The US Supreme Court Is Letting Racist Discrimination Run Wild In The Election System; Jim Crow Era
- The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963.
_______
- The Guardian, by Carol Anderson, Feb. 12, 2022. Ed. - The court has approved or tolerated massive voter roll purges, extreme gerrymandering and election laws that have a disparate impact on minorities. -
The US supreme court, in a 5-4 decision, used the ruse that it was too close to an election- 3 months away- to scrap a racially discriminatory, Republican-drawn legislative map in Alabama. A lower court had previously ruled against the state because its gerrymandered congressional districts diluted the voting strength of African Americans by ensuring that 27% of Alabama’s population would garner only 14% of the state’s congressional representation. But that reality didn’t faze 5 justices; the US supreme court was just fine with letting a policy designed to disfranchise Black voters unfurl & do its damage in an oncoming federal election.
The echoes of a brutal past are resonating in this decision.
After the civil war, Congress passed the 1867 Reconstruction Act, which provided that Black men had the right to vote, and then Congress followed that with the 15th amendment, which banned states from using race, color or previous conditions of servitude to undermine the right to vote. In a series of decisions in the late 19th and early to mid-20th centuries, however, the supreme court systematically dismantled those protections, as well as others crafted to support African Americans’ citizenship rights and defend against white domestic terrorism waged by the Ku Klux Klan and similar organizations.
Focusing on voting rights gives some indication of how pernicious the decisions were. The 1874 Minor v Happersett ruling asserted that the right to vote was not part and parcel of American citizenship. In 1876, United States v Reese et al dealt with a Black man who was trapped in a malicious catch-22 that prevented him from voting. He tried to pay his poll tax, which was required to vote, but the tax collector refused to accept the payment & the registrars would not allow him to cast a ballot without payment. The court ruled, despite this crude and brazen denial of his right to vote, that the 15th amendment “does not confer the right of suffrage upon any one”.
As states then began fully implementing Jim Crow legislation to disfranchise African Americans, the court, in the Williams v Mississippi (1898) decision, looked at the poll tax and the literacy test and ruled that those chokepoints to the ballot box- which had already removed 90% of registered Black voters in Mississippi from the rolls – did not violate the 15th amendment. In a 1903 case out of Alabama, Giles v Harris, the supreme court determined that it was powerless to stop a state from disfranchising Black voters even if the methods were unconstitutional. This assault on African Americans’ right to vote was an assault on American democracy aided & abetted by the highest court in the land. The results were devastating...
More,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/12/us-supreme-court-racist-discrimination-election-system
= new reply since forum marked as read
...every one with a Super Pac & a microphone in 2016, who looked the other way & said nothing about it, when the devastating loss was all on the line...when America was warned & those warnings were shouted over top of & ignored, over a daily blast of Populism...OWNS THIS LOSS.
Now, as we enter another campaign year with another election just months ahead, ..NOW we're hearing those fair weather politican's & their media, their social 'concerns' of Jim Crow & our Supreme Court, & like the devastating loss of Roe v Wade protections, they flat out IGNORED in the one election of our lifetime that they begged to be saved, ... by the one person who they ALL mercilessly vilified for even speaking at all.
Now they want President Biden to 'fix' their own fk ups of 2016.
Media & Celebrity Politicians, hypocritically now spout off the concern of the moment, that they never ever spoke of when the warnings of such dire loss were sounding in 2016.
Appears "Jim Crow' is the theme of the week. NOW they find it conveniently urgent to speak about it?
That is the shallowness of their hypocrisy.
There should not be one politician nor media source crying Jim Crow today, that makes one damned objection to Biden's SC nom.
And every one of them should be apologizing for their role in losing the SC in the 1st place.
