House Republicans and their Speaker gave away medals yesterday but won’t do anything to advance replacement legislation for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the law those medal-earners fought for in Alabama and Mississippi and a lot of other Southern states.
In 2015 the Supreme Court decided 5-4 that racism no longer exists in the United States, and that those states which had been required to get Federal approval before changing their voting procedures due to their past misbehavior no longer had to do so.
The current coverage system, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, is “based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day.”
See? According to Chief Justice Roberts voting in these United States is just peachy!
Except:
Texas announced shortly after the decision that a voter identification law that had been blocked would go into effect immediately, and that redistricting maps there would no longer need federal approval.
And Texas was just the first to jump on this bandwagon. Many other states, all of them governed by Republicans, decided that it was just too easy to cheat the white man out of his rightful election victories and thus laws must be changed.
What’s to be done? Well:
There are two pieces of legislation with bipartisan support in Congress to fix the VRA, the Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2014 and the Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2015, but the congressional GOP leadership refuses to advance them. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who’s presiding over the Gold Medal ceremony, said he personally supports fixing the VRA but won’t push House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte to hold hearings on the issue.
In other words, we the GOP like the system just the way it is. We know the country’s getting browner and blacker, and so we have to be able to manipulate the laws without interference. Oh, and don’t let that “bipartisan” support fool you. The moment the bill got close to passage I’m pretty sure the Republicans who signed on would vote no “because they listened to their constituents.”