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      The Brewing Voting Rights Clash

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn PoliticsThe Brewing Voting Rights ClashRepublicans are reuniting — and re-energized — as they pursue a longstanding political goal.March 2, 2021, 6:47 p.m. ETCredit…Antonio de LucaThe 2020 election was a wild one. And under the strange circumstances, Republicans wound up turning against one another on an issue that tends to unite them: voting access and elections.Some Republican officials fought to restrict access to the ballot amid the pandemic, while others endorsed mail-in voting and other methods to make voting easier. After the election, some Republicans backed President Donald Trump’s unfounded claims of election fraud, while a number of state-level officials — such as Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia and his secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger — defended the integrity of their own election systems.But now that the election is behind us, Republicans are reuniting on this issue, leading efforts around the country to restrict access to the vote. And in many cases they’re weaponizing Trump’s fabrications from 2020 to justify doing it. In Georgia this week, the Republican-led state legislature is moving forward with a bill to restrict absentee voting and limit early voting on weekends.The G.O.P. has one big advantage here: a newly cemented 6-to-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, which is broadly seen as receptive to restrictions on voting, even if it didn’t support Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. The justices heard oral arguments today in a challenge to the Voting Rights Act stemming from policies in Arizona during the 2020 election, and the court appeared sympathetic to the Republican plaintiffs’ arguments.Democrats, meanwhile, are equally unified in their efforts to preserve widespread voting access, particularly in Black and brown communities that are most heavily targeted by restrictive voting laws. The House today held a debate on the For the People Act, known as H.R. 1, which among other things would create a basic bill of rights for voting access. The legislation is expected to pass the chamber tomorrow along party lines.To put this all in perspective, I called Wendy Weiser, who studies these issues as the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at N.Y.U.’s law school. She took time out of a whirlwind news day on the voting front to answer a few questions for On Politics. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.Hi, Wendy. Let’s begin with the news from Georgia. What is the significance of the legislation making its way through the state legislature there, and is it part of a trend?The bill in Georgia is one of the most significant and restrictive voter suppression bills in the country, but it is not unique right now. We’ve been tracking the legislation to restrict and also to expand voting access across the country for over a decade, and right now we have well over 250 bills pending in 43 states across the county that would restrict access to voting. That is seven times the number of restrictive voting bills we saw at the same time last year. So it is a dramatic spike in the push to restrict access to voting.So we’ve seen this is a growing movement. It’s not brand-new this year, it wasn’t invented by Donald Trump, but it was certainly supercharged by his regressive attack on our voting systems. We’re seeing its impact in Georgia, but also across the country.Republicans have been talking about voter fraud, and attempting to limit access to the ballot, for many years. How much is the current surge in restrictive voting legislation related to Donald Trump and the conspiracy theories he pushed last year, during and after the campaign?Many of these bills are fueled by the same rhetoric and grievances that were driving the challenges to the 2020 election. In addition to expressly referencing the big lie about widespread voter fraud and that Trump actually won the election, they’re targeting the methods of voting that the Trump campaign was complaining about. So, for example, the single biggest subject of regressive voter legislation in this session — roughly half the bills — is mail voting.That is new this year. We’ve been tracking efforts to restrict access to voting for a very long time, and absentee voting has not been the subject of legislative attack before. It was the politicization of that issue in the 2020 election, principally by the Trump campaign and allies, that I think helped elevate that issue to a grievance level that would cause it to be the subject of legislative attack.The Supreme Court today heard oral arguments in a challenge to the Voting Rights Act, brought by the attorney general of Arizona. What is at stake in that case?On a narrow level, the case is challenging two provisions of an Arizona law that made it harder for voters of color in Arizona to participate in the election process, but the case’s significance is much broader. The plaintiffs and the Republican National Committee are actually arguing to dramatically scale back the strength of the nationwide protections against voting discrimination in the federal Voting Rights Act.About eight years ago, the Supreme Court gutted the most powerful provision of the Voting Rights Act, the preclearance provision, which applied to states with a history of discrimination. That led to disastrous outcomes across the country, but it did not invalidate the nationwide protections against discrimination in voting, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. So this is the next shoe, which I hope will not drop.At a time when voting rights in America are under significant attack, more than they have been in decades — an attack through racially targeted efforts to restrict access to voting — we need the protections of the Voting Rights Act more than ever. So this is absolutely the wrong direction to go in.With the Voting Rights Act in peril, Democrats in Congress are moving forward with legislation to ensure people’s access to the ballot. What are their proposals?There are two major pieces of voting rights legislation that are moving through Congress. The one that was not voted on today is called the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and it would restore the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act, which requires a federal review of changes in certain states to see if they’re discriminatory. It would also make other improvements to the Voting Rights Act to make it more effective.The other bill, which was voted on today, is called the For the People Act, H.R. 1. It would create a baseline level of voter access rules that every American could rely on for federal elections. This one would address almost comprehensively the attacks on voting rights that we’re seeing in state legislatures across the country. So, for example, in many states we’re seeing attempts to eliminate no-excuse absentee voting. H.R. 1 would require all states to offer no-excuse absentee voting. Every state would then offer that best practice of voting access, and it would no longer be manipulated, election by election, by state legislators to target voters they don’t like.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      A Supreme Court Test for What’s Left of the Voting Rights Act

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyA Supreme Court Test for What’s Left of the Voting Rights ActWhile state legislatures consider new voting restrictions to address claims of election fraud, the justices will hear arguments on what kind of legal scrutiny such laws should face.The Supreme Court has never considered how a particular provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 applies to policies that restrict the vote.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesFeb. 28, 2021, 12:24 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — As Republican state lawmakers around the nation are working furiously to enact laws making it harder to vote, the Supreme Court on Tuesday will hear its most important election case in almost a decade, one that will determine what sort of judicial scrutiny those restrictions will face.The case centers on a crucial remaining provision of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race. Civil rights groups are nervous that the court, now with a six-justice conservative majority, will use the opportunity to render that provision, Section 2, toothless.The provision has taken on greater importance in election disputes since 2013, when the court effectively struck down the heart of the 1965 law, its Section 5, which required prior federal approval of changes to voting procedures in parts of the country with a history of racial and other discrimination.But Chief Justice John G. Roberts’s majority opinion in the 5-to-4 decision, Shelby County v. Holder, said Section 2 would remain in place to protect voting rights by allowing litigation after the fact.“Section 2 is permanent, applies nationwide and is not at issue in this case,” he wrote.But it is more than a little opaque, and the Supreme Court has never considered how it applies to voting restrictions.The new case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, No. 19-1257, was filed by the Democratic National Committee in 2016 to challenge voting restrictions in Arizona. Lawyers for civil rights groups said they hoped the justices would not use the case to chip away at the protections offered by Section 2.“It would be just really out of step for what this country needs right now for the Supreme Court to weaken or limit Section 2,” said Myrna Pérez, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice, which submitted a brief supporting the challengers.Civil rights lawyers have a particular reason to be wary of Chief Justice Roberts. When he was a young lawyer in the Reagan administration, he unsuccessfully worked to oppose the expansion of Section 2, which had initially covered only intentional discrimination, to address practices that had discriminatory results.The Arizona case concerns two kinds of voting restrictions. One requires election officials to discard ballots cast at the wrong precinct. The other makes it a crime for campaign workers, community activists and most other people to collect ballots for delivery to polling places, a practice critics call “ballot harvesting.” The law makes exceptions for family members, caregivers and election officials.“I can’t believe the court would strike down common-sense election integrity measures,” Mark Brnovich, the state’s attorney general, said in an interview. In his brief, he wrote that “a majority of states require in-precinct voting, and about 20 states limit ballot collection.”Whether the particular restrictions challenged in the case should survive is in some ways not the central issue. The Biden administration, for instance, told the justices in an unusual letter two weeks ago that the Arizona measures did not violate Section 2. But the letter disavowed the Trump administration’s interpretation of Section 2, which would limit its availability to test the lawfulness of all sorts of voting restrictions.Section 2 bars any voting procedure that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race.” That happens, the provision goes on, when, “based on the totality of circumstances,” racial minorities “have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.”Dissenting in the Shelby County case, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Section 2 was not nearly as valuable as Section 5.A polling site in Phoenix in 2016. The case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, was filed by the Democratic National Committee that year to challenge voting restrictions in Arizona.Credit…Max Whittaker for The New York Times“Litigation occurs only after the fact, when the illegal voting scheme has already been put in place and individuals have been elected pursuant to it, thereby gaining the advantages of incumbency,” she wrote. “An illegal scheme might be in place for several election cycles before a Section 2 plaintiff can gather sufficient evidence to challenge it. And litigation places a heavy financial burden on minority voters.”While Section 5 was available, Section 2 was used mostly in redistricting cases, where the question was whether voting maps had unlawfully diluted minority voting power. Its role in testing restrictions on the denial of the right to vote itself has been subject to much less attention.But Paul M. Smith, a lawyer with the Campaign Legal Center, which submitted a brief supporting the challengers, said lower courts had worked out a sensible framework to identify restrictions that violate Section 2.“It is not enough that a rule has a racially disparate impact,” he said. “That disparity must be related to, and explained by, the history of discrimination in the jurisdiction. Our hope is that the court will recognize the importance of maintaining this workable test, which plays an essential role in reining in laws that operate to burden voting by Blacks or Latinos.”The two sets of lawyers defending the measures in Arizona did not agree on what standard the Supreme Court should adopt to sustain the challenged restrictions. Mr. Brnovich, the state attorney general, said the disparate effect on minority voters must be substantial and caused by the challenged practice rather than some other factor. Lawyers for the Arizona Republican Party took a harder line, saying that race-neutral election regulations that impose ordinary burdens on voting are not subject at all to challenges under Section 2.Last year, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled that both Arizona restrictions violated Section 2 because they disproportionately disadvantaged minority voters.In 2016, Black, Latino and Native American voters were about twice as likely to cast ballots in the wrong precinct as were white voters, Judge William A. Fletcher wrote for the majority in the 7-to-4 decision. Among the reasons for this, he said, were “frequent changes in polling locations; confusing placement of polling locations; and high rates of residential mobility.”Similarly, he wrote, the ban on ballot collectors had an outsize effect on minority voters, who use ballot collection services far more than white voters because they are more likely to be poor, older, homebound or disabled; to lack reliable transportation, child care and mail service; and to need help understanding voting rules.Judge Fletcher added that “there is no evidence of any fraud in the long history of third-party ballot collection in Arizona.”In dissent, four judges wrote that the state’s restrictions were commonplace, supported by common sense and applied neutrally to all voters.Lawmakers were entitled to try to prevent potential fraud, Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain wrote. “Given its interest in addressing its valid concerns of voter fraud,” he wrote, “Arizona was free to enact prophylactic measures even though no evidence of actual voter fraud was before the legislature.”The appeals court stayed its ruling, and the restrictions were in place for the election in November.Mr. Brnovich will argue before the justices on Tuesday in the case that bears his name. He said the Ninth Circuit’s approach “would jeopardize almost every voting integrity law in almost every state.”Leigh Chapman, a lawyer with the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which filed a brief supporting the challengers, said the Supreme Court faced a crossroad.“Especially in the absence of Section 5,” she said, “Section 2 plays an essential role in advancing the federal commitment to protecting minority voters and ensuring that they have an equal opportunity to participate in the political process.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How Alvin the Beagle Helped Usher In a Democratic Senate

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHow Alvin the Beagle Helped Usher In a Democratic SenateSenator Raphael Warnock was sworn in this week as Georgia’s first Black senator, and he arrived with a canny canine assist.Senator Raphael Warnock and Alvin the beagle during the production of his campaign ad.Credit…Warnock for GeorgiaPublished More

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      The Youthful Movement That Made Martin Luther King Jr.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Youthful Movement That Made Martin Luther King Jr.In this moment made so dark by white nationalism and truth denial, Americans should look to the country’s legacy of young leaders with forward-thinking wisdom.Mr. Benjamin is the author of “Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America.”Jan. 17, 2021, 7:00 p.m. ETMartin Luther King Jr. at home in Montgomery, Ala., in May 1956.Credit…Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesThere’s an image of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that’s seared into my mind. Eyes inviting and innocent, face relaxed, the casually dressed Dr. King reminds me of a cousin at a card party — he looks so young. When Dr. King elucidated his dream at the March on Washington in 1963, he was 34 — younger than most Americans now, given the national median age of 38.Despite his youth, or perhaps because of it, Dr. King understood the long view of history. He could not have foreseen a crowd brandishing guns and ransacking the Capitol, abetted by a failed president and right-wing digital media networks peddling debunked conspiracy theories. But he might have foreseen the Senate election victories of two youthful Southerners, Jon Ossoff, 33, and Raphael Warnock, 51, the latter a charismatic preacher and a successor to his pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church.Dr. King was a mobilizer of voters as much as he was an orator. To put voting rights at the forefront of the country’s consciousness, Dr. King helped launch a voter-registration drive in Selma, Ala., in early 1965. In many marches, over many weeks, Dr. King accompanied hundreds of Selma’s Black residents to the county courthouse. During one voter registration trip, he and 250 demonstrators were hauled to jail by the segregationist sheriff. That very day, county officers arrested some 500 schoolchildren who were protesting discrimination.When a 26-year-old Black civil rights activist, Jimmie Lee Jackson, was fatally shot during a march in nearby Marion, Ala., Dr. King, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organized a voting-rights march from Selma to the state Capitol in Montgomery. The hundreds of demonstrators, including Hosea Williams, 39, and John Lewis, 25, chairman of the S.N.C.C., were stopped as they left Selma, at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Alabama state troopers and local vigilantes attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas. Alongside others badly injured, Mr. Lewis (a future U.S. congressman) suffered a fractured skull during “Bloody Sunday.”The march resumed days later with federal protection. It stood on the shoulders of longstanding action: As far back as the 1930s, Ella Baker, in her 20s and 30s, worked as a community organizer in New York. By the mid-1940s, she was traveling across the South, recruiting new members to anti-racist groups and registering voters.Personally and through their work, Ms. Baker, Mr. Williams, Mr. Lewis and Dr. King faced down legally sanctioned oppression. They confronted horrors that we do not feel as regularly in our bones. They lived through them. How is it that they remained patriots?In this moment made so dark by white nationalism and truth denial, Americans should look to these examples of young leaders with forward-thinking wisdom to carry us through, to show how our civil rights ancestors got things done. This country can survey their organizing tactics to see step-by-step how Dr. King and his allies accomplished so much. Commemoration involves studying their careers as a strategy and amending their efforts to provide a road map to achieving political power.At this tender juncture in our country’s trajectory, countless young grass-roots leaders and local organizations are reshaping human equality and power. Setting a national example, the New Georgia Project, Black Voters Matter and Georgia STAND-UP were part of an effort that registered roughly 520,000 overlooked, new voters after 2016. The New Georgia Project alone knocked on at least two million doors, made over six million phone calls and sent four million texts to get out the vote during the general election and the runoff, according to the organization.To Americans who voted for the first time this cycle, or to anyone else born after 2002, Bloody Sunday can seem like ancient history — as distant and abstract as the Teapot Dome scandal. I’ve spoken to young people who don’t know what a sit-in or redlining is. But to others who cast a ballot for Mr. Warnock or Mr. Ossoff, a direct protégé of John Lewis, watching Confederates storm a federal building after a failed right-wing attempt to invalidate votes in heavily Black Democratic strongholds, Bloody Sunday does not look like distant history at all.Georgia’s electoral upsets and the resistance to Trumpism belong to a larger narrative and pantheon of liberation campaigns. These movements do not peddle in transactional politics; they forge transformative politics. They don’t dwell in the greasy realm of back-scratching and short-term calculation. They work deeply in vision, courage and action, persevering and believing in themselves when no one else does.“You see, I think that, to be very honest, the movement made Martin rather than Martin making the movement,” Ella Baker once reflected to an interviewer. “This is not a discredit to him. This is, to me, as it should be.”As we commemorate Dr. King, we need to toss the “great man” concept of leadership, our knee-jerk longing to worship epic individuals and not citizen action. Contrary to the mythology of most King celebrations, Dr. King’s true contribution wasn’t as a single messiah of civil rights, but as a formidable organizer of people and causes. To peddle the great Moses version of Dr. King’s legacy is to betray the greatness of his extraordinary deeds, whose lessons and necessity are more urgent than ever.Rich Benjamin (@IAmRichBenjamin) is writing a book that will be a family memoir and portrait of America. He is the author of “Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More