There really is a bottom, and we've arrived

Can you believe Republicans in the Senate blocked the Freedom to Vote Act today?  Of course you can.  It happened.  It’s all over the news.  If you turn your television to CNN or MSNBC, you can’t miss it.  But it’s still hard to believe we have actually arrived at the place where Republicans in the upper house of the Congress have voted against a bill seeking to make it easier for citizens of the United States to exercise their most precious right, the right to vote.

It wasn’t like this when the Senate confronted the issue of voting rights on July 20, 2006.  Just 15 years ago the vote in the Senate was the exact opposite of today’s vote – unanimous, 98 to zero – to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the landmark law passed during the Civil Rights era that restored the right to vote that had been taken away from Black Americans during the Jim Crow era.  98 to zero.  Not a single Senator – not Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, not Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, not even Mississippi Senator Trent Lott voted against reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act.

But today all 50 Republican senators voted against a compromise bill that you could argue merely fiddles around at the edges of voting rights.  The bill would allow same-day voter registration and no-excuse mail-voting for federal elections and make the presidential election day a holiday.  It would also make early voting a little easier to implement in some states, protect federal election records, and prevent non-partisan election officials from interference by state legislatures and governors.

The bill stops far short of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which was passed by the House in August and would restore the enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act, Articles Two and Five, that were eviscerated by two Supreme Court decisions, Shelby County v Holder in 2011 and Brnovich v Democratic National Committee this year.  Mitch McConnell has already announced that Senate Republicans will block the John Lewis Act.  Of course they will…because…well, why exactly?  When McConnell and a whole bunch of Republican Senators who were just as conservative as those serving in the Senate today voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act in 2006, the vote was completely uncontroversial.  Everybody was for it.  Hell, it passed the House 390 to 33.  Who could be against reauthorizing the law that finally, after more than 170 years, guaranteed every American, regardless of their race, creed or national origin, the right to vote?

As we learned today, the whole damn Republican Party could.  Which raises the question, what happened between 2006 and today to create this disgusting turn of events?

The best answer is that their heart was never really in it.  Conservative Republican activists had been after the Voting Rights Act practically from the day Lyndon Johnson signed it into law.  What they didn’t like about the law was its “preclearance” provision, which required 9 Southern states and parts of another – 40 of North Carolina’s 100 counties – to submit any changes in voting procedure, even changing the location of a single polling place, to the Department of Justice or a three-judge panel in Washington D.C. for “clearance” before the change could take place.

There was good reason for this, of course.  All the so-called “covered” states and jurisdictions had made it practically impossible for their Black citizens to vote for nearly a hundred years.  After the passage of the Voting Rights Act, they kept it up.  Counties in Mississippi and Alabama and other Southern states attempted to change the way they voted for positions such as county boards of supervisors to dilute the power of Black votes.  Counties that had voted by district changed over to voting “at large,” so that districts that were all-Black or nearly so could not elect Black citizens to the county boards to represent them. 

Preclearance requirements meant that such nakedly discriminatory practices could be easily challenged and were.  Instead of having to go into court to overturn discriminatory voting practices, the Department of Justice could simply rule that such changes were illegal and overturn them. 

That’s the way it went until 2011, when Chief Justice John Roberts ruled that “the country has changed” so much that the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act was no longer necessary.

Here’s how much the country had changed at the time Roberts made that patently insane observation.  The day after the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Shelby, the state of Alabama passed a voter ID law that was discriminatory on its face against minority voters.  The state made it necessary for voters to show a photo ID in order to vote, and then a year later, closed down 30 of the state’s DMV offices, almost every one of them in Black-majority areas, where people went to get drivers licenses or special voter ID’s if you didn’t drive.

A huge outcry against the DMV closures caused the state to rethink its plans, but still some offices were closed and it remained harder for Black Alabama citizens to get their voter ID’s than it was for whites.

Voter ID requirements, which states previous to the Shelby decision had not seen as necessary, spread across the South and other Republican-controlled states.  That’s how much the country had changed.  The minute the strictures of the Voting Rights Act were lifted, Southern states and other Republican controlled states began instituting restrictions on voting that affected minority voters more than white voters, and they haven’t stopped.  Several hundred voter suppression laws are pending in Republican controlled states at this moment, and restrictive voting laws have been passed in 12 states already.

In the deep South, the right to vote was denied to Black citizens for decades.  People died fighting to get the right to walk into a polling place and do the one thing that really, truly makes you a citizen:  cast a vote.  Politicians regularly call it “the sacred right” with good reason.  If a democracy that has a constitution with a strict separation between church and state like ours has anything that’s “sacred,” it is the right to vote.

But the Republican-dominated Supreme Court and Republicans in the House and the Senate have never believed in the right to vote.  It’s true that they believe in the right of certain people to vote for certain people.  They believe in the freedom not to do stuff like wear masks and get vaccinated.  When it comes to the freedoms that truly make us free, however, like the freedom to walk into a voting booth and vote for whoever you want, forget about it.  Fifty Republican Senators proved that today.

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