A duty and a privilege
by Tom Sullivan
At the Daily Beast, Eleanor Clift explains why Wisconsin Republican Jim Sensenbrenner’s bipartisan effort to repair the Voting Rights Act is going nowhere. Sensenbrenner’s H.R.885, co-sponsored by Democrat Rep. John Lewis of Georgia and forty others (including eight Republicans), was introduced on February 11. The bill is “going nowhere,” Clift believes, in spite of the observance last weekend of the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday at Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. John Lewis was among the civil rights marchers famously beaten there by Alabama State troopers.
It is worth noting that H.R.885 specifically exempts laws requiring “photo identification as a condition of receiving a ballot for voting in a federal, state, or local election” from actions that trigger federal jurisdiction over state efforts to abridge the right to vote. The price of that bipartisanship, no doubt.
Clift quotes David Bositis, formerly with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies:
Asked whether the symbolism of Selma fifty years later might move Congress to act, Bositis said flatly, “It’s not going to happen, nothing’s going to happen…. On balance this is more of a problem for the Republican Party than the Democrats because the people who are being disenfranchised view the Republican Party as hostile to them. It’s hurting the Republican Party.”
The Supreme Court 5-4 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder in June of 2013 opened the door to a spate of voter ID laws. “Voter suppression, that’s the intent, but so few people vote in the United States,” says Bositis, “so all they’re doing is reinforcing the idea that Republicans are hostile to minority groups.” The GOP did very well in 2010 and 2014, but it had nothing to do with voter suppression, he says. Young people and minority voters typically have low turnout in non-presidential years.
[snip]
No election outcomes will be changed with or without the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, he declares. Still, it’s important. “The fact that one of the two major political parties is hostile to the rights of minority citizens is a very big deal—and a lot of that hostility is in the center of gravity of the party, which is Southern whites.” They’re not wielding clubs and hoses anymore, he says, and they may not say anything overtly racist. They cloak their objections in states’ rights. But Republicans not only have no incentive to update the VRA, they have a disincentive, he explains.
I’ll offer two personal experiences set in sharp relief the differences between the parties regarding voting.
In 2006, I was the state party’s Get-Out-The-Vote coordinator for North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District, then 14-1/2 counties. It may sound hokey, but at the grocery store one day I had a kind of transcendental experience. I suddenly had a sense of everyone around me in the store. People standing in line at the checkouts. The woman coming towards me with the cart full of groceries. Another behind me. The people down the pet food aisle. It struck me that all these were “my voters.” Ensuring they got out to vote was both a duty and a privilege. And it didn’t matter what their party affiliation was. (Well, not at that moment anyway.) A quote from former Colorado Senate Majority Leader Ken Gordon (D-Denver) expresses it better:
“We think that voting actually is not just a private vote for the person who gets the vote, but a public good, and that the more people who vote, the more legitimate the elected officials are, and that they represent the actual values of the electorate.”
Contrast that with the T-party’s voter integrity “boot camp” I wrote about. Not once in seven hours did anyone suggest expanding the franchise or registering new voters and encouraging them to exercise their right to vote. Forget about public good. It was a personal, white-knuckled, bars-on-the-windows exercise in keeping the unwashed Irresponsibles from stealing their votes. On Election Day, you may get up, drink your morning coffee, and then head down to your polling place to do your civic duty in the American democratic process. The T-party frets that invisible hordes of Others get up on Election Day intent on committing felonies punishable by five years in prison and a $10,000 fine — just to add a single, extra vote to their team’s total. And they must be stopped.
Clift concludes:
In a rapidly changing America, the signals the GOP sends are as important as any legislation. Sensenbrenner told the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2013 that he didn’t expect his career to include a third reauthorization of the VRA, “but I believe it is a necessary challenge. Voter discrimination still exists, and our progress toward equality should not be mistaken for a final victory.”
Good on Sensenbrenner for trying, but he’d better not hold his breath.