Last year, the Supreme Court decimated one of the civil rights movement’s crowning achievements. Now, it’s time for Congress to pick up the pieces, put it back together and make our laws strong enough to protect our most important right: our vote.
Many folks who lived and fought through the civil rights movement weren’t just frustrated by the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which undermined a core provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
They were heartbroken.
The ruling gutted the Voting Rights Act provision that required the Justice Department to pre-approve changes to voting laws in areas with a history of discrimination at the ballot box. For nearly half a century, the Justice Department used that authority to block some of the country’s most egregious attacks on voting rights.
The Supreme Court’s decision didn’t eliminate the Justice Department’s preclearance authority itself, but it removed the formula that determined where it could use that authority, rendering the entire preclearance provision useless.
In doing so, the Court opened the gates for a flood of new laws that restrict the right to vote through a range of methods. Since Shelby, states and municipalities have pushed through legislation making it harder for millions of people to cast ballots. States have cut back on early voting, made it harder to register, and begun requiring specific forms of identification — documents that many eligible voters don’t have and can’t easily get.
From shortening the hours the polls are open to moving polling locations, these restrictions fall heaviest on people of color, the elderly, students, and the poor. Now it’s up to Congress to solve the problem.
The Supreme Court’s ruling left room for Congress to repair the damage and put the law’s protections back into effect. And a bipartisan group of representatives have been working to do just that with the Voting Rights Amendment Act (VRAA). It is a flexible, modern, nationwide solution to combating voting discrimination. And it would provide new tools to stop voter suppression and ensure that any proposed election changes are clear and fair.
Unfortunately, after a bipartisan process in which members of both parties had a hand in drafting the new legislation, House Republican leaders and the chair of the House Judiciary Committee have decided to block the fix and refuse even to hold hearings on the legislation.
That’s very bad news for voting rights and very bad news for our democracy.
Voting rights shouldn’t be a partisan issue, and representatives from both parties should be applauded for doing the hard work of repairing one of our nation’s most important laws. Now it’s up to ordinary people across the political spectrum to take a lesson from the civil rights movement and call out the lawmakers standing in the way of an important bill.
With grassroots pressure, there’s no reason the Voting Rights Amendment Act can’t become law this year, restoring and strengthening our civil rights protections.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
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We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
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With love, rage, and solidarity,
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