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speak easy

(9,096 posts)
Thu Mar 4, 2021, 04:21 PM Mar 2021

Why is it so hard for GOPers to say 'Jim Crow'?

Maybe it's because they knew they were guilty as hell, but stayed silent just as long as the silver was pouring into their pockets.

Jennifer Rubin: We need a national crusade against Jim Crow voting laws

“Experience has clearly shown that the existing process of law cannot overcome systematic and ingenious discrimination. No law that we now have on the books — and I have helped to put three of them there — can ensure the right to vote when local officials are determined to deny it,” the president said. “In such a case our duty must be clear to all of us. The Constitution says that no person shall be kept from voting because of his race or his color. We have all sworn an oath before God to support and to defend that Constitution. We must now act in obedience to that oath.”

President Barack Obama? Joe Biden? Actually, that was President Lyndon B. Johnson in a joint speech to Congress eight days after Bloody Sunday, when the John R. Lewis nearly lost his life. The vicious assault on peaceful demonstrators on March 7, 1965, setting out on their march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., was an inflection point, but not the sole factor in passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It took a bipartisan alliance (Northern Republicans and Democrats), religious and business leaders, and the full force of the presidency to raise this issue above the day-to-day politics of the time and get landmark legislation passed.

Sadly, the contents of the 1965 bill — including “a simple, uniform standard which cannot be used, however ingenious the effort, to flout our Constitution” and elimination of “tedious, unnecessary lawsuits which delay the right to vote,” as Johnson described it — are still front and center as states devise mechanisms to throw voters off the rolls (with purges, for example), make access to the ballot more difficult (e.g., fewer poll locations, longer lines, voter ID requirements, elimination of no-excuse voting) and disallow votes (e.g. with signature match requirements). The motive of Jim Crow states in 1965 was the same as it is now in 2021: the suppression of minority voters to perpetuate minority white rule.

The sprawling H.R. 1, however, addresses issues well beyond voting access, encompassing everything from campaign finance reform to Supreme Court ethics. However meritorious all those provisions may be, the legislation’s only hope (and it is a slim one) rests with Democrats’ willingness to pare down the measure to match the nature of the current assault on voting rights: Restore the pre-clearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act, require no-excuse voting by mail and some period of early voting (including weekends), mandate a paper ballot trail, ban periodic purges without voters’ consent, modernize voting systems and promote automatic registration. A short, easily understood list of items such as that will be critical to driving popular support. It is easy to think up reasons to oppose campaign finance reform; it is hard to deny the Justice Department the ability to anticipate and ward off anti-voting measures by states we now see are dedicated to reducing minority voting.

In short, if Democrats remove issues that will be used as a pretext for opposition, they can make this a clear up-or-down issue on voter suppression. Are you for or against Jim Crow laws?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/04/we-need-national-crusade-against-jim-crow-voting-laws/

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