You Can Blame the Supreme Court for America’s Decade of Voter Suppression
► For more, visit Mother Jones: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/...
This is what gutting the Voting Rights Act looks like.
The main reason that Republicans are able to target Black representation so ruthlessly is because of Shelby County v. Holder, a 2013 Supreme Court ruling holding that states with a long history of discrimination no longer needed to approve voting changes and electoral maps with the federal government—a process known as “preclearance.”
June 25th marks the 10th anniversary of the decision, which has had a devastating impact on voting rights in the South. Shelby County laid the groundwork for a wave of new voter suppression laws and racially gerrymandered maps. Decades of advances for minority voters have been wiped out in the past ten years.
“History did not end in 1965,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion in the 5-4 ruling, alleging that “things have changed dramatically” in the South. But Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s fiery dissent, where she compared the decision to “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet,” now seems far more prescient.
“It’s pouring right now in the South,” says Hilary Harris Klein, a senior counsel for the North Carolina-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice. “Absolutely pouring.”
Since 2013, more than thirty states have passed new restrictions on voting, including 85 percent of states that were previously required to get federal approval for their voting changes, either statewide or in select jurisdictions. Twenty new laws impeding voting access and fair election administration were passed in the former preclearance states following the Shelby decision, according to an analysis by the Voting Rights Lab provided to Mother Jones.
The last redistricting cycle also marked the first without preclearance, leading civil rights groups to challenge maps for Congress or the state legislature in ten of eleven Southern states based on allegations that they discriminated against minority voters. At least 21 Black lawmakers lost their seats last year in the former Confederate states, according to a review by the Washington Post of data from the National Conference of State Legislatures.
“Because of the makeup of Southern legislatures, they’re starting to act pre-1960s,” says Dan Blue Jr., the minority leader in the North Carolina Senate.
The history of the South shows how quickly gains and rights for formerly disenfranchised communities can be taken away. “From Reconstruction through to 1900, North Carolina elected 111 black legislators,” The Economist wrote last year. “For the next 68 years, it elected none.” That changed with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, but the steady progress made in the South since 1965 has been abruptly reversed by the Shelby decision.
Ari Berman has a retrospective on America's decade of voter disenfranchisement. Check it out at MotherJones.com.
#VotingRights #South #Politics #Trump
--
For more award-winning independent reporting, visit Mother Jones: https://www.motherjones.com/
Facebook: / motherjones
Twitter: / motherjones
Instagram: / motherjonesmag
Watch video You Can Blame the Supreme Court for America’s Decade of Voter Suppression online without registration, duration hours minute second in high quality. This video was added by user Mother Jones 23 June 2023, don't forget to share it with your friends and acquaintances, it has been viewed on our site 1,56 once and liked it 14 people.