“Exactly seven years ago today, the United States Supreme Court destroyed what I considered to be the heart and soul of the Voting Rights Act — the preclearance formula. This process ensured that the burden was not on those citizens whose rights were — or will be — violated. In justifying the Shelby v. Holder decision, the Majority argued that blatant, racist discrimination is rare; looking at the current state of our country, we know this to be false.” Representative John Lewis, letter to Attorney General William Barr, June 25, 2020"
Washington will take a break from business as usual this coming week to honor the life of Representative John Lewis, an extraordinary man who quite simply put his life on the line for democratic values. Lewis will be accorded the well-deserved honor of lying in state in the U.S. Capitol. The catafalque his coffin will rest on is the same one that supported Abraham Lincoln’s coffin in 1865.
All of the tributes to Lewis are well-earned. He was a man who as PBS analyst Mark Shields said “left America a better place than he found it. How would John Lewis like us to honor him? Given his life’s record, I think that there is no better way to honor Lewis’ life than to get into a little “good trouble.”
There can be no better way to honor John Lewis’ memory than to restore the effectiveness of the Voting Rights Act. Prior to the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, African American voter turnout in the South was almost nonexistent. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 expanded the 14th and 15th amendments by banning racial discrimination in voting practices. The act was a response to the barriers that prevented African Americans from voting for nearly a century. Also very much worth noting was the Voting Rights Act was passed in part because the country saw people like John Lewis literally put their lives on the line so their fellow Americans could vote.
For many years, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 did what it was intended to do and African American voters’ participation in elections — especially in the South — increased very significantly. Unfortunately, in 2013 the Supreme Court took the heart out of the Act. As the New York Times explained at the time:
“The Supreme Court on Tuesday effectively struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, freeing nine states, mostly in the South, to change their election laws without advance federal approval. The court divided along ideological lines, and the two sides drew sharply different lessons from the history of the civil rights movement and the nation’s progress in rooting out racial discrimination in voting. At the core of the disagreement was whether racial minorities continued to face barriers to voting in states with a history of discrimination.”
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts essentially argued that American has changed since 1965 and that the preclearance provisions of the law were no longer needed. Roberts is right that America has changed since 1965, but not nearly enough to warrant gutting the Voting Rights Act. The course of events since 2013 have shown that Chief Justice Roberts and the four other justices who supported this point of view were profoundly wrong.
A number of Democrats on Capitol Hill and one courageous Republican (Senator Lisa Murkowski) are seeking to honor Lewis by passing the The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act which would restore and expand provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that were struck down by the Supreme Court.
House Majority Whip John Clyburn said today (July 26) that he will introduce the Voting Rights Advancement Act in the House of Representatives tomorrow and that he is optimistic about passage.
Unfortunately, the odds of passage for the Voting Rights Enhancement Act are long at best in the Senate. It seems unlikely that any GOP senators will join with their colleague from Alaska. A Trump veto is a certainty. While we need to know the difficulty of the course, we need to remember that what Lewis showed us time after time: What counts are not the odds against success but the importance of doing the right thing.
If you want to honor the remarkable legacy of John Lewis, you need to get in some good trouble. There is no better trouble to get into then telling your senator that he or she needs to support the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
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