The Supreme Court’s decision to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act brought back the image of Lyndon Baines Johnson signing his signature achievement in 1965, prompting the state of Texas, within hours of the decision, to put into place the onerous voter ID and gerrymandered redistricting that the Department of Justice, under that same provision of the VRA which SCOTUS deemed “unnecessary” because the nation “has changed.”
That image of LBJ is emblazoned in my mind from my recent visit to the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas. That mammoth marble building on the campus of the University of Texas – the subject of another SCOTUS decision this session having to do with affirmative action – is mere steps away from the state’s Capitol Building, a replica of the nation’s Capitol, grand dome and all, where State Senator Wendy Davis filibustered under Texas’ torturous rules for 11 solid hours, in order to run out the clock (with help from thousands of shouting, cheering onlookers who jammed the tiers of the building) so that the Republican-dominated legislature could not pass anti-women, anti-choice, anti-women’s health law. Under the redistricting map which the Department of Justice blocked and now Texas will move forward with, her seat would have been eliminated and her supporters would not have had representation.
Austin is not Texas (sad to say). Austin is a shining oasis of youth, vitality, creativity, humanism and open-mindedness in a desert landscape stuck in the Dark Ages and hugely proud of it.
But when you go to Austin – to enjoy its food, wine, music, quirkiness and vibe – you get some sense of the outrageous arrogance and bigotry that is exemplified by the notion of Texas Exceptionalism that goes back to its rebellion from Mexico (which was fought because Mexico had banned slavery and the Tejians, as they were called, who had come with their slaves from the United States wanted to keep them). It is so ironic that in those early days, when the Mexican Government under President Santa Ana realized the mistake of inviting the Anglos and giving them land grants, they wanted to cut off immigration from the US! Stephen Austin couldn’t have that!
The Anglos took over Tejas and basically made life so difficult for the Tejians (the actual Mexicans), that most left, or were relegated to an inferior status if they stayed. Ditto the Indians, the First People on the land.
You learn this when you visit the Bullock Texas State Museum in Austin, across the street from the Capitol building, where you can see a multi-sensory “Star of Destiny” movie in the Texas Spirit Theater designed to instill in you (and particularly the Texas school kids who cram the theater) this noble, heroic individualism and perseverance that the state claims as its unique character.
Actually, they can’t put lipstick on this pig: this individualism they are so proud of comes across as selfishness and arrogance of epic proportions, and that is what is manifests today.
I have never had the experience before of visiting a place where my impressions were formed of negative stereotypes and had those negative stereotypes confirmed by reality.
This distaste that formed followed me out of the Texas Spirit Theater, through the exhibit which ends with a condescending “tip of the hat” to the Indians for basically submitting to assimilation, through the section on the rebellion from Mexico, into the section leading up to the Civil War and the chart showing the rising output of cotton as the population of slaves increased, through the Civil War years (which Texas, more than any other place, is still fighting with its nullification and calls for secession), into the section of the discovery of oil and the millionaires it forged, and to which they cling despite the destruction of lives and the environment. There is even an exhibit which pays lip service to “Women Shaping Texas in the 20th Century” and “The Future of Texas Women’s History” (rewritten, I’m guessing, with not a good ending) – a complete joke when you see the war on women the state government is now waging.
When I came to the LBJ Library, I wondered how this man, this native son of Texas and the South could have grown into the champion of civil rights, acknowledging when he signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, “We’ve lost the South.” In fact, the library does not do justice to LBJ’s upbringing and I was left with many questions, but there is one section that explains his understanding and empathy and his determination to attack poverty and the entrenched political and social forces that keep certain people in the chains of poverty: after college, LBJ became a teacher in an impoverished Mexican-American town of Cotulla, Texas. The photo of him sitting on the porch with his students is compelling.
He took from this a first-hand understanding of how the lack of access to good education, food, health care – everything that the comfortable white majority took for granted for themselves but denied others – perpetuated the cycle of poverty and deprived the rest of society of the potential talent that was squandered.
I realized that my impression of LBJ was colored by the Vietnam War. I only just learned through tapes newly released by the LBJ Library, that LBJ managed to secure a peace agreement just before the 1968 election, but Nixon’s campaign sabotaged the talks and convinced the Vietnamese to keep fighting on because they would get a better deal under Nixon; in the audio tapes you can listen to in the Library, you hear LBJ warning Senator Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader, to get a message to Nixon that “this is treason.” It is still a mystery to me why LBJ did not let this information be known because Hubert Humphrey would then have won the presidency instead of Nixon and the Vietnam War would have been ended. Apparently LBJ was more concerned about concealing the fact he bugged everybody’s phones, so I guess this is the choice he made, and a tragic one at that. And so America fought on and 26,000 more American soldiers died as well as tens of thousands of Vietnamese.
That’s who the Republicans were then and are now – as embodied in the Texas capital where Sen. Davis bravely and nobly fended off an attack on women’s civil rights, their right to equal protection under the law, their right to privacy, their right to determine their own future.
But the victory will be short-lived in Texas, where Governor Rick Perry has already called for another special session in order to pass the legislation, and in Washington where Republicans are adept at using the filibuster and all sorts of devices to make sure the will of the majority is thwarted – repeal Obamacare for the 38th time, anyone? Yet another anti-choice measure?
Some may question why there is an epidemic of anti-choice, anti-Women’s health laws percolating in every state dominated by Republicans, that blatantly violate Roe v. Wade, which was supposed to be “settled law.” It’s because the anti-choice activists are confident that the Roberts Court will find the rationale they need to overturn Roe v. Wade. Frankly, a woman’s right to choose was predicated on the “privacy” provision of the Fourth Amendment, when it should have been based on the “equal protection” clause. Without the right to choose, to make choices for one’s own body, one’s own future, a woman is less than a second-class citizen, a woman is a slave of the State.
Republicans, thanks to the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, which, combined with Citizens United, will continue to take over all levels of government, to make sure that the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson are completely undone.
Some have said the Supreme Court’s five conservative justices act out of “originalism”, out of “principle” and “ideology.” I would say they rule with a measure of activism never seen before to advance their political strategy.
The Supreme Court, going back to the 2000 Bush v. Gore decision- basically taking authority over an election away from the state (Florida’s Supreme Court had ordered a recount of all the ballots because the 517 margin of “victory” for Bush was well under the margin that would have triggered a recount) in order to give it to their guy, George W. Bush (who was the challenger in the case), went outside the rules and protocols of the Supreme Court to manufacture the Citizens United decision which equates property with personhood and cash with speech. Now they have again contradicted the precise language of the 15th amendment in overturning Congress’ reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, after 51 witnesses, 50,000 pages of testimony, to say that Congress was misguided in its almost unanimous verdict to reauthorize it in 2006.
Indeed, both the Voting Rights Act and DOMA decisions were 5-4, with the conservatives solidly against anything that smacks of civil rights, personal rights, people over corporations or institutions.
Scalia even contradicted himself. In his blistering dissent over the DOMA decision, he said, “We have no power to decide this case. And even if we did, we have no power under the Constitution to invalidate this democratically adopted legislation.”
But on Voting Rights, Scalia claimed just the opposite: that the Supreme Court should be the one to dictate to Congress and supplant their action. During the oral arguments, he belittled the Voting Rights Act as a “perpetuation of racial entitlement” that was somehow insulated from the “normal political process.” (Tell that to the 90 percent of Americans who wanted to see background checks for guns).
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg exposed the hypocrisy in her blistering dissent, charging the majority with “hubris”: “[T]he Court’s opinion can hardly be described as an exemplar of restrained and moderate decision making,” she wrote. “Quite the opposite. Hubris is a fit word for today’s demolition of the VRA…”
“The Court appears to believe that the VRA’s success in eliminating the specific devices extant in 1965 means that pre-clearance is no longer needed. … With that belief, and the argument derived from it, history repeats itself.”
Within hours of the Supreme Court’s decision to end the federal government’s ability to stop packing, cracking, and other voter suppression tactics, Texas filed to immediately implement its widely lambasted Voter ID law and the redistricting map that had been rejected by the Department of Justice; Mississippi, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida also are steamrolling ahead to put into place the voter suppression measures that the DoJ had blocked.
It was already the case that 1.5 million more people voted for Congressional Democrats than Republicans, yet Republicans still held to a substantial majority in the House of Representatives. The same is true in State Houses across the country.
Now that kind of imbalance will only be exacerbated at every level – including Nassau County which has adopted a gerrymandered map designed to give Republicans a permanent majority in the Legislature.
It will take 60 or 70 percent majority – not 50.1 percent – for Democrats to win any election. That makes a Democrat worth a fraction of a Republican. So much for one-person, one-vote.
And we see what happens when Republicans control all branches of government – in Texas where thousands of women will be handed a death sentence when the Legislature reconvenes to obliterate women’s health clinics; in Michigan and Wisconsin.
It is unlikely with this Congress that has proved so effective in blocking anything in support of civil rights, human rights, individual opportunity, that they will devise a formula more acceptable to the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, which would likely find another excuse to overturn the Voting Rights Act.
Instead, now the government can only enforce the provisions of the 15th Amendment, but after the fact, after an election has been won through illegitimate means that suppress or make it impossible for a minority to elect a representative of their choosing.
So here’s what “We the People” should demand of a voter protection law that Congress should enact:
1) Undo the election results as the remedy if a jurisdiction is found to discriminate or suppress votes, and call for new election
2) Enforce real penalties for individuals who interfere with voting or suppress votes, including tearing up voter registration cards, giving false information about where or when an election is being held, conspiracy to purge legitimate voters from voting lists
3) Manipulating or altering election results including hacking into voting machines
4) Using intimidation tactics to keep people from polls
Happy Independence Day.
