Mark Crispin Miller: Supreme Court hopes to kill the Voting Rights Act

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Mark Crispin Miller

On Friday, The New York Times reported that the Supreme Court will rule on whether Congress had the right to extend the Voting Rights Act. Specifically, SCOTUS will decide the constitutionality of Congress's renewal of Section 5 -- the Act's provision that certain states and municipalities get federal permission (called "preclearance") before making any changes that affect the voting by their residents.

The states concerned are mostly in the South, and all have had rich histories of electoral malfeasance, largely aimed at disenfranchising minority voters. The Southern states are Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia; the list also includes Arizona and Alaska.

It was in May 2006 that Congress, then Republican-controlled, unanimously voted to extend the Voting Rights Act, removing none of its provisions. At the time, that vote appeared to be a nice surprise, since some Republicans had wanted to renew the Act selectively. In fact, that overwhelming vote in favor of the Act was only "a facade," as Linda Greenhouse notes in her op-ed:

"They allowed the extension to pass," she writes, "on the assumption that the Supreme Court would eventually answer the question, relieving them of the political cost of dismantling an iconic statute."

So here we are. As both Greenhouse and Adam Liptak note, Chief Justice Roberts is not keen on efforts to protect minority voters; and so it's very possible that he and his extremist brethren on the Court will rule so as to void the Act's renewal. Thus they would continue with the radical assault on democratic governance that SCOTUS started, or intensified, with Bush v. Gore -- which, of course, not only put Bush/Cheney in the White House, but also served to fortify the Court's own ultra-right plurality.

But we can't treat this new judicial threat to our democracy as an entirely rightist move, or blame this situation only on Bush/Cheney. Of course, the Senate Democrats did not mount any strong resistance to Bush/Cheney's choice of Roberts or Alito; but what we're facing now is based on a far larger abdication of responsibility -- not just by nearly all the Democrats (our President-elect included), but by the press as well (and that, of course, includes The New York Times).

For both the Democratic Party and "the liberal media" have both refused even to note, much less investigate, the Bush regime's unprecedented program of election fraud and vote suppression; and that long silence has allowed the Bush Republicans to argue, with straight faces, that the only such wrongdoing has been perpetrated by the Democrats. Meanwhile, says Bush/Cheney's party, Jim Crow is a distant memory, since no-one is denied the right to vote on racial grounds, nor has that sort of thing occurred for many years.

It is on the basis of that crackpot argument that SCOTUS now intends to nullify the Voting Rights Act. The case that Roberts and his brethren have agreed to hear  -- Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Mukasey-- argues that there's simply no more need for those once-infamous localities to seek "preclearance" to make any changes in their voting rules. The lawsuit argues bluntly that "the times they have a-changed," that citizens throughout the land now cast their votes without impediment, and that it's therefore time for We the People to move on, without that onerous and shameful Section 5:

The America that has elected Barack Obama as its first African-American president is far different than when §5 was first enacted in 1965. Appellees barely acknowledge the deep-rooted societal change, preferring to assume that conditions remain similarly dire despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There is no warrant for continuing to presume that jurisdictions first identified four decades ago as needing extraordinary federal oversight through §5 remain uniformly incapable or unwilling to fulfill their obligations to faithfully protect the voting rights of all citizens in those parts of the country.

For anyone with even cursory knowledge of what's really happened in U.S. elections since 2000, that argument is staggering. It is, in fact, as wild a misconstruction of the truth as any other ultra-rightist myth -- e.g., that there's no scientific evidence of natural selection, or that "global warming" is a hoax, or that the Holocaust was all made up. And so it should have been, quite literally, laughed out of court (even that court). But it was not -- because the truth about U.S. elections has been ignored, shrugged off and/or suppressed since Bush & Co.'s first stolen presidential race eight years ago. Thus both the Democratic Party and the press apparently believe that ultra-right canard, because they don't know, or don't want to know, what's really happened here.

An adequate rebuttal of that lie would take up far more space than I have here; and anyone who wants to know the truth can get it from the many books and articles and documentaries now readily available. Suffice it here to say that, while the lawsuit claims that things have universally improved since 1965, the evidence makes clear that, since 2000, things have gotten just as bad as they once were, or even worse -- albeit voters black and brown and red (and student voters of all colors) are now deprived of their essential civil rights not through crude violence, as in Selma once upon a time, but through methods infinitely subtler, and far more efficient.

All of this amounts to a mere fraction of the evidence that this election too was stolen -- even though Barack Obama was indeed elected as our "first African-American president." This election, first of all, was stolen from him, insofar as his true victory margin was no doubt considerably larger than we think -- not just a "decisive victory" as the media (and he) have termed it, but a landslide, which, if it had not been whittled down by electronic fraud and vote suppression, would have made quite clear that Bush & Co.'s party is dead meat. This election, secondly, was very likely stolen from a number of Democratic challengers for several House and Senate seats. And yet most important is the fact that this election too was stolen from those voters  -- mostly African-American, such as Obama -- whose participation was illegally (or "legally") pre-empted or annulled, so that they could not participate in our self-government; and if they were wrongly disenfranchised, our votes too mean that much less, however happy we may be about who "won."

If we really care about the voting rights of all our fellow-citizens, then it is not enough to cheer Obama's victory, which, historic though it is, counts for much less than the democracy which he is now about to lead. So if we really care about those rights of ours, we have to face the fact that this democracy is in the gravest danger still -- supremely threatened not just by Bush/Cheney's party and their Court, but, no less, by the silence of the press, and of the Democrats, and of our President-elect. And so we have to break that silence now, or it will finish us at last, whichever party manages the show.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Mark Crispin Miller is a professor of media studies at New York University and the author of Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform, now available in an expanded paperback edition. My latest book is Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008.

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