onus on his fellow lawmakers to do so through legislation.
Congress should prohibit its operation through one of the must-pass legislative vehicles in September.
That's a strong legislative play since Republicans will inevitably need some Democratic votes to get a government funding bill through the Senate before the end of September. If Democrats rally around that cause—which Schumer calls an "imperative"—they might ostensibly have the power to force rescission into a spending bill, backing Trump into a very uncomfortable corner on his commission.
Schumer also urges a round of public hearings on the matter.
Let’s have a public debate about these issues where experts can discuss policies like same-day registration as well as alleged voter fraud. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, vice chairman of the Election Integrity Commission, should testify as well.
As Schumer notes, none of his focus on the administration's clear efforts to disenfranchise voters of color comes in a vacuum. Following the Supreme Court's 2013 ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act, we have seen a spate of voter suppression laws emanating from GOP-led states that have been thoroughly repudiated by the courts. Last year, a federal appeals court found that North Carolina's sweeping law targeted black voters with "almost surgical precision"—a ruling upheld by the Supreme Court earlier this year. And just this week, a federal judge concluded that the only way to fix Texas's thrice-stricken discriminatory voter ID law, was to tear it out "root and branch."
But after Charlottesville, there's nothing theoretical about the fact that rabid white supremacy ideals still thrive in modern-day America and the goals are just as pernicious and obvious as they ever were. Only now they're being overtly perpetuated from the Oval Office.