SCOTUS Votes 5:4 to Uphold Voting Rights Act: Democracy by a Thread

[McCamy Taylor]

In the case of Tom Delay's Texas gerrymandering---gerrymandering made possible by the use of illegal campaign contributions which allowed Texas Republicans to gain control of the Texas legislature--the SCOTUS voted narrowly to affirm the Voting Rights Act and order a district to be redrawn because it violated the Voting Rights Act by denying 100,000 Latinos their right to representation.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13592999/

"At issue was the shifting of 100,000 Hispanics out of a district represented by a Republican incumbent and into a new, oddly shaped district. Foes of the plan had argued that that was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under the Voting Rights Act, which protects minority voting rights."

This case is significant, because it is one of the few instances in which the Voting Rights Act has been enforced in this country since W. took office. The Department of Justice under John Ashcroft and then Al Gonzales has chosen to pretend that the Voting Rights Act does not exist. Ashcroft did not prosecute Katherine Harris for using a felon's list in Florida which contained the names of tens of thousands of people entitles to vote (even though she was informed that the list was flawed in this way--a violation of the Act). He did not prosecute the thugs who crossed state lines to threaten and intimidate poll workers into stopping a lawful vote recount, even though that is clearly against the law. He did not step in when Diebold inserted an illegal patch called "rob.georgia.zip" into the softwear of of its voting machines in 2002, resulting in surprise upset victories over Democratic incumbents who had double digit leads in the polls.

Thanks to Ashcroft's non-enforcement and the climate of Anything Goes, election fraud reached epidemic proportion in 2004, with bogus voter registrations in which Democrats found their registration forms shredded, more questionable E-voting and, of course, Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell's blatant disregard of the Voting Right's Act. The Act basically says that every effort will be made to make sure that all eligible to vote get to vote and that every vote will be recorded if at all possible. Blackwell went to the opposite extreme, attempting to keep people from voting based on technicalities such as improper weight of paper used, wrong precinct or form used. He scrubbed thousands of minority and poor voters from the rolls without giving them a chance to get back on the rolls. He denied Democrats equal access to voting equipment. He interfered with the recount process. He broke the law so many times, it was ludicrous---and the Department of Justice looked the other way in every single instance, because everything Blackwell had done favored the Attorney General's boss.

Now, thanks to this laissez-faire attitude, the gloves are off. State legislatures in the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida and Ohio have passed laws that violate the Voting Rights Act. Not only has the Department of Justice failed to act, it actually rubber stamped a photo ID law in Georgia that the federal courts later struck down as amounting to a poll tax. Secretaries of State in Ohio and California are actively disenfranchising voters--and no one is acting to defend the voter's rights. Not the Department of Justice, not the Republican controlled Congress.

The only federal governmental body left that seems to believe that the Voting Rights Act is still the law of the land is the judiciary. And even at the Supreme Court of the United States, it is a 5 to 4 decision. One more Justice, and the Voting Rights Act will be dead in our lifetime, whether or not Congress ratifies it again.

It is essential to take back Congress in order to ratify the Voting Rights Act. It is also important that Congress become Democratic in order to keep W. from nominating any more extremist judges to the SCOTUS. And while they are at it, maybe Congress can do something about the biggest criminal of all in the current administration, the attorney general who thinks that he is the White House Counsel, Alberto Gonzales. If the attorney general can not be bothered to uphold the law, then our country will descend into anarchy.