End unfair Voting Rights Act sections
May 30, 2006    Georgia Political Digest.com   Opinion

End unfair Voting Rights Act sections
Phil Kent |Phil Kent.com | bio

May 30, 2006

It was August 6, 1965 when the Congress-- reacting in no small measure to televised images of mounting black civil rights protests and pressure from President Lyndon Johnson -- passed the Voting Rights Act.

The political landscape of the South changed forever, and thousands of blacks have been elected to city, county and statewide offices in Southern states since then.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act – a nationwide ban on discrimination in voting – is permanent law. Section 4 determines who is subject to Section 5 Justice Department preclearance of voting matters and whether the attorney general may send observers under Sections 6 and 8. Section 7 governs registration lists and 9 governs removing voters from those lists.

The end of Section 4 in August 2006 triggers the expiration of 5,6,7,8 and 9.

It is time for a majority in Congress – if it has any spine whatsoever-- to dump all of those unconstitutional stipulations into the dustbin of history.

Section 5 applies only to part or all of 16 states— most of them the old Confederate States of America. So the upcoming congressional debate should focus on the extent of voting abuses that still require special federal scrutiny and the adequacy of the Justice Department’s powers under the Act.

Congress must consider if the covered states and areas are still sufficiently different from uncovered states like Massachusetts to warrant all voting changes to be submitted to the Justice Department for prior approval. The answer? There’s no concrete evidence that conditions in covered states 40 years later still require officials to go hat in hand to Justice bureaucrats for approval.

Continuation of this differential treatment insults citizens and their elected legislatures in covered states by codifying that they are “racist” and “bigoted” and can’t be trusted to make legislative changes— but the rest of the country can!

Making Section 5 permanent and extending it nationwide, as some Republicans suggest, would not only be costly and bureaucratic, but makes no sense given that current demographic trends in some areas guarantee that white voters will become a minority. (Democrat-run Justice Departments have never protected disenfranchised white voters under this law, and it was only last year that a Republican-controlled civil rights division of Justice intervened in a blatant Mississippi case where black county officials were denying whites the right to vote.)

Furthermore, Section 5 objections received by the Justice Department have trickled in recent years to a handful. Almost all changes submitted from covered localities are non-controversial— raising no discrimination concerns. This fact underscores that Section 5 coverage is too broad. (For example, even simply moving a polling place in a small Georgia town must be precleared -- more waste of time and taxpayers’ money.)

There’s one last stipulation that Congress should also not to extend: Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act. It discourages immigrants from learning English and blocks assimilation into American culture by requiring that if 5 percent of a population in a jurisdiction is non-English speaking, then ballots and election materials must be printed in foreign languages. This is an enormous unfunded burden on local jurisdictions. (Los Angeles must translate ballots and voting material into six languages.)

The U.S. Justice Department can already adequately police voting abuses anywhere in the United States, if it so chooses. It can send federal observers anywhere in the nation to monitor elections, with or without any other these Voting Right Act sections.

The sections up for renewal are unconstitutional, unnecessary and punitive. Even old-time liberals crow that they were inserted to “punish” the states of the old Confederacy that voted in 1964 not for incumbent Johnson but for states’ rights Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater (who opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act).

Finally, here’s a question for radical black activists like Jesse Jackson and the white “politically correct” liberal lobby: Wouldn’t making Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act permanent – which they want-- place blacks and Hispanics in a state of perpetual dependence on the federal government based on the concept that they are unable to protect their own rights and are incapable of participating fully in the democratic process? How come that isn’t “racist”?

Phil Kent is an Atlanta-based author and pundit on WAGA-TV’s Georgia Gang.

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