Jim Crow lives: Yesterday, members of the House, most of whom represent states that belonged to the old Confederacy, stalled the renewal of the Voting Rights Act which imposes federal oversight on states where disenfranchisement of African-American citizens was both overt and pernicious for nearly a century after the end of the Civil War:
“A lot of it looks as if these are some old boys from the South who are trying to do away with it,” said Representative Lynn A. Westmoreland of Georgia, who said it would be unfair to keep Georgia under the confines of the law when his state has cleaned up its voting rights record. “But these old boys are trying to make it Constitutional enough that it will withstand the scrutiny of the Supreme Court.”
I happened to catch Rep. Westmoreland on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal yesterday. Leaving aside his evil leer and Foghorn Leghorn accent, during his entire live interview, he never once referred to the reason the Voting Rights Act was imposed on Georgia and the other Southern states but rather focused on the act’s discriminatory effects on districts such as his own.
This is another shining example of the conservatives’ culture of victimhood: “Stop persecuting us because we are racists!”
The only problem with your position here is that it completely ignores the facts aout what is going on.
1) The Voting Rights Act will not expire in 2007 — merely a couple of provisions of it. Those provisions were intended to expire in 1970 in the original VRA.
2) The major provision expiring, pre-clearance of any and all voting changes, applies ot only 9 states and is based upon voting data from 1964. Those trying to ramrod the extension through want to continue to use that data for another quarter century — making it 68 years old when the provision is next considered. Why not use more recent data, if you want to fix real (as opposed to historical) inequities? Or if pre-clearance is so important, why not extend it to cover every state, providing equal protection for all? Those are both proposed by the GOP dissidents, but rejected by Democrats (especially black Democrats).
3) The non-English ballot requirement is not supported by most Americans.
You gotta love it when Republicans decide to talk about facts.
Be sure and explain these facts to African-American and latino voters you’re trying to recruit into the GOP when they ask why your party is determined to weaken the Voting Rights Act.
There is a reason that nine states are targeted by this act, and if you believe that white people who run those states today wouldn’t try the same shenanigans to disenfranchise brown-skinned people that their grandpappies did back in the good ol’ days, you haven’t been paying attention to what happens every cycle in Florida when they expunge the “convicts” from the voter rolls, just to name one glaring instance of Jim Crow in the Walmart era.