A bipartisan group of lawmakers wants to overcome the Supreme Court's setbacks.
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Last year, the Supreme
Court decimated one of the civil rights movement’s crowning achievements. Now,
it’s time for Congress to pick up the pieces, put it back together and make our
laws strong enough to protect our most important right: our vote.
Many folks who lived
and fought through the civil rights movement weren’t just frustrated by the
Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which undermined a core
provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
They were heartbroken.
The ruling gutted the
Voting Rights Act provision that required the Justice Department to pre-approve
changes to voting laws in areas with a history of discrimination at the ballot
box. For nearly half a century, the Justice Department used that authority to
block some of the country’s most egregious attacks on voting rights.
In doing so, the Court
opened the gates for a flood of new laws that restrict the right to vote
through a range of methods. Since Shelby, states and municipalities have pushed
through legislation making it harder for millions of people to cast ballots.
States have cut back on early voting, made it harder to register, and begun
requiring specific forms of identification — documents that many eligible
voters don’t have and can’t easily get.
From shortening the
hours the polls are open to moving polling locations, these restrictions fall
heaviest on people of color, the elderly, students, and the poor. Now it’s up
to Congress to solve the problem.
The Supreme Court’s
ruling left room for Congress to repair the damage and put the law’s
protections back into effect. And a bipartisan group of representatives have
been working to do just that with the Voting Rights Amendment Act (VRAA). It is
a flexible, modern, nationwide solution to combating voting discrimination. And
it would provide new tools to stop voter suppression and ensure that any
proposed election changes are clear and fair.
Unfortunately, after a
bipartisan process in which members of both parties had a hand in drafting the
new legislation, House Republican leaders and the chair of the House Judiciary
Committee have decided to block the fix and refuse even to hold hearings on the
legislation.
That’s very bad news
for voting rights and very bad news for our democracy.
Voting rights shouldn’t
be a partisan issue, and representatives from both parties should be applauded
for doing the hard work of repairing one of our nation’s most important laws.
Now it’s up to ordinary people across the political spectrum to take a lesson
from the civil rights movement and call out the lawmakers standing in the way
of an important bill.
With grassroots
pressure, there’s no reason the Voting Rights Amendment Act can’t become law
this year, restoring and strengthening our civil rights protections.
Marge Baker is the
executive vice president of People For the American Way. PFAW.org
Distributed via OtherWords. OtherWords.org
Distributed via OtherWords. OtherWords.org