6-28-06, 10:23 am

Many Americans were shocked to discover a week ago that House Republicans had apparently rebelled against their own leaders by voting to delay the renewal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, an obvious ploy to give the misleading impression that the GOP generally supports the law's renewal. The act established federal regulatory procedures that finally enabled the government to end the de facto disenfranchisement of millions of African Americans, often sustained by state-sanctioned KKK terror that had been in effect since the end of Reconstruction.

What is going on here? First, most people don't know that the Voting Rights Act has to be periodically renewed, which itself is fairly outrageous, since it brings with it the possibility that the rights that so many people paid so much to gain could be simply cancelled by a right-wing Congress using one pretext or another to achieve that end.

Actually, segregationists have dreamed of eliminating the act from the first moment it was past, the way corporate leaders dreamed of eliminating the National Labor Relations Act when it was first passed in 1935.

The late Strom Thurmond supported Richard Nixon over Ronald Reagan in 1968 and lined up the segregationists who had followed him into the GOP to support Nixon, because he thought he had a pledge from Nixon to oppose renewing the act if he became president. Fortunately, Nixon double-crossed Thurmond, which was one trick that Tricky Dick pulled that was for, not against the people.

Although Ronald Reagan began his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi (the town where three civil rights workers were brutally murdered in 1964) with a crudely-coded racist appeal to 'states rights,' and did everything in his power to undermine enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, particularly the later affirmative action directives which stemmed from it, neither his nor subsequent administrations have openly sought to repeal the Voting Rights Act.

Actually, the Southern Republicans who challenged the renewal last week have focused on a provision aimed mostly at Southern states that requires these states to gain 'pre-clearance' from the Justice Department for any amendments to their voting laws. 'The pre-clearance portions of the Voting Rights Act should apply to all states or no states,' says Representative Lynn Westmoreland (R Ga.), sponsor of an amendment that would 'update' the list of states based on voter turnout every four years.

Actually Westmoreland has a point, but not the one he is pushing. All states should be compelled to comply with Justice Department oversight regularly on voting rights, since the forces of disenfranchisement today use computer checks rather than burning crosses and death threats to purge the voter rolls of people (the present term is 'scrub the voter lists'). These policies in Florida in 2000 and a number of states in 2004 were an important part of Bush's Supreme Court appointment to the Presidency in 2000 and his very questionable narrow victory in 2004.

In Florida, for example, thousands of African American voters (but not Cuban American voters likely to vote Republican) were the targets of a 'felon scrub' of the voting rolls, even though there were questions about the 'felonies' that many had supposedly committed. Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris was able to hustle this racist tactic past the Clinton Justice Department to the detriment of Al Gore.

In 2004, the GOP greatly expanded their voter challenges nationwide from 2000. Of the estimated three million 'voter challenges,' 88% were laid against minority voters, African American voters particularly. To some analysts, these and other actions, particularly in Ohio, are evidence that the 2004 election was as much stolen as the 2000 election, albeit in a way that was much more effective in regard to public opinion. Studies of the 20004 election even show that GOP leaders referred to their computerized lists as 'caging lists,' an incredible expression of racist language, although they have formally and vehemently denied that such lists existed.

The Republicans have to deny that they are targeting people in large numbers because of their race or color, because that is a crime under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Today the Act is an important guardian of our diminishing democracy. It must be both maintained and strengthened by giving Civil Rights attorneys the right to challenge the 'consulting firms' that the GOP has hired in recent years to carry out the targeted disfranchisement of voters both South and North who are most likely to vote against the Republican Right in federal elections.

In the case of the NLRB, reactionary forces eventually enacted the Taft-Hartley Law (1947), amending the National Labor Relations Act to give states the right to pass anti-union shop 'right to work' laws. Reactionaries probably hope to amend the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to give states like Florida the 'right' to enact anti-civil rights election laws that will accomplish the disenfranchisement of large numbers of voters.

That the Republicans have even raised the issue of blocking and/or amending the act's renewal is an example of the extreme hypocrisy of an administration and a party that proclaims that it is fighting to bring 'democracy' to Iraq and other countries, while it is engaging in updated versions of racist disenfranchisement to trample on the democratic rights of the American people.



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