Today, members of Congress took an important first step in restoring and reinvigorating the protections afforded by the Voting Rights Act before it was so drastically gutted by a majority of the Supreme Court last June.
A bipartisan group of House members have offered legislation to update the formula for preclearance and to strengthen the other judicial remedies available to people who have been denied their fundamental right to vote and to have that vote count. While not a perfect repair to the damage done by the Shelby County case, we are hopeful that this legislation—and, we trust, a bipartisan companion bill in the Senate—will begin the important dialogue needed for this nation to appreciate that pernicious schemes to deny or dilute the right to vote on the basis of race are not historical anomalies. These tactics are, unfortunately, alive and well in the United States and, indeed have been even more obvious since the U.S. Supreme Court eviscerated the preclearance remedy, thus allowing states previously subject to federal oversight to enact and implement racially discriminatory laws with impunity.
I know, I know. You’re probably saying, “How can this Congress possibly get something this hot passed when they can’t even seem to get anything done on the routine stuff?” A reasonable question, to be sure. But here’s the dirty little secret about Congress: even a Congress as fractious as this one operates on the basis of relationships, and there’s a lot of respect in the Republican caucus for James Sensenbrenner, the lead Republican sponsor of the “VRA fix” legislation, who has championed the Voting Rights Act through several bipartisan reauthorizations during his nearly 35 years in Congress and pledged to fix what the Supreme Court did practically right after they did it. If anyone can get this done, he can.
So, let’s give them a chance to get this right before we take our usual defeatist default position. And let’s keep the conversation going.
Read Project Vote’s statement on the introduction of the Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2014 here.
Photo by SEIU International via Creative Commons.