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portlander23

(2,078 posts)
Thu Dec 22, 2016, 02:30 PM Dec 2016

Will Political Chaos in North Carolina Lead to a Third Reconstruction?

Will Political Chaos in North Carolina Lead to a ‘Third Reconstruction’?
Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan
Truth Dig

The North Carolina legislature—both the Senate and the House of Representatives—has been in the hands of Republicans since the anti-Obama tea party electoral backlash of 2010. When Gov. McCrory took office in 2013, after controversial statewide redistricting, he enjoyed an even stronger Republican legislative majority. Then the U.S. Supreme Court, in a narrow 5-4 partisan decision in the case of Shelby County v. Holder, threw out key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The floodgates were opened for the disenfranchisement of people of color across the South, and North Carolina didn’t disappoint.

“We have seen, since Shelby, the worst coordinated attack in this country,” the Rev. Dr. William Barber told us on the “Democracy Now!” news hour last April. He is the president of the North Carolina NAACP. He continued: “At the very time that African-Americans are voting at 70 percent and we’re building fusion with progressive whites and Latinos, we’ve seen an extremist governor and legislature vote to put in place apartheid voting districts. We’ve seen them shorten the early-voting period by a full week, because 70 percent of those that use the first week are African-American. We’ve seen them eliminate same-day registration, because 43 percent of those that use same-day registration are African-American. And we’ve seen them pass a strict form of photo ID that negatively impacts 300,000 voters. This is a racial and class attack on our democracy.”

Ultimately, a U.S. Court of Appeals agreed that North Carolina’s omnibus electoral law was unconstitutional. “The new provisions target African-Americans with almost surgical precision,” the opinion stated. North Carolina’s appeal of this decision to the U.S. Supreme Court lost in a 4-4 tie, as it came after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

Despite the political chaos, the Rev. Barber has hope, and envisions a “Third Reconstruction.” He told us, “They are afraid. They are fearful ... they see this tide rising. They see black and white and Latino people standing together in the Deep South. They know that if we have policy movement along with this kind of moral movement, it will not only energize North Carolina, but it could energize the rest of the South.”
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