Civil Voting Rights Act VRA 1964-5

primary 7 26 on desruction; sirta generic for voting rights esp for poc

this is both 64 and 65

NO MERRI

see SECTION V VRA

SEE ROBERTS

SEE SCOTUS 4 CLARENCE 6-3 DISSENT?

SEE GERRY 4 26

see shelby scotus roberts ARTL 2 AND 5? 10 25 ALITO 4 26

see CRM MLK

see voter suppression voter ID, election integrity BS Big Lie gt replacement

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lbj villain in both Selma movie and hillary's america?!

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AN BOLL BLIM THE PROGRESSIVE

There is no bigger con man in the United States than Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. Not even President Donald J. Trump.

The con began in September 2005, during Roberts’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Articulate, handsome, and energetic at fifty years old, Roberts seemed to have been culled “straight from central casting,” as Republican Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama actually remarked on the first day of the hearings. Roberts was also convincing—he famously promised that if confirmed, he would serve in the fashion of a baseball umpire, calling only “balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.” Seventy-eight Senators, including twenty-two Democrats, fell for the ploy and voted to give him the lifetime assignment.

The biggest yarn Roberts told during his hearing concerned his views on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA), a cornerstone of American democracy, which the Supreme Court gutted this past April in a redistricting case from the state of Louisiana (Louisiana v. Callais).

As is his prerogative as Chief Justice, Roberts assigned the task of drafting the Callais majority opinion to fellow conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who responded with a 6 to 3 ruling that held that, henceforth, Section 2 of the landmark legislation would require VRA plaintiffs to meet the nearly impossible burden of proving that redistricting maps challenged as “racial gerrymanders” were created with discriminatory intent rather than for permissible political purposes. The opinion allowed Louisiana to eliminate one majority Black Congressional district. It also effectively negated legislation passed in 1982 that had amended Section 2 to permit the Justice Department and private citizens to challenge election laws that have the effect of diluting minority voting power without proving intent.

Flash back to 2005 and it is apparent that, at best, Roberts misled the judiciary committee. In response to a question from Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy about the VRA’s constitutionality, Roberts replied, “[T]he existing Voting Rights Act—the constitutionality has been upheld. And I don’t have any issue with that.”

In fact, Roberts had plenty of issues with the VRA. As a young lawyer serving as a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith in the Reagan Administration, Roberts authored upward of twenty-five memos opposing the 1982 legislation. In them, Roberts urged the administration to defeat any proposed changes to the VRA and to keep the “intent test” established by a 1980 Supreme Court decision (City of Mobile v. Bolden) that required VRA plaintiffs to prove officials explicitly intended to discriminate against minority voters. Adopting the effects test over the intent test, Roberts argued, would create “a quota system [akin to affirmative action] for electoral politics by creating a right to proportional racial representation on elected governmental bodies.”

In another exchange at his confirmation hearing, this time with Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, Roberts sought to explain away his memos as just part of the job he had been assigned at the time rather than a reflection of his personal views, saying, “I was a twenty-six-year-old staff lawyer. It was my first job as a lawyer after my clerkships [with Second Circuit Judge Fred Friendly and Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist]. I was not shaping administration policy. The administration policy was shaped by the Attorney General . . . . It was the policy of President Reagan. It was to extend the Voting Rights Act without change.”

Despite young Roberts’s warnings, the 1982 amendments were passed by Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support by a vote of 389 to 24 in the House and 85 to 8 in the Senate. President Reagan quickly reversed course and signed the amendments into law on June 29, 1982. In 2006, Congress extended the VRA for another twenty-five years with even greater bipartisan support, by a vote of 390 to 33 in the House and 98 to 0 in the Senate.

Once installed as the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, it didn’t take Roberts long to show his true colors, declaring in a 2007 majority opinion on busing in public schools (Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District Number One) that, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Two years later, in an otherwise obscure case (Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder) involving the elected board of a municipal water district in Texas, he turned his attention to Sections 4 and 5 of the VRA, which required state and local jurisdictions, mostly in the South, with histories of egregious voter discrimination to obtain advance federal approval—known as “preclearance”—before making changes to their election procedures. Although his opinion left the sections intact, Roberts warned that unless Congress updated the formula to determine which jurisdictions should be subject to the preclearance process, the Supreme Court might stop the process altogether.

In 2013, he made good on that threat. Writing for a 5 to 4 majority in Shelby County v. Holder, he invalidated the preclearance formula and effectively put an end to the process, reasoning that racism in American elections was a thing of the past and there was no longer any justification for singling out Southern states for remedial measures. Shelby led swiftly to an upsurge in restrictive voter ID laws, voting-roll purges, and limitations on mail-in balloting in Republican-led states across the country, especially in the South.

Although Roberts also declared in Shelby that Section 2 of the VRA “is permanent, [and] applies nationwide,” he returned to the attack with his 2019 majority opinion in Rucho v. Common Cause, holding that “political gerrymandering” claims cannot be brought in federal courts because they present nonjusticiable “political questions.” Political gerrymandering has a long history in the United States, Roberts noted, dating back to the salamander-shaped voting districts created by Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry in 1812 to give an advantage to his Democratic-Republican Party. “The Constitution,” Roberts argued in Rucho, “supplies no objective measure for assessing whether a districting map treats a political party fairly” and thus provides no basis for proportional political representation.

Lacking objective standards to work with, he concluded, the federal courts had no business entering the redistricting wars.

Rucho, in turn, set the stage for Callais in 2026, which put an end to claims of racial gerrymandering, the last bastion of relief from discrimination available under the VRA. Callais gave red states permission to redesign their electoral maps to eliminate “majority-minority districts” (where a minority group comprises a majority of the population) that had been created to boost the electoral power of Black and Latine voters, who tend to lean Democratic. Election law predict that as a result of Callais, as many as nineteen seats in Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana could be eliminated, starting with the November midterms, potentially returning the bulk of the former states of the Confederacy to virtual one-party rule.

As The Nation’s justice correspondent Elie Mystal put it in a mournful post-Callais column, “The ruling effectively ends the VRA, and with it the all too brief era of multiracial democracy in America.” And as Ari Berman added in a piece for *Mother Jones*, Callais may have been written by Alito, but it “represents the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts . . . [who] has been trying to kill the Voting Rights Act for more than forty years.”

The severe negative reaction to Callais forced Roberts to do damage control. Addressing a judicial conference in Hershey, Pennsylvania, in early May, he said: “I think at a very basic level, people think we’re making policy decisions, [that] we’re saying we think this is what things should be as opposed to this is what the law provides . . . . I think they view us as truly political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do. I would say that’s the main difficulty . . . . We’re not simply part of the political process.”

The problem for Roberts is that his shtick just isn’t working anymore. Any lingering pretense of impartiality ended with his stunning majority opinion in 2024’s Trump v. United States, which offered the President near-complete immunity from criminal prosecution for his official acts. In addition to shielding Trump from legal accountability, the immunity ruling embraced the Reagan-era “unitary executive theory,” which posits that all executive power is concentrated in the person of the President, as a settled principle of Constitutional law.

The unitary theory was on full display again in late-June opinions this term on immigration and independent agencies. In Trump v. Slaughter, another 6 to 3 majority opinion written by Roberts involving the firing of a Federal Trade Commissioner, the Court overturned a federal law that bars the President from firing members of the independent agencies created by Congress without just cause. In the process, Roberts overruled a precedent decision that had stood since 1935 (Humphrey’s Executor v. United States), which had upheld the contested statute.

In rulings on the immigration cases, both written by Alito and resolved 6 to 3 along party lines, the Court upheld the administration’s termination of temporary protected status (TPS) for an estimated 350,000 Haitian and 6,000 Syrian nationals who were allowed to come to the United States to avoid persecution (Mullin v. Doe), and authorized the administration to revive Trump’s first-term policy denying asylum seekers the right to enter the country before reaching the U.S.-Mexico border (Mullin v. Al Otro Lado).

The immigration decisions sparked uncommonly vitriolic dissents from the Court’s three liberal Justices, exposing deepening fissures on the bench. In the asylum case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted the majority, writing, “The consequences of today’s decision are predictable. More people will die. More people will attempt to cross the border illegally, and some will make it while others will not.” In the TPS case, Justice Elena Kagan all but accused the majority of enabling Trump’s racism, citing the President’s public statements accusing Haitian refugees of “eating” cats and dogs, “poisoning the blood,” and saying they come from a “shithole country” and “probably have AIDS.”

The Court’s racial bias was also evident in its “shadow docket,” the term given to emergency appeals that come before the Court outside of its standard “merits” docket and are typically resolved rapidly without full briefing and on an interim basis while litigation proceeds in lower courts. In one particularly egregious ruling (Noem v. Perdomo), the Court permitted immigration agents to detain suspected undocumented immigrants on the basis of race, ethnicity, language, location, and occupation, green-lighting unbridled racial profiling.

The shadow docket also included an emergency order permitting Alabama to reinstate a Congressional map that eliminates a Black-majority district that the Court had invalidated under the VRA just three years ago.

Even in the handful of major decisions the Trump Administration lost this term, the cases were narrowly framed. In Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, with Roberts writing for a 6 to 3 majority, the Court invalidated Trump’s worldwide “liberation day” tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, but left the door open for more targeted duties under different statutes. Similarly, in Trump v. Cook, with Roberts writing for a 5 to 4 majority, the Court temporarily barred Trump from firing a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors while her lower-court challenges continue.

Continuing the trend, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett writing for a 5 to 4 majority in Watson v. Republican National Committee, the Court held that existing federal election laws do not prevent Mississippi, and by extension other states, from counting absentee ballots postmarked by election day but received up to five days thereafter. Barrett, however, very carefully noted that her opinion did “not consider the scope of Congress’s authority to regulate federal elections” through legislation, possibly a covert nod to the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act that Trump has insisted Congress pass, which would outlaw nearly all mail-in voting.

The same is true for the Court’s much-anticipated decision in Trump v. Barbara, on Trump’s Executive Order declaring an end to birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment for the children of undocumented people. In years past, the Court would have unanimously rejected Trump’s gambit. Instead, in a 5 to 4 opinion written by Roberts and joined by Barrett, the order was barely rebuffed for violating the text and history of the Amendment.

Roberts may have gained a small measure of redemption with his Barbara opinion, but the Court’s accelerating lurch to the right under his stewardship has done permanent damage to the institution, and sparked renewed calls for radical reforms, including the imposition of term limits for the Justices and, most far-reaching of all, for an expansion of the bench to as many as thirteen members.

To accomplish any significant reforms, however, will require Democrats to stiffen their spines and to take back both houses of Congress later this year and the presidency in 2028. In the meantime, we can take heart that the long con Roberts started in 2005 has been exposed for all to see. And we can heed the call of New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie to remind ourselves that Roberts and his GOP confederates do not own the future of the Constitution. We do.

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https://arkansasadvocate.com/2024/03/18/to-boost-trump-gop-attorneys-general-charge-into-battle-over-state-election-rules/

To boost Trump, GOP attorneys general charge into battle over state election rules

Zachary Roth

March 18, 2024

A loose coalition of Republican-led states, often led by Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, shown above, has advanced a string of arguments that appear designed to lay the groundwork for GOP legal victories in the event of a contested presidential vote. (Stew Milne for Alabama Reflector)

With less than six months before voting begins, the legal jousting over the rules for the 2024 election is already underway. And former President Donald Trump’s campaign is getting support from allies who have stayed mostly under the national radar: red-state attorneys general.

In court filings made in recent months, these chief state legal officers have advanced a string of arguments — some strikingly far-reaching — that appear designed to lay the groundwork for Republican legal victories in the event of a contested presidential vote, or to otherwise boost Trump and the GOP.

Often led by Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, a loose coalition of Republican-led states has submitted briefs urging judges to:

Throw out certain mail ballots,

Weaken long-standing protections against racial discrimination in voting,

Green-light gerrymandered district maps,

And empower partisan state legislatures, rather than courts, to set election rules.

“These are all setting up an argument, potentially, to say that the 2024 election was flawed because of all these state practices that are questionable,” said Paul Nolette, a political science professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee who has written in depth on the role of state AGs. “The AGs just have been critical in pushing these arguments.”

Marshall’s office did not respond to a request to comment for this story. But last month Marshall also led a coalition of red states in submitting an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to pause Trump’s election subversion trial tied to the events of Jan. 6, 2021 — a stance that aligned the group perfectly with the interests of the Trump campaign.

And in 2020, many of these same state AGs, including Marshall, sought to have the courts overturn Trump’s election loss.

An election decided in the courts?

The danger of outright election subversion this year appears to have receded somewhat, election law experts have said, thanks to important federal legislation and the results of the last midterms. But the chances that the election will be contested, and ultimately settled in the courts, remain very high.

In that scenario, advocates and experts say, these Republican AGs look well-placed to provide the kinds of conservative legal arguments that could prove pivotal, both by directly influencing court decisions and by infiltrating the broader public debate.

But many of these claims, democracy advocates warn — especially those that support new voting restrictions, reduce the power of minority voters, or undermine courts’ authority to set election rules — could threaten fair elections.

“A huge part of the overall anti-democracy movement is really based on continuing to find ways to use legal tactics as a jumping-off point to spread the election denier message,” said Lizzie Ulmer, senior vice president of strategy and communications for States United Democracy Center, a pro-democracy group.

“There are good and pro-democracy state AGs on both sides of the aisle. But the truth is there are AGs in office right now that have the potential to do real harm. And we’ve seen that in the past and we’re seeing it today.”

Growing politicization

The involvement of the Republican AGs in elections cases with national stakes marks the latest step in a decades-long trend toward AGs taking on more politicized roles.

In less polarized times, experts say, state AGs mostly presented as apolitical prosecutors, and frequently teamed up across party lines to tackle issues of public concern.

That began to shift in earnest during the George W. Bush administration, when Democratic AGs used a series of splashy lawsuits against Wall Street firms and corporate polluters, among others, to advance national policy and political goals — and to boost their own national profiles.

But in the Trump era, the shift has intensified. Several close observers said a key moment came in 2017, when Republicans sought to oust then-Virginia AG Mark Herring, a Democrat — ending a long-standing custom in which neither party spent money targeting incumbent AGs of the other party. Herring ultimately won re-election, but that cycle saw record campaign spending on AG races.

In Republican-led states, the politicization of AG offices reached its height around the 2020 election, centered around the Republican Attorneys General Association, an advocacy group for Republican AGs. In the leadup to the events of Jan. 6, 2021, the group’s fundraising arm, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, sent robocalls urging people to gather for a march to the U.S. Capitol to “stop the steal” and “protect the integrity of our elections.”

Marshall, the Alabama AG, served as chair of RLDF at the time, and has said he was unaware of the robocalls. He has declined to say whether RAGA or RLDF staff were at the Capitol on Jan. 6, and his office has denied public records requests by the Alabama Political Reporter for his calendars covering the period.

Along with other Republican AGs, Marshall sought to cast doubt on the 2020 election results, telling Newsmax not long after the vote: “We obviously have concerns about some of the issues, specifically of irregularities and fraud in other places.”

On Dec. 10, 2020, Marshall and other Republican AGs joined Trump for a meeting at the White House. A day earlier, Marshall had announced that Alabama would join a lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton seeking to overturn the results in Pennsylvania and three other states narrowly won by Joe Biden. Seventeen Republican-led states ultimately signed on to the Texas case.

Idaho AG disagreed

One state that didn’t join the suit was Idaho, whose AG at the time, Republican Lawrence Wasden, saw the Texas lawsuit as an improper attempt to use the AG’s office to make policy — and to interfere in other states’ business.

“The policy-making function under both the state and federal constitutions is clearly put in the hands of the legislative branch of government,” Wasden told States Newsroom. “The AG is an executive officer, and does not have those powers. That’s not how we should make public policy.”

After 20 years in office, Wasden lost his 2022 re-election bid in the Republican primary to former U.S. Rep. Raul Labrador — a defeat Wasden attributes to GOP voter anger at his decision not to join the Texas case. But he hasn’t wavered in his view that it was the right call.

“If Texas can control or influence the outcome of the election in Pennsylvania, then California can influence the election in Idaho,” Wasden said. “And that is not how federalism works.”

Labrador was elected attorney general later that year, and has signed Idaho on to several of the elections cases brought by Republican AGs.

As for Marshall, in 2021, he withdrew Alabama from the bipartisan National Association of Attorneys General, saying the group had “moved too far to the left.” The next year, Texas, Missouri, and Montana followed suit.

In 2022, Marshall declined to say, when asked under oath while testifying before Congress, that Biden was “duly elected,” answering only that “he is the president of this country.”

Months later, Marshall was elected chair of RAGA. Now, he’s leading the charge among Republican AGs on election cases with an eye on 2024.

Weakening voting protections

Marshall has battled on behalf of strict voting laws in his own state.

His office energetically, and successfully, fought off a 2020 court challenge to an Alabama law that bars people with past convictions from casting a ballot. In that year’s election, he also succeeded in getting the Supreme Court to block an effort to allow curbside voting, which voting advocates said could offer easier access for elderly and disabled voters .

But it’s Marshall’s work on behalf of Republicans looking to influence election rules far beyond the Yellowhammer State that could have an even greater impact.

In January, Marshall led a coalition of 17 red states that submitted an amicus brief supporting a bid by national Republicans to require Pennsylvania to reject mail ballots with incorrect or missing dates.

In Pennsylvania’s 2020 election, there were over 10,000 such ballots, and how the case is resolved could help determine the winner of this pivotal swing state, if the result is very close. Democrats have voted by mail at significantly higher rates than Republicans in recent elections.

But the impact could be broader still. A district court found last year that the missing or incorrect dates are irrelevant to establishing a vote’s legitimacy.

That means, the court ruled, that under the materiality provision of civil rights law — first included in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, then extended to cover non-federal elections in the Voting Rights Act the following year — a missing or incorrect date can’t be used as a reason to reject a vote.

In their brief, Alabama and the other states called the district court’s ruling “seriously misguided.”

They argued that the materiality provision should be read more narrowly, and doesn’t bar states from imposing reasonable ballot integrity measures. And, they claimed, the provision contains no “private right of action,” meaning it can be enforced only by the U.S. Justice Department, not by the civil rights groups involved in the Pennsylvania case.

By itself, making the materiality provision harder to use would likely have only a limited impact, since it hasn’t been among the tools most commonly used to protect voting rights, noted Cameron Kistler, counsel at Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan democracy advocacy group.

But, he said, it comes in the context of other ongoing conservative legal attacks on voting protections — including attempts to weaken the Voting Rights Act, and suggestions by the Supreme Court that it may lower the level of scrutiny it applies to voting laws that are accused of harming voters.

“The tools that you’d use to ensure free and fair elections are slowly being pulled away,” said Kistler. “When you take them all together, that’s when it starts to get really problematic.”

Voting Rights Act

As if to prove the point, a separate amicus brief submitted in December by Marshall’s office argued that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — the law’s most important plank, since the Supreme Court neutered Section 5 a decade ago — also contains no private right of action.

Marshall and his allies were urging a federal appeals court to reverse a ruling striking down Louisiana’s congressional map as a racial gerrymander under Section 2.

The notion that Section 2 contains no private right of action had until recently been seen by many advocates as outlandish. But a federal judge endorsed it in a separate 2022 case involving an Arkansas redistricting plan, brought by Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin, a Republican, who has signed his state on to several of Marshall’s amicus briefs. That decision was upheld on appeal in December.

Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin. (John Sykes/Arkansas Advocate)

The issue is likely to come before the Supreme Court. A ruling for Arkansas could dramatically limit the power of the VRA to stop racial discrimination in voting.

Separately, Marshall has sought to defend Alabama’s own redistricting plan. In arguing that the state should not have to draw a new map with an additional majority-Black district, his office adopted an interpretation of the VRA that, experts said, would have made it all but impossible to use for stopping racial gerrymanders.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a prominent election law scholar at Harvard Law School, has called Alabama’s approach to the question “directly contrary to 40 years of precedent.”

The claim was too extreme even for the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which ultimately ordered Alabama to create a new map.

In response, Marshall signaled an agenda that went well beyond Alabama.

“There should be nothing more offensive to the people of our great state than to be sidelined in 2023 by a view of Alabama that is stuck in 1963,” he said in a statement. “This racial agenda is pressed by left-wing activists, not just in Alabama, but in any Republican state where it might advantage Democrats.”

And he compared the ruling, which aimed to empower Black voters, with Jim Crow.

“If this brazen and divisive commandeering is permitted without even a whisper of concern from other quarters, America’s congressional elections as we know them will never be the same,” Marshall continued. “We will be grouped together by race alone, with counties and cities split down the middle—the same way that we were so wrongfully segregated once before.”

Marshall also led a coalition of 18 GOP-led states that filed a 2021 amicus brief supporting Arizona’s defense of a law requiring voters who don’t sign their mail ballots to do so by 7 p.m. on election night.

The issue may seem minor, but Marshall’s brief invoked a far more fundamental question, arguing that state legislatures, not the courts, are in charge of setting election rules.

“The U.S. Constitution is unambiguous about the right of state legislatures to determine the manner of holding elections within their respective states,” wrote Marshall. “Accordingly, state legislatures, not federal courts, are vested with the legal authority to determine state election laws. Court attempts to micromanage election laws duly passed by state legislatures conflict with our constitutional structure and legal precedent.”

When North Carolina brought a version of this claim — known as the Independent State Legislature Theory — to the Supreme Court last year, experts warned that it could radically reshape election law, giving partisan state lawmakers almost unfettered power to make the rules. The Justices ultimately rejected the argument.

Why AGs enjoy influence

Advocates say it’s difficult to assess whether, and to what extent, courts are swayed by amicus briefs. But, they add, the role of state AGs as their state’s chief legal officer gives their claims an invaluable sheen of authority.

“State AGs are taken seriously because of the governmental role they play, in a way that parties, who do not have a governmental role, typically are not,” said Dax Goldstein, a senior counsel at States United Democracy Center. “So there’s a real difference between a sitting AG filing a brief and (Donald Trump lawyer) John Eastman filing a brief.”

In addition, since a 2007 Supreme Court ruling in a case where a group of states led by Massachusetts sued the George W. Bush administration’s Environmental Protection Agency, states have enjoyed more power than individual plaintiffs to bring lawsuits on public policy issues.

“States have a greater ability to bring legal challenges than private citizens do,” said Kistler. “So when you have these super active state officials with a greater ability to bring cases than private parties and a judiciary that’s willing to entertain the cases, it makes a difference.”

Nolette, the Marquette political scientist, noted that if the AGs’ series of briefs in election cases appear coordinated, it’s no accident.

“There’s a lot of strategy that goes into planning these far-reaching arguments,” Nolette said, adding that AGs of both parties use their partisan organizations — the Republican Attorney Generals Association, and the Democratic Attorney Generals Association — to align their efforts and figure out the venues where they might have the most chance of success.

“It’s almost like buying a lottery ticket, trying to boost the chances of those arguments taking hold somewhere,” Nolette continued. “And once they get one district court judge to agree with it, then it moves them to a different state of respectability. It’s like, well, a federal judge has agreed with us, so this is a legitimate argument, even if it was considered totally out there in previous years.”

Ralph Chapoco contributed to this report.

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an 5 26

Legal analysts stunned as 3-judge panel enacts Sotomayor plan to block Alabama maps

A three-judge panel has blocked Alabama's effort to readjust maps to eliminate congressional districts that contain large populations of people of color, reported Politico on Tuesday.

It flies in the face of the recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that struck down part of the Voting Rights Act, which makes it more difficult to challenge redistricting based on racially biased redistricting, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) analyzed.

That didn't stop another state from stepping in on a different case.

Legal analyst Josh Gerstein believesthe next and final step will be a trip to the High Court. Journalist Kirk A. Bado agreed.

In a thread about the case, former Alabama prosecutor Joyce Vance commented, "Even after Callais, a 3-judge panel (2 Trump appointees) enjoins Alabama from using 'new' maps for the midterm election because of evidence of racial discrimination. Writing in dissent from SCOTUS’ decision to speed Milligan, the Alabama gerrymandering case, into effect after Callais, Justice Sotomayor invited the panel to do exactly this."

“Alabama cannot use Callais to legitimize its pre-Callais decision to double down on the discriminatory vote dilution that we and the Supreme Court found,” the court ruled. “And it cannot use Callais to legitimize the series of specific and unusual decisions it made to entrench that dilution. If such retroactive validation strategies were available, States would be encouraged to govern themselves according to what they think federal law ought to be, not what it is.”

"This decision finds AL's 2023 map was intentionally racially discriminatory even after Callais, but the injunction expires when AL passes new districts, which is already in the works," explained New Mexico lawyer Owen Barcala.

Further, he explained, "Probably won't get decisions like this in the future because the legislators in 2022 didn't know they could just explain everything away as a partisan gerrymander. Here they expressly said they weren't trying to do a partisan gerrymander."

"Whoa! Everyone had assumed Alabama would get to go back to its old congressional map after Callais. But the lower court that originally struck down that map says, not so fast," characterized VotebeatUS managing editor Nathaniel Rakich.

"I anticipate that Alabama will appeal soon. The Supreme Court oversees the appeal and will oversee the stay motion. Given their recent work on this, I am inclined to think they grant (but never know with them)," said conservative Eric Wess.

"Darkly funny how the Supreme Court keeps telling Republicans, 'Here is the approved list of ways to disenfranchise black voters, ' and Republicans are so greedy they keep failing to pass through the extremely wide loophole the court carved out for them in the VRA," one person quipped.

Another commented, "'I wasn’t trying to knock down that building,' says Guy Who Rented A Bulldozer And Used It To Repeatedly Ram The Building."

In 2023, three federal judges in the Allen v. Milligancase struck down the maps, saying that they had blatantly discriminated against Black voters, Democracy Docket recalled.

“Try as we might, we cannot understand the 2023 Plan as anything other than an intentional effort to dilute Black Alabamians’ voting strength and evade the unambiguous requirements of court orders standing in the way,” the judges wrote. “After we and the Supreme Court ruled that the 2021 Plan, with only one majority-Black district, likely had the unlawful discriminatory effect of diluting Black Alabamians’ votes, the Legislature deliberately enacted another Plan that it concedes lacks the second Black-opportunity district we said was required. This amounted to intentional racial discrimination in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection guarantee.”

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AN 5 26

In late April, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that critics say “demolishes” the Voting Rights Act by ending a provision that prevents racial discrimination. Now, according to experts, it appears that arguments made by Justice Samuel Alito were based on “misleading data analysis.”

According to the Guardian, “In his opinion gutting section 2 of the Voting Rights Act last week, Alito said that Black voter turnout had exceeded white voter turnout in two of the five most recent presidential elections, both nationally and in Louisiana. Alito’s claim was copied almost verbatim from a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the justice department. It was a critical data point Alito used to make the argument that the kind of discrimination that once made the Voting Rights Act necessary no longer exists.”

But a review of this assertion revealed that an “unusual methodology” was used to come to such a conclusion.

The brief provided by the Trump-led Justice Department calculated Black and white voter turnout in direct proportion to the total adult population of each racial group. But as the Guardian explained, “Such an approach is not preferred by experts in calculating statewide turnout because the general over-18 population may include non-citizens, people with felony convictions and others who cannot legally vote. But it does yield Alito’s conclusion that Black voter turnout exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections in Louisiana.”

If calculated using the accepted method, however, the numbers offer a different conclusion: “that Black voter turnout in Louisiana only exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 presidential election.” What’s more, “The Guardian also reviewed data from the Louisiana secretary of state’s office, which calculates voter turnout a third way, as a percentage of registered voters. Using that methodology, Black turnout has not exceeded white turnout in any of the last five presidential elections in Louisiana.”

Experts suggest that this was no mere mistake, but an intentional attempt to manipulate the outcome.

“[The DOJ approach] is misleading because they’re including ineligible voters in the denominator,” said University of Florida political science professor Michael McDonald. One of the nation’s leading expertson voter turnout, he noted that if he wanted to reach Alito’s conclusion, McDonald would “manipulate” the numbers in the exact same way. “They had to fudge how they’re calculating the turnout rate to get there, and they’re not even taking into account margin of error, and all these other methodology issues about the current population survey to arrive at that number. Someone knew what they were doing.”

GUK REF

THe claims Samuel Alito, a supreme court justice, made about voter turnout in Louisiana in a landmark Voting Rights Act case were based on a misleading data analysis, a Guardian review has found.

In his opinion gutting section 2 of the Voting Rights Act last week, Alito said that Black voter turnout had exceeded white voter turnout in two of the five most recent presidential elections, both nationally and in Louisiana. Alito’s claim was copied almost verbatim from a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the justice department. It was a critical data point Alito used to make the argument that the kind of discrimination that once made the Voting Rights Act necessary no longer exists.

US supreme court expedites Voting Rights Act ruling so Louisiana can redraw its maps for midterms

Read more](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/04/supreme-court-expedites-voting-rights-act-ruling)

“Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South, where many Section 2 suits arise,” Alito wrote in a majority opinion in the case, which concerned Louisiana’s congressional map, joined by the five other conservative justices on the court. “Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than white voters in two of the five most recent Presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana.”

But a review of turnout and racial data in Louisiana reveals that assertion relies on an unusual methodology. The justice department brief that Alito cited calculated Black and white voter turnout in Louisiana as a proportion of the total population of each racial group over the age of 18. Such an approach is not preferred by experts in calculating statewide turnout because the general over-18 population may include non-citizens, people with felony convictions and others who cannot legally vote. But it does yield Alito’s conclusion that Black voter turnout exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections in Louisiana.

The widely accepted approach is to consider voter turnout as a proportion of the citizen voting age population or the voter eligible population, the latter of which excludes non-citizens as well as people who cannot vote because of a felony conviction or because they have been deemed mentally incapacitated. When the Guardian analyzed turnout numbers in Louisiana using the citizen voting age population, it found that Black voter turnout in Louisiana only exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 presidential election.

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“[The DoJ approach] is misleading because they’re including ineligible voters in the denominator,” said Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida who is one of the nation’s leading expertson voter turnout. “If I wanted to manipulate the numbers in a way that was favorable to the government’s interest, I would be using voting age population.”

McDonald also said that the survey DoJ’s analysis was based on, the Census Bureau’s current population survey, is known to produce misleading turnout statistics.

“They had to fudge how they’re calculating the turnout rate to get there, and they’re not even taking into account margin of error, and all these other methodology issues about the current population survey to arrive at that number,” he said. “Someone knew what they were doing.”

A justice department spokesperson acknowledged that the agency used total voting age population and not the citizen voting age population to compute turnout figures. The spokesperson did not respond to a question asking why the department used that approach. A supreme court spokesperson did not return a request for comment about the methodology.

The Guardian also reviewed data from the Louisiana secretary of state’s office, which calculates voter turnout a third way, as a percentage of registered voters. Using that methodology, Black turnout has not exceeded white turnout in any of the last five presidential elections in Louisiana.

Alito’s claim about national turnout also misses the more recent picture that the turnout gap is actually widening, according to a Guardian review of election data. Barack Obama was the first Black US president on the ballot in 2008 and 2012, the two elections where Black turnout was higher than white turnout. In the three most recent presidential elections since then, Black voter turnout has lagged white voter turnout.

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“In zero out of the last three presidential elections, did Black turnout come anywhere close to parity,” said Kevin Morris, a researcher at the Brennan Center for Justice, who has studied the turnout gap extensively. The overall national turnout gap has “exploded” over the last 15 years, he added. Alito’s claim is “simply not factual”, Morris wrote in a post last week.

“They’re both cherry picking a particular year, they’re cherry picking a particular method and they’re ignoring this long term more concerning trend in the data,” said Christopher Warshaw, a professor at Georgetown University who studies elections.

When the Voting Rights Act was enacted in 1965, there were ugly racial disparities in voting across the southern US. Black voter registration rates were 50 percentage points behind the voter registration rates of white people in states such as Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Once the Voting Rights Act went into effect, that gap narrowed, in part because of federal examiners deployed to southern states to register voters. There was also a surge in Black people elected to office. In 2012, Black voter turnout reached an all time high and exceeded that of white people for the first time, at least since the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

After 2012, Black voter turnout dropped and has trailed white voter turnout in every presidential election since. That drop happened amid the supreme court’s 2013 decision in Shelby county v Holder, which gutted a requirement that places with a history of voting discrimination get election changes pre-approved by the federal government before they went into effect. The case was a major blow to the Voting Rights Act and freed up states to pass voting restrictions.

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“Shelby county directly increased the racial turnout gap,” Morris said.

Kareem Crayton, a vice-president at the Brennan Center for Justice, also said it was misleading for Alito to argue the Voting Rights Act was no longer needed because disparities had decreased.

“We could have stopped the project in 1970 because things did get immediately a lot better,” he said. “It’s a bit of a ruse to say that the assessment simply is ‘if things have gotten better then the project is oveR”

D . JOHN SAUER Solicitor General Counsel of Record

HARMEET K. DHILLON Assistant Attorney General HASHIM M. MOOPPAN Deputy Solicitor General JESUS A. OSETE Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General AARON Z. ROPER Assistant to the Solicitor General ANDREW G. BRANIFF

DAVID N. GOLDMAN Attorneys Department of Justice Washington, D.C. 20530-0001 SupremeCtBriefs@usdoj.gov (202) 514-2217

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mma

After VRA ruling, Benny Johnson suggests the Trump administration “should go full speed ahead in bringing the full force of the federal government against these DEI districts”

05/04/26

After VRA ruling, Benny Johnson suggests the Trump administration “should go full speed ahead in bringing the full force of the federal government against these DEI districts”

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published 05/04/26

Video

Citation

From the May 4, 2026, edition of The Benny Show, posted to YouTube

BENNY JOHNSON (HOST): Harmeet Dhillon, who, of course, is a favorite of our show ... she said that she is going to be suing in order to ensure that there are reparations for hard-working Americans who have been disenfranchised through Eric Holder and Barack Obama's racism in creating congressional ghettos and DEI districts. Your take on that, how should Harmeet Dhillon ensure that maps are as fair and equitable as possible for the 2026 elections?

MIKE DAVIS (GUEST): I love Harmeet Dhillon, and I always say this: my favorite Americans are women and minority conservatives because they are absolutely the most bold and fearless people on the planet. They're great -- whether it's Byron Donalds or Harmeet Dhillon -- these are the types of people who I want in these offices. People who are going to fight every day for America, for the West, for our way of life, for our Judeo-Christian traditions. Harmeet is phenomenal.

...

The best thing about Harmeet, the best thing about this new version of the Trump administration, is prior Republicans, George W. Bush Republicans — and I worked in the George W. Bush White House — we were, those Republicans who were so scared of being labeled as racists or sexist or homophobe or transphobe or whatever phobe the Democrats come out with. And my response to those Republicans is to say to those Democrats, ‘Go to hell. You're not going to be able to use your Marxist division and cow us like you've done in the past.' We are the party of opportunity for poor Black people trapped in these Democrat ghettos and these DEI districts. Democrats want to keep minorities trapped in intergenerational poverty. They want victims. They want misery. Because that's the Marxist playbook. So, people like Harmeet Dhillon, people like Byron Donalds, they are the all-stars.

JOHNSON: So, Harmeet should go full speed ahead in bringing the full force of the federal government against these DEI districts and lawfare Democrats who want to sue in order to create these congressional ghettos?

DAVIS: Absolutely. The Supreme Court just ruled that we, you can have political gerrymandering, but you cannot have racial gerrymandering. It was a brilliant opinion by Justice Sam Alito, and Harmeet can go after every one of these districts, these House districts where these Democrats in these blue states intentionally sliced and diced the population to have a DEI district, to have some loser Democrat minority be the House representative and go grift and make millions of dollars and do nothing for their poor Black or poor Hispanic constituents.

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AN 5 26

How do I explain what the supermajority of the US Supreme Court did this week to the Voting Rights Act? I'll put it this way. Six justices decided to pretend that racism no longer exists and that the history of racial discrimination no longer bears on the present. The gravity of their ruling cannot be overstated, but the ruling itself was based on fantasy.

The point of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) was ensuring equality. Everyone involved in its passage, which arose from overwhelming support in the US Congress, knew the point was to codify the ennobling principles of the founding. And everyone involved understood the primary challenge to that goal: racial discrimination, especially in the former slaver states.

The history of slavery and Jim Crow apartheid is why the VRA's Section 2 allowed race to be a factor in drawing congressional maps. The idea was that remedies to racial discrimination should be race-conscious. After all, how do you reverse the effects of the history of slavery and apartheid, as well as make reparations to future citizens, without an awareness of race?

To rightwingers, the VRA was never the manifestation of the Declaration of Independence. It was always a weapon against "innocent" white people. For years, rightwing courts tried to gut it. Yesterday's ruling is a result of that history. Six justices pretended racism isn't real – or not real enough to justify the provision's continuation.

By make-believing, they rationalized a ruling that found that race-conscious remedies to racial discrimination are actually racist. Here's what Associate Justice Samuel Alito said in the court's majority opinion on the constitutionality of a district in Louisiana that is majority Black: "Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act … was designed to enforce the Constitution — not collide with it. Unfortunately, lower courts have sometimes applied this Court's [Section] 2 precedents in a way that forces States to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids."

To put this another way, what Alito is saying is hooray! The VRA did it! The United States is no longer as racist as it used to be! And because the mission is accomplished, the Supreme Court cannot continue to allow race to be a factor in drawing congressional maps. If it did, that would mean a law designed to enforce the Constitution ends up colliding with it. The only constitutional way to draw congressional maps is by being completely "blind" to color.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Alito is gaslighting us. Plaintiffs must now show that states intentionally discriminated against minorities. That's going to be difficult to prove, however, in courts that are now constitutionally mandated to pretend to be colorblind.

In that, Alito is merely building on the original gaslighting by Chief Justice John Roberts. In 2013, in a ruling that opened the door to yesterday's, he said "it is a sordid business, this divving us up by race. ... our country has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions." In response, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reminded Roberts that racial prejudice is a feature requiring constant vigilance. "Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."

Of course, no one in America is blind to color! Remember the point of the Voting Rights Act: to ensure equality in the face of real racial discrimination. It didn't make bigotry disappear. By gutting this key provision, however, the Supreme Court has paved the way for its resurgence in election law, and predictably, that's what happened. Within hours of the ruling, Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana – all former slaver states – moved to redraw their maps to suppress the vote, and therefore suppress the rights and freedoms, of their minorities.

The Washington press corps almost uniformly framed news of the ruling in terms of the midterms, as in: which of the parties will have the advantage in light of the court's decision? While it's true that it supercharges a bipartisan gerrymandering effort already underway, it does much more than that. The ruling, according to Hofstra Law Professor James Sample, "is a diametrical shift in voting rights practices, a diametrical shift in the areas of race and racial discrimination and the remedies for racial discrimination." Elections are only a means. The ruling's ultimate impact will be on the ability of equal citizens to manifest their destinies.

However, the ruling's impact on elections is probably what will finally get the full attention of Democratic leaders. While the party has successfully countered GOP gerrymandering efforts in Texas, the court has dismantled some of the last remaining obstacles to restoring the legal structures of southern apartheid, thus increasing the odds of continued Republican dominance in Washington. In short, the ruling poses an existential threat to the Democratic Party's future. Perhaps that will finally force the party to regard the court as its enemy.

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Benny Johnson cheers Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act: “Maybe we should just kick Ketanji Brown Jackson off the court”

04/30/26

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rww

02/19/2026

Kyle Mantyla

Tony Perkins claims that the Founding Fathers saw the Bible "as the blueprint to build a nation."

Doug Wilson says that "one of the very best things we could possibly do for everyone, Blacks especially, is repeal the 1964 Civil Rights Act."

Nate Schatzline reports that he is overseeing the National Faith Advisory Board's midterm election strategy, focusing on mobilizing churches in 18 swing states "to put passionate, Bible-believing Christians that are pursuing the presence of God back into those seats in government."

James Fishback continues to focus his Florida gubernatorial campaign on reaching far-right audiences, appearing again with streamer Sneako and then appearing on "Fresh and Fit," hosted by Hitler-loving antisemite Myron Gaines.

Finally, John Doyle asserts that Martin Luther King Jr. belief in nonviolence "was mostly just an optics thing": "King was just trying to cover his ass. He knew that the fear of rioting and looting could be used as something that could coerce white people into accepting race communism."

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Newsmax host: “The civil rights time - we've kind of passed that now”

10/16/25

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Louisiana argues parts of Voting Rights Act are unconstitutional

an 1 15

NEW ORLEANS – Attorneys representing Louisiana in a lawsuit against the state legislative redistricting plans passed in 2022 are arguing that a key piece of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional and should not be applied to the state.

The case could produce a bellwether decision that impacts Black voting strength in several states where similar challenges have arisen.

Arguments were presented Tuesday to a three-judge panel of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in the case Nairne v. Landry,in which Black voters are challenging the most recent legislative redistricting maps as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.

Last February, U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick of the Middle District of Louisiana ruled that maps Louisiana lawmakers drew two years ago to update the boundaries of their own districts do not give Black voters a fair opportunity to elect their own representatives. Dick’s ruling came after the 2023 elections, when a new class of lawmakers were elected, yielding a Republican supermajority in both chambers.

While Dick’s ruling blocks legislative elections from being held in every district while the lawsuit plays out, plaintiffs in the case agreed to let special elections for two vacant Louisiana Senate seats go forward in February.

The state has appealed Dick’s decision. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibits voting laws or procedures that purposefully discriminate on the basis of race, color or membership in a language minority group.

“Conditions that originally justified those measures no longer apply to Louisiana,” Deputy Solicitor General Morgan Brungard argued. “We ask the court to reverse and hold Section 2 unconstitutional as it applies to Louisiana.”

Brungard argued that Black voter turnout in Louisiana is sufficiently high enough that Section 2 is no longer necessary.

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The three 5th Circuit judges presiding are James Dennis, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, Catharina Haynes, an appointee of President George W. Bush, and Irma Ramirez, an appointee of President Barack Obama.

For over a decade, conservative attorneys and officials have sought to whittle down the Voting Rights Act. Nairneis one vehicle politicians have sought to use as a test case against Section 2.

Last year, Republican attorneys general from 14 states filed an amicus brief in the case arguing Section 2 is unconstitutional. That action followed a 2023 decision in the U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis that only the federal government can seek an enforcement ruling under the Voting Rights Act, rather than individuals.

The federal government and voting rights advocates have pushed back on that stance.

Every case brought under Section 2 is likely to be used as a test case for those that seek to have that portion of the Voting Rights Act overturned, advocates have said.

The U.S. Department of Justice intervened in Nairnein response to the state’s arguments against Section 2 but remained neutral on the other aspects of the case.

Noah Bokat-Lindell, a DOJ civil rights attorney, argued states cannot get a carveout from a generally applicable statute. For example, they cannot become exempt from the Americans with Disabilities Act because a state argues it doesn’t discriminate against disabled people, he said.

In a press conference after the hearing, Attorney General Liz Murrill argued that if Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was ruled unconstitutional, Black voters could still count on the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

“Those are legal arguments that we wanted to preserve so that they eventually might make it up to the United States Supreme Court,” Murrill said. “They’ve also been percolating in a number of other cases related to the scope and continuing application of Section 2 to states under current conditions.”

If Dick’s decision is upheld, legislators will have another opportunity to redraw the boundaries of their districts. Dick, an Obama federal court appointee, did not specify in her ruling the number of majority Black districts necessary to comply with the Voting Rights Act.

Plaintiffs have said the state should add six in the Louisiana House and three in the Senate. Currently, 28 out of 105 House districts are majority Black, as are 11 of 39 Senate districts.

State Rep. Edmond Jordan, D-Baton Rouge, who is Black, said he intends to file a bill with a new redistricting plan in the upcoming legislative session, which begins April 14.

Also at issue in Nairneis whether Dick erred in blocking the entire redistricting plan. Attorneys for the state argue the plaintiffs only have standing to challenge the districts where they live.

It is not known when the 5th Circuit panel will rule on the state’s appeal.

Louisiana Illuminator is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Greg LaRose for questions: info@lailluminator.com.

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doj sued illegal alien BS

msnbc 10 24

two states dumping sweater vest gov youngkin if discrepnancy in dmv recs; only possible b/c scotus gutted voting rts act which req pre-clearance of fuckery

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mma 8 234

In a video posted to social media, Charlie Kirk denied that he called for the Civil Rights Act to be overturned. He has a track record of suggesting otherwise.

### Democratic content creator Knowa confronts Kirk

For reasons that are not immediately clear, Turning Point USA founder and MAGA personality Charlie Kirk obtained credentials to attend night one of the 2024 Democratic National Convention. Kirk promptly posted a video of himself getting mocked by the president of Georgia Young Democrats. But it was another Kirk confrontation that caught my attention, when he answered a question from 13-year-old Democratic content creator Knowa De Baraso:

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KNOWA: I have a question.

CHARLIE KIRK: OK. What's your question?

KNOWA: Why did you say that the civil rights bill should be overturned?

KIRK: I didn't say that. I said it was a mistake.

KNOWA: Why? That's crazy.

### What Kirk has said about civil rights laws

Kirk earlier this year made viral comments about being afraid to fly with a Black pilot. Kirk frequently discusses quite bizarre racial theories on-air.

It is true that Kirk has called the Civil Rights Act a “mistake.” But he’s also said more than that.

And Kirk has appeared to suggest that the Civil Rights Act should be overturned.

Kirk discussed civil rights laws in October 2023 with Richard Hanania, a Project 2025 contributor who reportedly wrote racist essays for white supremacist websites for years.

The two discussed the Civil Rights Act and its supposed impacts on “wokeism,” with Hanania claiming that “the perversion of the Civil Rights Act and a few laws that came after it” became “something like a state religion.” Kirk readily agreed that it “created this regime” and shifted the discussion to impacts of the law in culture.

Video

CitationFrom the October 18, 2023, edition of Salem's The Charlie Kirk Show

A bit later in the discussion, Kirk even suggested that “not only is it the moral right thing to do, it's actually insanely popular to get rid of these laws, these traditions that discriminate against groups of people, in particular white people.”

Video

CitationFrom the October 18, 2023, edition of Salem's The Charlie Kirk Show

Kirk also railed against the Civil Rights Act in April 2024, claiming “that beast has now turned into an anti-white weapon,” while his guest called to “fundamentally relook at a lot of our civil rights legal regime.”

Video

CitationFrom the April 16, 2024, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

Kirk in June 2023 described the Civil Rights Act as “way too broad and largely poorly written.”

Video

CitationFrom the June 30, 2023, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show

Kirk has been so outspoken against the Civil Rights Act that even conservative campaign consultant Raynard Jackson appeared to express alarm while speaking at an event at CPAC earlier this year:

Video

CitationFrom the February 21, 2024 War Room Force Multiplier Academy, streamed on Rumble

RAYNARD JACKSON: Let me say that I have some good sources on the other side — this White House is terrified of the prospect of President Trump tapping into the Black community. But let me tell you what they're also saying. They don't think President Trump, they don't believe, Steve, MAGA is willing to do what is necessary to turn polling data into votes at the voting blocks. And let me tell you what I mean by that. Until conservatives and MAGA deal with the issue of race and the Black community, you're never going to penetrate the Black vote — even people like me.

...

But, Steve, I got to be honest — to have one of our MAGA compatriots go on his podcast and call Martin Luther King a rapist, for a 30-year-old guy to sit up and tell me that the civil rights bill of '64 was bad for America, that makes my job almost impossible.

Wired also reported on Kirk’s increasing efforts to target civil rights laws.

This is all happening as the Republican National Committee, now co-led by Lara Trump after Kirk assisted in the ouster of Ronna McDaniel, works closer with Kirk’s Turning Point USA and its sister organization Turning Point Action.

Turning Point USA is also an official Project 2025 partner.

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an badash

it’s being called a “surprise decision,” a “landmark win,” and a “a major victory for the Voting Rights Act (VRA),” but some legal experts are warning that heralding the U.S. Supreme Court’s Thursday decision as anything except upholding the status quo is a mistake, and other experts suggest it means the Court’s earlier rulings wrongly threw control of the House of Representatives to Republicans. Some experts say a Democratic-majority House in 2024 is now more likely.

In short, in its 5-4 decision in Allen v. Milligan, the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Alabama discriminated against Black voters, which make up a quarter of its population, by drawing congressional maps to exclude them.

Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern, who writes about law and the courts, exclaimed, “WHOA!” as he explained: “The Supreme Court’s final decision of the day is a 5–4 ruling that AFFIRMS the Voting Rights Act’s protection against racial vote dilution! Roberts and Kavanaugh join the liberals. This is a HUGE surprise and a major voting rights victory.”

Democracy Docket, the website founded by Marc Elias, the voting rights attorney who won 63 of the 64 court cases Donald Trump and his allies filed to contest the 2020 presidential election, also served up a similar response on social media, calling it “a massive victory for voting rights.”

On its website, Democracy Docket calls it “an overwhelming win for Alabamians, specifically Black voters, whose voting power was found to be diluted under the current congressional map. Importantly, the conservative Supreme Court did not make the drastic decision to strike down Section 2 of the VRA, leaving an important tool in voting rights litigation in place.”

It adds the Supreme Court’s decision in Allen v. Milligan “leaves Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) intact and, in a landmark win for voters, struck down the state’s congressional map. The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, is joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson and joined in part by Justice Brett Kavanaugh.”

Democracy Docket also notes the decision “will have major positive implications for outstanding redistricting lawsuits.”

Stern agrees, writing: “It’s a boon to Democrats’ chances of retaking the House in 2024. The Supreme Court had blocked multiple lower court rulings striking down congressional maps that diluted Black voting power. At least some of those rulings should now be implemented.”

Democracy Docket adds: “The Court’s decision in Allen likely means that litigation challenging Louisiana’s congressional map can move forward and paves the way for a favorable outcome for Louisiana voters. Louisiana’s situation directly mirrors Alabama’s. In both states, voting rights advocates argued that a second majority-Black congressional district is needed to ensure compliance with the VRA. The Supreme Court paused Louisiana’s litigation pending a decision in Allen.”

Dave Wasserman, U.S. House editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report calls the decision “a major surprise,” and says: “This could reverberate to LA, SC and/or GA, forcing creation of 2-4 new Black majority districts and netting Dems 2-4 seats” in the House.

Wasserman, known for his keen knowledge of congressional districts and iconic “I’ve seen enough” early and accurate predictions of House election races, offered this view of how the Court’s decision could impact current districts:

“The Alabama Republicans in most jeopardy owing to the SCOTUS ruling: Reps. Jerry Carl (R) #AL01, Barry Moore (R) #AL02 and Mike Rogers (R) #AL03. Moore could be squeezed the most in any map reconfigured to feature a second Black majority seat.”

University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck, author of a book on the Supreme Court, “The Shadow Docket,” offers up a stinging reminder of how the Court has damaged voting rights and helped Republicans in the process:

“If you assume that additional majority-minority districts in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, & 1–2 other states would’ve been safe Democratic seats, then today’s #SCOTUS ruling strongly suggests that the Court’s 2022 shadow docket stays [decisions/rulings] wrongly gave Republicans control of the House.”

Professor of law Anthony Michael Kreis, pointing to Vladeck’s remarks, adds: “there’s a House majority built on discriminatory lawlessness.”

Also taking note of Thursday’s SCOTUS ruling: House Democrats. Axios’ Andrew Solender reports House Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ office is “inviting Dem[ocratic] congressional staff to a Friday briefing on recent Supreme Court cases, including the Alabama congressional map case.”

Meanwhile, the well-known NYU professor of law, Melissa Murray, is stepping in to properly frame reactions to what she sees as the Court’s “weak sauce” decision on the Voting Rights Act.

“Some initial thoughts on Allen v. Milligan,” she writes on Twitter. “Media is trumpeting this as a ‘victory’ for the Voting Rights Act. And it is. And I don’t want to be a turd in the punchbowl… but this is pretty weak sauce from this Court.”

Professor Murray says, “this doesn’t ‘strengthen’ the VRA. It preserves the status quo. And the status quo is that this Court has done an A+ job of hobbling the VRA over the last 10 years.”

Murray offers up some quick historical background.

“In 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, it eviscerated the preclearance formula. The preclearance regime required states with a history of voting discrimination to first ‘preclear’ any changes to their voting rules and regs with the DOJ or a three-judge federal court panel.”

“The Court invalidated the preclearance formula on the ground that progress had been made and minorities were voting and blah blah blah,” she notes. “This progress narrative prompted RBG [the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg] to note in dissent that throwing out the preclearance formula was like throwing out your umbrella in a rainstorm because you weren’t getting wet. She was right.”

Murray also refers to a number of other cases along the way that weakened voting rights.

“So, yes,” she concludes, “today’s decision is a victory that maintains the status quo for Section 2 of the VRA. But it is cold comfort when one considers the way this Court through its decisions has actively distorted the electoral landscape and made true representative government more elusive.”

The Economist’s Supreme Court reporter Steven Mazie, calls Prof. Murray’s remarks, “Crucial zoomed-out context for today’s Voting Rights Act ruling. The 5-4 is a surprise, and it’s a victory—but after a long string of losses, today’s win amounts to…not losing YET MORE voting protections for people of color.”

The Nation’s justice correspondent, Elie Mystal, offers a bit of a more compact and down-to-earth response: “A way to understand what just happened with Roberts and Kav[anaugh] in the Voting Rights Case is that it’s not going to change much in terms of Alabama’s racist maps. This cost them little,” he says. “The *victory* is that these fools could have straight killed Section 2 of the VRA, but didn’t.”

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

US Civil Rights Commission shelves recommendations for protecting voter rights in November

no lnx

Just one Republican breaks ranks to join the Democrats in passing new Voting Rights Advancement Act

Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams December 6, 2019

Just one Republican—Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania—joined a united House Democratic caucus on Friday to pass what rights groups hailed as “historic” legislation to restore and expand voter protections that were gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013.

Lisa Gilbert, vice president of legislative affairs for Public Citizen, said passage of the Voting Rights Advancement Act (H.R. 4) is a “critical step” in combating Republican voter suppression efforts that have proliferated in the six years since the Supreme Court’s infamous decision inShelby County v. Holder.

“Numerous state legislatures have undertaken targeted and deliberate steps to limit or impede the right to vote for communities of color, students, the elderly, and people with disabilities,” said Gilbert. “Americans who are eligible to vote but are denied that right due to fabricated or illegal barriers are being deprived of the full privilege of our democracy.”

BREAKING: The House just passed #HR4, one of the most important bills to emerge during this Congress. As voter suppression continues to spread across the US, this bill would breathe life back into the Voting Rights Act. A win for the people & a win for democracy! #RestoreTheVote pic.twitter.com/TR14b3ltxQ

— Kristen Clarke (@KristenClarkeJD) December 6, 2019

BREAKING: @RepBrianFitz is the one and only House Republican that believes in voting rights. https://t.co/37aqHMYIMO

— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) December 6, 2019

“If we want a true democracy, we must protect the right to vote for all,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “The Voting Rights Advancement Act is critical to getting there.”

The legislation now heads to the Senate, which is controlled by Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has refused to allow a vote on Democrats’ For the People Act (H.R. 1), to which the Voting Rights Advancement Act was previously attached.

As Ari Berman of Mother Jones reported, H.R. 4—sponsored by Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.)—would “initially cover 11 states: nine in the South, plus California and New York, which have more recently been found to discriminate against Latinos and Asian Americans.”

“The bill would also require all states to get federal approval for election changes that are known to disproportionately affect voters of color, such as strict voter ID laws, tighter voter registration requirements, and polling place closures in areas with large numbers of minority voters,” Berman noted.

Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, applauded the House for passing H.R. 4 and demanded that McConnell bring the bill up for a vote in the Senate as soon as possible.

“The passage of H.R. 4 in the House of Representatives today brings us one step closer to restoring the Voting Rights Act and undoing the tremendous damage of Shelby,” Gupta said in a statement. “The VRAA is too important—and the right to vote is too fundamental—to end up buried in the McConnell legislative graveyard.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/what-selma-gets-right-and-wrong-about-civil-rights-history/

The Nation

ACTIVISM What ‘Selma’ Gets Right—and Wrong—About Civil-Rights History

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ACTIVISM VOTING RIGHTS ACT BLOG

What ‘Selma’ Gets Right—and Wrong—About Civil-Rights History

It took MLK’s activism and LBJ’s leadership to pass the Voting Rights Act.

By Ari BermanTwitter JANUARY 8, 2015

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act at the US Capitol alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. (Photo: Yoichi R. Okamoto, courtesy Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum)

The civil-rights movement has been richly chronicled in books like Taylor Branch’s trilogy on Martin Luther King Jr. and documentaries like Eyes on the Prize. But there have been few equally powerful depictions of the movement in pop culture, which tend to overstate the contribution of white protagonists and turn African-Americans into supporting players in their own struggle (i.e., The Help, Mississippi Burning etc).

That’s why the new film Selma is such an important work.

The movie is unique in many respects. It movingly captures the dramatic events that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It has a great cast, anchored by an unusually nuanced portrayal of King by David Oyelowo. It also boasts a diversity rarely seen in major films, both on screen and behind the camera: as a black woman filmmaker, writer-director Ava DuVernay is, sadly, a rarity in Hollywood. In her hands, Selma skillfully shows the tensions within the civil-rights movement between groups like King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the young activists with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the many pressures—personal, political and organizational—that King faced at the time.

Despite glowing reviews, the film has attracted controversy for its portrayal of Lyndon Johnson. Some of this criticism is the result of an Oscar-season smear campaign and former aides to the president who are over-protective of his legacy. But as an admirer of the film and DuVernay, I must confess that I found the depiction of Johnson to be unnecessarily one-sided, and out of sync with the history I’ve extensively studied in the course of writing a book on the history of voting rights since 1965.

Selma depicts King as a crusader for voting rights and LBJ, in contrast, as a voting rights skeptic. The reality is more complex, and gets to the heart of how the VRA came to be.

One of the first scenes in the film shows King meeting with the president in the Oval Office on December 18, 1964, eight days after King won the Nobel Peace Prize. He urges Johnson to take up voting rights legislation to end the systematic disenfranchisement of African-Americans in the South. “Let’s not start another battle until we’ve won the first,” Johnson tells King in the film, referring to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “This voting thing is just going to have to wait.” After the meeting, King tells Andrew Young they’re going to Selma to launch a voting-rights campaign.

In real life, LBJ did tell King something to that effect at that meeting, saying he wanted to focus on Great Society legislation in 1965, and that voting-rights legislation couldn’t pass Congress so soon after the enactment of the Civil Rights Act. “I’m going to do it eventually, but I can’t get voting rights through in this session of Congress,” LBJ told King, according to Nick Kotz’s great book Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America.

What Selma doesn’t show is that four days before meeting with King, LBJ told his acting attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach to begin drafting a voting-rights bill. “I basically believe that we can have a simple, effective method of gettin’ ’em registered,” the president said. “Just get me some things you’d be proud of, to show your boy, and say, ‘Here is what your daddy put through in nineteen sixty-four, -five, -six, -seven.’?” LBJ was a notorious wheeler-dealer who liked to keep his options open, which is why he told King one thing and Katzenbach another. Two weeks later, Katzenbach sent LBJ three options for a voting-rights bill.

On January 15, 1965, after King had arrived in Selma, Johnson called the civil-rights leader on his birthday. “We have got to come up with [voting-rights legislation],” Johnson told him. “That will answer 70 percent of your problems!” He urged King to highlight examples of blacks being denied the right to vote, which was the purpose of King’s campaign in Selma.

While King and civil-rights activists bravely tried to register black voters in Selma, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department was busy drafting voting-rights legislation.Two days before the Bloody Sunday march, DOJ lawyers finished a rough draft of a voting-rights bill, giving the federal government extensive power over voter registration in the South.

The violent response to the protests in Selma significantly accelerated the administration’s timetable for pushing voting-rights legislation—LBJ’s aides were previously divided on what the bill should look like, when to introduce it and how aggressively to promote it—and compelled Congress to act swiftly. “The climate of public opinion throughout the nation has so changed because of the Alabama outrages, as to make assured passage of this solid bill—a bill that would have been inconceivable a year ago,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Emanuel Celler said on March 18, 1965, when the House began hearings on the VRA.

In another scene in Selma, King is shown lecturing LBJ about the need for a voting-rights bill following the death of the white minister James Reeb in Selma, who was brutally beaten by white segregationists following a second aborted march from Selma to Montgomery on March 9. When I saw the film, audience members cheered as King put Johnson in his place. But Johnson didn’t need to be converted at that point; his administration was frantically trying to finalize voting-rights legislation that week.

Johnson championed the Voting Rights Act in a dramatic speech before a joint session of Congress on March 15, which is shown in the film, and his administration skillfully shepherded the bill through Congress, defanging Southern opposition. The result was the most impactful civil-rights legislation of the twentieth century.

At a signing ceremony at the US Capitol, LBJ gave King one of the pens he used to sign the VRA. “You have created a Second Emancipation,” King told the president. It took King’s activism and LBJ’s leadership to get it done.

Why does this matter today?

“When it comes to voting rights, you realize the past isn’t the past,” former NAACP president Ben Jealous once told me. Selma comes out at a time when the VRA is under attack like never before and states are enacting the most significant restrictions on voting rights since the end of Reconstruction. “If there is anything that we should be talking about in terms of legacy, it is really the destruction of the legacy of the Voting Rights Act,” DuVernay said recently.

To protect voting rights today, we must understand how those rights were secured in the past. It requires determined activists who can dramatize the inequities in our democracy and political leaders who can channel the movement’s goals. We have neither a King nor an LBJ today.

Ari Berman

is a former senior contributing writer for The Nation.

wiki

Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting.^[7][8] It was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson during the height of the Civil Rights Movement on August 6, 1965, and Congress later amended the Act five times to expand its protections.^[7] Designed to enforce the voting rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the Act secured the right to vote for racial minorities throughout the country, especially in the South. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the Act is considered to be the most effective piece of federal civil rights legislation ever enacted in the country.^[9]

The Act contains numerous provisions that regulate elections. The Act's "general provisions" provide nationwide protections for voting rights. Section 2 is a general provision that prohibits every state and local government from imposing any voting law that results in discrimination against racial or language minorities. Other general provisions specifically outlaw literacy tests and similar devices that were historically used to disenfranchise racial minorities.

The Act also contains "special provisions" that apply to only certain jurisdictions. A core special provision is the Section 5 preclearance requirement, which prohibits certain jurisdictions from implementing any change affecting voting without receiving preapproval from the U.S. Attorney General or the U.S. District Court for D.C. that the change does not discriminate against protected minorities.^[10] Another special provision requires jurisdictions containing significant language minority populations to provide bilingual ballots and other election materials.

Section 5 and most other special provisions apply to jurisdictions encompassed by the "coverage formula" prescribed in Section 4(b). The coverage formula was originally designed to encompass jurisdictions that engaged in egregious voting discrimination in 1965, and Congress updated the formula in 1970 and 1975. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the coverage formula as unconstitutional, reasoning that it was no longer responsive to current conditions.^[11] The Court did not strike down Section 5, but without a coverage formula, Section 5 is unenforceable.^[12]

Background

Further information: Disfranchisement after the Reconstruction Era

Alabama police in 1965 attack voting rights marchers participating in the first of the Selma to Montgomery marches, which became known as "Bloody Sunday"

As initially ratified, the United States Constitution granted each state complete discretion to determine voter qualifications for its residents.^[13][14]:50 After the Civil War, the three Reconstruction Amendments were ratified and limited this discretion. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) prohibits slavery; the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) grants citizenship to anyone "born or naturalized in the United States" and guarantees every person due process and equal protection rights; and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) provides that "[t]he right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." These Amendments also empower Congress to enforce their provisions through "appropriate legislation".^[15]

To enforce the Reconstruction Amendments, Congress passed the Enforcement Acts in the 1870s. The Acts criminalized the obstruction of a citizen's voting rights and provided for federal supervision of the electoral process, including voter registration.^[16]:310 However, in 1875 the Supreme Court struck down parts of the legislation as unconstitutional in United States v. Cruikshank and United States v. Reese.^[17]:97 After the Reconstruction Era ended in 1877, enforcement of these laws became erratic, and in 1894, Congress repealed most of their provisions.^[16]:310

Southern states generally sought to disenfranchise racial minorities during and after Reconstruction. From 1868 to 1888, electoral fraud and violence throughout the South suppressed the African-American vote.^[18] From 1888 to 1908, Southern states legalized disenfranchisement by enacting Jim Crow laws; they amended their constitutions and passed legislation to impose various voting restrictions, including literacy tests, poll taxes, property-ownership requirements, moral character tests, requirements that voter registration applicants interpret particular documents, and grandfather clauses that allowed otherwise-ineligible persons to vote if their grandfathers voted (which excluded many African Americans whose grandfathers had been slaves or otherwise ineligible).^[16][18] During this period, the Supreme Court generally upheld efforts to discriminate against racial minorities. In Giles v. Harris (1903), the Court held that irrespective of the Fifteenth Amendment, the judiciary did not have the remedial power to force states to register racial minorities to vote.^[17]:100

In the 1950s, the Civil Rights Movement increased pressure on the federal government to protect the voting rights of racial minorities. In 1957, Congress passed the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction: the Civil Rights Act of 1957. This legislation authorized the Attorney General to sue for injunctive relief on behalf of persons whose Fifteenth Amendment rights were denied, created the Civil Rights Division within the Department of Justice to enforce civil rights through litigation, and created the Commission on Civil Rights to investigate voting rights deprivations. Further protections were enacted in the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which allowed federal courts to appoint referees to conduct voter registration in jurisdictions that engaged in voting discrimination against racial minorities.^[9]

Although these acts helped empower courts to remedy violations of federal voting rights, strict legal standards made it difficult for the Department of Justice to successfully pursue litigation. For example, to win a discrimination lawsuit against a state that maintained a literacy test, the Department needed to prove that the rejected voter-registration applications of racial minorities were comparable to the accepted applications of whites. This involved comparing thousands of applications in each of the state's counties in a process that could last months. The Department's efforts were further hampered by resistance from local election officials, who would claim to have misplaced the voter registration records of racial minorities, remove registered racial minorities from the electoral rolls, and resign so that voter registration ceased. Moreover, the Department often needed to appeal lawsuits several times before the judiciary provided relief because many federal district court judges opposed racial minority suffrage. Thus, between 1957 and 1964, the African-American voter registration rate in the South increased only marginally even though the Department litigated 71 voting rights lawsuits.^[17]:514

Congress responded to rampant discrimination against racial minorities in public accommodations and government services by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Act included some voting rights protections; it required registrars to equally administer literacy tests in writing to each voter and to accept applications that contained minor errors, and it created a rebuttable presumption that persons with a sixth-grade education were sufficiently literate to vote.^{[14]:97[19][20]} However, despite lobbying from civil rights leaders, the Act did not prohibit most forms of voting discrimination.^[21]:253 President Lyndon B. Johnson recognized this, and shortly after the 1964 elections in which Democrats gained overwhelming majorities in both chambers of Congress, he privately instructed Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to draft "the goddamndest, toughest voting rights act that you can".^[14]:48–50 However, Johnson did not publicly push for the legislation at the time; his advisers warned him of political costs for vigorously pursuing a voting rights bill so soon after Congress had passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Johnson was concerned that championing voting rights would endanger his Great Society reforms by angering Southern Democrats in Congress.^[14]:47–48, ^50–52^

Following the 1964 elections, civil rights organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) pushed for federal action to protect the voting rights of racial minorities.^{[21]:254–255} Their efforts culminated in protests in Alabama, particularly in the city of Selma, where County Sheriff Jim Clark's police force violently resisted African-American voter registration efforts. Speaking about the voting rights push in Selma, James Forman of SNCC said:

Our strategy, as usual, was to force the U.S. government to intervene in case there were arrests—and if they did not intervene, that inaction would once again prove the government was not on our side and thus intensify the development of a mass consciousness among blacks. Our slogan for this drive was "One Man, One Vote."^[21]:255

In January 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Bevel,^[22][23] and other civil rights leaders organized several demonstrations in Selma that led to violent clashes with police. These marches received national media coverage and drew attention to the issue of voting rights. King and other demonstrators were arrested during a march on February 1 for violating an anti-parade ordinance; this inspired similar marches in the following days, causing hundreds more to be arrested.^{[21]:259–261} On February 4, civil rights leader Malcolm X gave a militant speech in Selma in which he said that many African Americans did not support King's nonviolent approach;^[21]:262 he later privately said that he wanted to frighten whites into supporting King.^[14]:69 The next day, King was released and a letter he wrote addressing voting rights, "Letter From A Selma Jail", appeared in The New York Times.^[21]:262

With the nation paying increasing attention to Selma and voting rights, President Johnson reversed his decision to delay voting rights legislation, and on February 6, he announced he would send a proposal to Congress.^[14]:69 However, he did not reveal the proposal's content or when it would come before Congress.^[21]:264

On February 18 in Marion, Alabama, state troopers violently broke up a nighttime voting-rights march during which officer James Bonard Fowler shot and killed young African-American protester Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was unarmed and protecting his mother.^[21]:265[24] Spurred by this event, and at the initiation of Bevel,^{[21]:267[22][23][25]:81–86} on March 7 SCLC and SNCC began the Selma to Montgomery marches in which Selma residents proceeded to march to Alabama's capital, Montgomery, to highlight voting rights issues and present Governor George Wallace with their grievances. On the first march, demonstrators were stopped by state and county police on horseback at the Edmund Pettus Bridge near Selma. The police shot tear gas into the crowd and trampled protesters. Televised footage of the scene, which became known as "Bloody Sunday", generated outrage across the country.^[17]:515

In the wake of the events in Selma, President Johnson, addressing a televised joint session of Congress on March 15, called on legislators to enact expansive voting rights legislation. He concluded his speech with the words "we shall overcome", a major anthem of the Civil Rights Movement.^[21]:278[26] The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was introduced in Congress two days later while civil rights leaders, now under the protection of federal troops, led a march of 25,000 people from Selma to Montgomery.^{[17]:516[21]:279}, ^282

Legislative history:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

President Lyndon B. Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks at the signing of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965

Original bill:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Senate:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was introduced in Congress on March 17, 1965 as S. 1564, and it was jointly sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-MT) and Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (R-IL), both of whom had worked with Attorney General Katzenbach to draft the bill's language.^[27] Although Democrats held two-thirds of the seats in both chambers of Congress after the 1964 Senate elections,^[14]:49 Johnson worried that Southern Democrats would filibuster the legislation, as they had opposed other civil rights efforts. He enlisted Dirksen to help gain Republican support. Dirksen did not originally intend to support voting rights legislation so soon after supporting the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but he expressed willingness to accept "revolutionary" legislation after learning about the police violence against marchers in Selma on Bloody Sunday.^[14]:95–96 Given Dirksen's key role in helping Katzenbach draft the legislation, it became known informally as the "Dirksenbach" bill.^[14]:96 After Mansfield and Dirksen introduced the bill, 64 additional Senators agreed to cosponsor it,^[14]:150 with a total 46 Democratic and 20 Republican cosponsors.^[28]

The bill contained several special provisions that targeted certain state and local governments: a "coverage formula" that determined which jurisdictions were subject to the Act's other special provisions ("covered jurisdictions"); a "preclearance" requirement that prohibited covered jurisdictions from implementing changes to their voting procedures without first receiving approval from the U.S. Attorney General or the U.S. District Court for D.C. that the changes were not discriminatory; and the suspension of "tests or devices", such as literacy tests, in covered jurisdictions. The bill also authorized the assignment of federal examiners to register voters, and of federal observers to monitor elections, to covered jurisdictions that were found to have engaged in egregious discrimination. The bill set these special provisions to expire after five years.^{[16]:319–320[17]:520}, ^524^[29]:5–6

The scope of the coverage formula was a matter of contentious Congressional debate. The coverage formula reached a jurisdiction if: (1) the jurisdiction maintained a "test or device" on November 1, 1964, and (2) less than 50% of the jurisdiction's voting-age residents either were registered to vote on November 1, 1964 or cast a ballot in the November 1964 presidential election.^[16]:317 This formula reached few jurisdictions outside the Deep South. To appease legislators who felt that the bill unfairly targeted Southern jurisdictions, the bill included a general prohibition on racial discrimination in voting that applied nationwide.^[30]:1352 The bill also included provisions allowing a covered jurisdiction to "bail out" of coverage by proving in federal court that it had not used a "test or device" for a discriminatory purpose or with a discriminatory effect during the 5 years preceding its bailout request.^[29]:6 Additionally, the bill included a "bail in" provision under which federal courts could subject discriminatory non-covered jurisdictions to remedies contained in the special provisions.^{[31][32]:2006}–2007

The bill was first considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose chair, Senator James Eastland (D-MS), opposed the legislation with several other Southern Senators on the committee. To prevent the bill from dying in committee, Mansfield proposed a motion to require the Judiciary Committee to report the bill out of committee by April 9, which the Senate overwhelmingly passed by a vote of 67 to 13.^[14]:150[28] During the committee's consideration of the bill, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) led an effort to amend the bill to prohibit poll taxes. Although the Twenty-fourth Amendment—which banned the use of poll taxes in federal elections— was ratified a year earlier, Johnson's administration and the bill's sponsors did not include a provision in the voting rights bill banning poll taxes in state elections because they feared courts would strike down the legislation as unconstitutional.^{[17]:521[21]:285} Additionally, by excluding poll taxes from the definition of "tests or devices", the coverage formula did not reach Texas or Arkansas, mitigating opposition from those two states' influential congressional delegations.^[17]:521 Nonetheless, with the support of liberal committee members, Kennedy's amendment to prohibit poll taxes passed by a 9-4 vote. In response, Dirksen offered an amendment that exempted from the coverage formula any state that had at least 60% of its eligible residents registered to vote or that had a voter turnout that surpassed the national average in the preceding presidential election. This amendment, which effectively exempted all states from coverage except Mississippi, passed during a committee meeting in which three liberal members were absent. Dirksen offered to drop the amendment if the poll tax ban were removed. Ultimately, the bill was reported out of committee on April 9 by a 12-4 vote without a recommendation.^[14]:152–153

On April 22, the full Senate started debating the bill. Dirksen spoke first on the bill's behalf, saying that "legislation is needed if the unequivocal mandate of the Fifteenth Amendment ... is to be enforced and made effective, and if the Declaration of Independence is to be made truly meaningful."^[14]:154 Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC) retorted that the bill would lead to "despotism and tyranny", and Senator Sam Ervin (D-NC) argued that the bill was unconstitutional because it deprived states of their right under Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution to establish voter qualifications and because the bill's special provisions targeted only certain jurisdictions. On May 6, Ervin offered an amendment to abolish the coverage formula's automatic trigger and instead allow federal judges to appoint federal examiners to administer voter registration. This amendment overwhelmingly failed, with 42 Democrats and 22 Republicans voting against it.^{[14]:154–156} After lengthy debate, Ted Kennedy's amendment to prohibit poll taxes also failed 49-45 on May 11.^[28] However, the Senate agreed to include a provision authorizing the Attorney General to sue any jurisdiction, covered or non-covered, to challenge its use of poll taxes.^{[21]:156–157[29]:2} An amendment offered by Senator Robert Kennedy (D-NY) to enfranchise English-illiterate citizens who had attained at least a sixth-grade education in a non-English-speaking school also passed by 48-19. Southern legislators offered a series of amendments to weaken the bill, all of which failed.^[14]:159

On May 25, the Senate voted for cloture by a 70-30 vote, thus overcoming the threat of filibuster and limiting further debate on the bill.^[33] On May 26, the Senate passed the bill by a 77-19 vote (Democrats 47-16, Republicans 30-2); only Senators representing Southern states voted against it.^[14]:161[34]

House of Representatives:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Remarks on the Signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965

Emanuel Celler (D-NY), Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, introduced the Voting Rights Act in the House of Representatives on March 19, 1965 as H.R. 6400.^[28] The House Judiciary Committee was the first committee to consider the bill. The committee's ranking Republican, William McCulloch (R-OH), generally supported expanding voting rights, but he opposed both the poll tax ban and the coverage formula, and he led opposition to the bill in committee. The committee eventually approved the bill on May 12, but it did not file its committee report until June 1.^[14]:162 The bill included two amendments from subcommittee: a penalty for private persons who interfered with the right to vote, and a prohibition of all poll taxes. The poll tax prohibition gained Speaker of the House John McCormack's support. The bill was next considered by the Rules Committee, whose chair, Howard W. Smith (D-VA), opposed the bill and delayed its consideration until June 24, when Celler initiated proceedings to have the bill discharged from committee.^[28] Under pressure from the bill's proponents, Smith allowed the bill to be released a week later, and the full House started debating the bill on July 6.^[14]:163

To defeat the Voting Rights Act, McCulloch introduced an alternative bill, H.R. 7896. It would have allowed the Attorney General to appoint federal registrars after receiving 25 serious complaints of discrimination about a jurisdiction, and it would have imposed a nationwide ban on literacy tests for persons who could prove they attained a sixth-grade education. McCulloch's bill was co-sponsored by House Minority Leader Gerald Ford (R-MI) and supported by Southern Democrats as an alternative to the Voting Rights Act.^{[14]:162–164} The Johnson administration viewed H.R. 7896 as a serious threat to passing the Voting Rights Act. However, support for H.R. 7896 dissipated after William M. Tuck (D-VA) publicly said he preferred H.R. 7896 because the Voting Rights Act would legitimately ensure that African Americans could vote. His statement alienated most supporters of H.R. 7896, and the bill failed on the House floor by a 171-248 vote on July 9.^[35] Later that night, the House passed the Voting Rights Act by a 333-85 vote (Democrats 221-61, Republicans 112-24).^{[14]:163–165[28][36}]

Conference committee

The chambers appointed a conference committee to resolve differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill. A major contention concerned the poll tax provisions; the Senate version allowed the Attorney General to sue states that used poll taxes to discriminate, while the House version outright banned all poll taxes. Initially, the committee members were stalemated. To help broker a compromise, Attorney General Katzenbach drafted legislative language explicitly asserting that poll taxes were unconstitutional and instructed the Department of Justice to sue the states that maintained poll taxes. To assuage concerns of liberal committee members that this provision was not strong enough, Katzenbach enlisted the help of Martin Luther King, Jr., who gave his support to the compromise. King's endorsement ended the stalemate, and on July 29, the conference committee reported its version out of committee.^{[14]:166–167} The House approved this conference report version of the bill on August 3 by a 328-74 vote (Democrats 217-54, Republicans 111-20),^[37] and the Senate passed it on August 4 by a 79-18 vote (Democrats 49-17, Republicans 30-1).^{[14]:167[38][39]} On August 6, President Johnson signed the Act into law with King, Rosa Parks, John Lewis, and other civil rights leaders in attendance at the signing ceremony.^[14]:168

Amendments

Main article: Amendments to the Voting Rights Act of 1965

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964

Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Pub.L. 88–352, 78 Stat. 241, enacted July 2, 1964) is a landmark civil rights and U.S. labor law in the United States^[5] that outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.^[6] It prohibits unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools, employment, and public accommodations.

Powers given to enforce the act were initially weak, but were supplemented during later years. Congress asserted its authority to legislate under several different parts of the United States Constitution, principally its power to regulate interstate commerce under Article One (section 8), its duty to guarantee all citizens equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment, and its duty to protect voting rights under the Fifteenth Amendment.

The legislation had been proposed by U.S. President John F. Kennedy in June 1963,but opposed by filibuster in the Senate. After Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnsonpushed the bill forward, which in its final form was passed in the U.S. Congress by a Senate vote of 73–27 and House vote of 289–126. The Act was signed into law by U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 2, 1964, at the White House.

Origins:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

John F. Kennedy addresses the nation about civil rights on June 11, 1963

The bill was called for by U.S. President John F. Kennedy in his Report to the American People on Civil Rights of June 11, 1963,^[7] in which he asked for legislation "giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public—hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and similar establishments"—as well as "greater protection for the right to vote". Kennedy delivered this speech in the aftermath of the Birmingham campaign and the growing number of demonstrations and protests throughout the southern United States. Kennedy was moved to action following the elevated racial tensions and wave of black riots in the spring 1963.^[8]

Emulating the Civil Rights Act of 1875, Kennedy's civil rights bill included provisions to ban discrimination in public accommodations, and to enable the U.S. Attorney General to join in lawsuits against state governments which operated segregated school systems, among other provisions. However, it did not include a number of provisions deemed essential by civil rights leaders, including protection against police brutality, ending discrimination in private employment, or granting the Justice Department power to initiate desegregation or job discrimination lawsuits.^[9]

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House of Representatives

First page of the Civil Rights Act of 1964

On June 11, 1963, President Kennedy met with Republican leaders to discuss the legislation before his television address to the nation that evening. Two days later,S:{enate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen and Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield both voiced support for the president's bill, except for provisions guaranteeing equal access to places of public accommodations.}: This led to several Republican Representatives drafting a compromise bill to be considered. On June 19, the president sent his bill to Congress as it was originally written, saying legislative action was "imperative".^[10][11] The president's bill went first to the House of Representatives, where it was referred to the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Emanuel Celler, a Democrat from New York. After a series of hearings on the bill, Celler's committee strengthened the act, adding provisions to ban racial discrimination in employment, providing greater protection to black voters, eliminating segregation in all publicly-owned facilities (not just schools), and strengthening the anti-segregation clauses regarding public facilities such as lunch counters. They also added authorization for the Attorney General to file lawsuits to protect individuals against the deprivation of any rights secured by the Constitution or U.S. law. In essence, this was the controversial "Title III" that had been removed from the 1957 Act and 1960 Act. Civil rights organizations pressed hard for this provision because it could be used to protect peaceful protesters and black voters from police brutality and suppression of free speech rights.

Kennedy called the congressional leaders to the White House in late October 1963 to line up the necessary votes in the House for passage.^[12] The bill was reported out of the Judiciary Committee in November 1963 and referred to the Rules Committee, whose chairman, Howard W. Smith, a Democrat and staunch segregationist from Virginia, indicated his intention to keep the bill bottled up indefinitely.

Johnson's appeal to Congress:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

The assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, changed the political situation. Kennedy's successor as president, Lyndon Johnson, made use of his experience in legislative politics, along with the bully pulpit he wielded as president, in support of the bill. In his first address to a joint session of Congress on November 27, 1963, Johnson told the legislators, "No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long."^[13]

Judiciary Committee chairman Celler filed a petition to discharge the bill from the Rules Committee; it required the support of a majority of House members to move the bill to the floor. Initially Celler had a difficult time acquiring the signatures necessary, with many Representatives who supported the civil rights bill itself remaining cautious about violating normal House procedure with the rare use of a discharge petition. By the time of the 1963 winter recess, 50 signatures were still needed.

After the return of Congress from its winter recess, however, it was apparent that public opinion in the North favored the bill and that the petition would acquire the necessary signatures. To avert the humiliation of a successful discharge petition, Chairman Smith relented and allowed the bill to pass through the Rules Committee.

Lobbying efforts:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Lobbying support for the Civil Rights Act was coordinated by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a coalition of 70 liberal and labor organizations. The principal lobbyists for the Leadership Conference were civil rights lawyer Joseph L. Rauh Jr. and Clarence Mitchell, Sr. of the NAACP.^[14]

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Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X at the United States Capitol on March 26, 1964. Both had come to hear the Senate debate on the bill. This was the only time the two men ever met; their meeting lasted only one minute.^[15]

Johnson, who wanted the bill passed as soon as possible, ensured that the bill would be quickly considered by the Senate. Normally, the bill would have been referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Senator James O. Eastland, Democrat from Mississippi. Given Eastland's firm opposition, it seemed impossible that the bill would reach the Senate floor. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield took a novel approach to prevent the bill from being relegated to Judiciary Committee limbo. Having initially waived a second reading of the bill, which would have led to it being immediately referred to Judiciary, Mansfield gave the bill a second reading on February 26, 1964, and then proposed, in the absence of precedent for instances when a second reading did not immediately follow the first, that the bill bypass the Judiciary Committee and immediately be sent to the Senate floor for debate.

When the bill came before the full Senate for debate on March 30, 1964, the "Southern Bloc" of 18 southern Democratic Senators and one Republican Senator led by Richard Russell(D-GA) launched a filibuster to prevent its passage.^[16] Said Russell: "We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our (Southern) states."^[17]

Strong opposition to the bill also came from Senator Strom Thurmond (D-SC): "This so-called Civil Rights Proposals, which the President has sent to Capitol Hill for enactment into law, are unconstitutional, unnecessary, unwise and extend beyond the realm of reason. This is the worst civil-rights package ever presented to the Congress and is reminiscent of the Reconstruction proposals and actions of the radical RepublicanCongress."^[18]

On the morning of June 10, 1964, Senator Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) completed a filibustering address that he had begun 14 hours and 13 minutes earlier opposing the legislation. Until then, the measure had occupied the Senate for 60 working days, including six Saturdays. A day earlier, Democratic Whip Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, the bill's manager, concluded he had the 67 votes required at that time to end the debate and end the filibuster. With six wavering senators providing a four-vote victory margin, the final tally stood at 71 to 29. Never in history had the Senate been able to muster enough votes to cut off a filibuster on a civil rights bill. And only once in the 37 years since 1927 had it agreed to cloture for any measure.^[20]After 54 days of filibuster, Senators Hubert Humphrey (D-MN), Mike Mansfield (D-MT), Everett Dirksen (R-IL), and Thomas Kuchel (R-CA), introduced a substitute bill that they hoped would attract enough Republican swing votes in addition to the core liberal Democrats behind the legislation to end the filibuster. The compromise bill was weaker than the House version in regard to government power to regulate the conduct of private business, but it was not so weak as to cause the House to reconsider the legislation.^[19]

On June 19, the substitute (compromise) bill passed the Senate by a vote of 73–27, and quickly passed through the House–Senate conference committee, which adopted the Senate version of the bill. The conference bill was passed by both houses of Congress, and was signed into law by President Johnson on July 2, 1964.^[21]

Vote totals

Totals are in "Yea–Nay" format:

The original House version: 290–130 (69–31%)
Cloture in the Senate: 71–29 (71–29%)
The Senate version: 73–27 (73–27%)
The Senate version, as voted on by the House: 289–126 (70–30%)

By party:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

The record of the roll call votekept by the House Clerk on final passage of the bill

The original House version:^[22]

Democratic Party: 152–96 (61–39%)
Republican Party: 138–34 (80–20%)

Cloture in the Senate:^[23]

Democratic Party: 44–23 (66–34%)
Republican Party: 27–6 (82–18%)

The Senate version:^[22]

Democratic Party: 46–21 (69–31%)
Republican Party: 27–6 (82–18%)

The Senate version, voted on by the House:^[22]

Democratic Party: 153–91 (63–37%)
Republican Party: 136–35 (80–20%)

By party and region:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Note: "Southern", as used in this section, refers to members of Congress from the eleven states that made up the Confederate States of America in the American Civil War. "Northern" refers to members from the other 39 states, regardless of the geographic location of those states.^[24]

The original House version:

Southern Democrats: 7–87 (7–93%)
Southern Republicans: 0–10 (0–100%)
Northern Democrats: 145–9 (94–6%)
Northern Republicans: 138–24 (85–15%)

The Senate version:

Southern Democrats: 1–20 (5–95%) (only Ralph Yarborough of Texas voted in favor)
Southern Republicans: 0–1 (0–100%) (John Tower of Texas)
Northern Democrats: 45–1 (98–2%) (only Robert Byrd of West Virginia voted against)
Northern Republicans: 27–5 (84–16%)

Women's rights

Engrossing copy of H.R. 7152, which added sex to the categories of persons against whom the bill prohibited discrimination, as passed by the House of Representatives [25]

Just one year earlier, the same Congress had passed the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which prohibited wage differentials based on sex. The prohibition on sex discrimination was added to the Civil Rights Act by Howard W. Smith, a powerful Virginia Democrat who chaired the House Rules Committee and who strongly opposed the legislation. Smith's amendment was passed by a teller vote of 168 to 133. Historians debate Smith's motivation, whether it was a cynical attempt to defeat the bill by someone opposed to civil rights both for blacks and women, or an attempt to support their rights by broadening the bill to include women.^{[26][27][28][29]} Smith expected that Republicans, who had included equal rights for women in their party's platform since 1944,^[30] would probably vote for the amendment. Historians speculate that Smith was trying to embarrass northern Democrats who opposed civil rights for women because the clause was opposed by labor unions. Representative Carl Elliott of Alabama later claimed, "Smith didn't give a damn about women's rights...he was trying to knock off votes either then or down the line because there was always a hard core of men who didn't favor women's rights,"^[31] and the Congressional Record records that Smith was greeted by laughter when he introduced the amendment.^[32]

Smith asserted that he was not joking; he sincerely supported the amendment and, indeed, along with Rep. Martha Griffiths,^[33] he was the chief spokesperson for the amendment.^[32] For twenty years Smith had sponsored the Equal Rights Amendment (with no linkage to racial issues) in the House because he believed in it. He for decades had been close to the National Woman's Party and its leader Alice Paul, who was also the leader in winning the right to vote for women in 1920, the author of the first Equal Rights Amendment, and a chief supporter of equal rights proposals since then. She and other feminists had worked with Smith since 1945 trying to find a way to include sex as a protected civil rights category. Now was the moment.^[34] Griffiths argued that the new law would protect black women but not white women, and that was unfair to white women. Furthermore, she argued that the laws "protecting" women from unpleasant jobs were actually designed to enable men to monopolize those jobs, and that was unfair to women who were not allowed to try out for those jobs.^[35] The amendment passed with the votes of Republicans and Southern Democrats. The final law passed with the votes of Republicans and Northern Democrats. Thus, as Justice William Rehnquist explained in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, "The prohibition against discrimination based on sex was added to Title VII at the last minute on the floor of the House of Representatives... the bill quickly passed as amended, and we are left with little legislative history to guide us in interpreting the Act's prohibition against discrimination based on 'sex.'"^[36]

Desegregation

One of the most damaging arguments by the bill's opponents was that once passed, the bill would require forced busing to achieve certain racial quotas in schools.^[37] Proponents of the bill, such as Emanuel Celler and Jacob Javits, said that the bill would not authorize such measures. Leading sponsor Senator Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) wrote two amendments specifically designed to outlaw busing.^[37] Humphrey said "if the bill were to compel it, it would be a violation [of the Constitution], because it would be handling the matter on the basis of race and we would be transporting children because of race."^[37] While Javits said any government official who sought to use the bill for busing purposes "would be making a fool of himself," two years later the Department of Health, Education and Welfare said that Southern school districts would be required to meet mathematical ratios of students by busing.^[37]

Political repercussions

Major features:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

(The full text of the Act is available online.)

Title I:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

This title barred unequal application of voter registration requirements. Title I did not eliminate literacy tests, which acted as one barrier for black voters, other racial minorities, and poor whites in the South or address economic retaliation, police repression, or physical violence against nonwhite voters. While the Act did require that voting rules and procedures be applied equally to all races, it did not abolish the concept of voter "qualification". It accepted the idea that citizens do not have an automatic right to vote but would have to meet standards beyond citizenship.^[42][43] The Voting Rights Act of 1965 directly addressed and eliminated most voting qualifications beyond citizenship.

Title II:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin in hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, and all other public accommodations engaged in interstate commerce; exempted private clubs without defining the term "private".^[44]

Title III:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Prohibited state and municipal governments from denying access to public facilities on grounds of race, color, religion, or national origin.

Title IV:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Encouraged the desegregation of public schools and authorized the U.S. Attorney General to file suits to enforce said act.

Title V:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Expanded the Civil Rights Commission established by the earlier Civil Rights Act of 1957 with additional powers, rules and procedures.

Title VI:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Prevents discrimination by programs and activities that receive federal funds. If a recipient of federal funds is found in violation of Title VI, that recipient may lose its federal funding.

General

This title declares it to be the policy of the United States that discrimination on the ground of race, color, or national origin shall not occur in connection with programs and activities receiving Federal financial assistance and authorizes and directs the appropriate Federal departments and agencies to take action to carry out this policy. This title is not intended to apply to foreign assistance programs. Section 601 – This section states the general principle that no person in the United States shall be excluded from participation in or otherwise discriminated against on the ground of race, color, or national origin under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

Section 602 directs each Federal agency administering a program of Federal financial assistance by way of grant, contract, or loan to take action pursuant to rule, regulation, or order of general applicability to effectuate the principle of section 601 in a manner consistent with the achievement of the objectives of the statute authorizing the assistance. In seeking the effect compliance with its requirements imposed under this section, an agency is authorized to terminate or to refuse to grant or to continue assistance under a program to any recipient as to whom there has been an express finding pursuant to a hearing of a failure to comply with the requirements under that program, and it may also employ any other means authorized by law. However, each agency is directed first to seek compliance with its requirements by voluntary means.

Section 603 provides that any agency action taken pursuant to section 602 shall be subject to such judicial review as would be available for similar actions by that agency on other grounds. Where the agency action consists of terminating or refusing to grant or to continue financial assistance because of a finding of a failure of the recipient to comply with the agency's requirements imposed under section 602, and the agency action would not otherwise be subject to judicial review under existing law, judicial review shall nevertheless be available to any person aggrieved as provided in section 10 of the Administrative Procedure Act (5 U.S.C. § 1009). The section also states explicitly that in the latter situation such agency action shall not be deemed committed to unreviewable agency discretion within the meaning of section 10. The purpose of this provision is to obviate the possible argument that although section 603 provides for review in accordance with section 10, section 10 itself has an exception for action "committed to agency discretion," which might otherwise be carried over into section 603. It is not the purpose of this provision of section 603, however, otherwise to alter the scope of judicial review as presently provided in section 10(e) of the Administrative Procedure Act.

Title VII

Title VII of the Act, codified as Subchapter VI of Chapter 21 of title 42 of the United States Code, prohibits discrimination by covered employers on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin (see 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2^[45]). Title VII applies to and covers an employer "who has fifteen (15) or more employees for each working day in each of twenty or more calendar weeks in the current or preceding calendar year" as written in the Definitions section under 42 U.S.C. §2000e(b). Title VII also prohibits discrimination against an individual because of his or her association with another individual of a particular race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, such as by an interracial marriage.^[46] The EEO Title VII has also been supplemented with legislation prohibiting pregnancy, age, and disability discrimination (See Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, Age Discrimination in Employment Act,^[47] Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990).

In very narrowly defined situations, an employer is permitted to discriminate on the basis of a protected trait where the trait is a bona fide occupational qualification (BFOQ) reasonably necessary to the normal operation of that particular business or enterprise. To prove the bona fide occupational qualifications defense, an employer must prove three elements: a direct relationship between the protected trait and the ability to perform the duties of the job, the BFOQ relates to the "essence" or "central mission of the employer's business", and there is no less-restrictive or reasonable alternative (United Automobile Workers v. Johnson Controls, Inc., 499 U.S. 187 (1991) 111 S.Ct. 1196). The Bona Fide Occupational Qualification exception is an extremely narrow exception to the general prohibition of discrimination based on protected traits (Dothard v. Rawlinson, 433 U.S. 321 (1977) 97 S.Ct. 2720). An employer or customer's preference for an individual of a particular religion is not sufficient to establish a Bona Fide Occupational Qualification (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Kamehameha School — Bishop Estate, 990 F.2d 458 (9th Cir. 1993)).

Title VII allows for any employer, labor organization, joint labor-management committee, or employment agency to bypass the "unlawful employment practice" for any person involved with the Communist Party of the United States or of any other organization required to register as a Communist-action or Communist-front organization by final order of the Subversive Activities Control Board pursuant to the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950.^[48]

There are partial and whole exceptions to Title VII for four types of employers:

Federal government; (Comment: The proscriptions against employment discrimination under Title VII are now applicable to certain federal government offices under 42 U.S.C. Section 2000e-16)
Federally recognized Native American tribes
Religious groups performing work connected to the group's activities, including associated education institutions;
Bona fide nonprofit private membership organizations.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) as well as certain state fair employment practices agencies (FEPAs) enforce Title VII (see 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-4).^[45] The EEOC and state FEPAs investigate, mediate, and may file lawsuits on behalf of employees. Where a state law is contradicted by a federal law, it is overridden.^[49] Every state, except Arkansas and Mississippi, maintains a state FEPA (see EEOC and state FEPA directory). Title VII also provides that an individual can bring a private lawsuit. An individual must file a complaint of discrimination with the EEOC within 180 days of learning of the discrimination or the individual may lose the right to file a lawsuit. Title VII only applies to employers who employ 15 or more employees for 20 or more weeks in the current or preceding calendar year (42 U.S.C. § 2000e(b)).

Precedents and history:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

In the early 1980s, the EEOC and some federal courts began holding that sexual harassment is also prohibited under the Act. In 1986, the Supreme Court held in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, 477 U.S. 57 (1986), that sexual harassment is sex discrimination and is prohibited by Title VII. This case filed by plaintiff Mechelle Vinson was the first in the history of the court to recognize sexual harassment as actionable.^[50] Following 1986, court cases in which the plaintiff suffers no economic loss can potentially argue for a violation of Title VII if the discrimination resulted in a hostile work environment.^[50] Same-sex sexual harassment has also been held in a unanimous decision written by Justice Scalia to be prohibited by Title VII (Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc., 523 U.S. 75 (1998), 118 S.Ct. 998).

In 2012, the EEOC ruled that employment discrimination on the basis of gender identity or transgender status is prohibited under Title VII. The decision held that discrimination on the basis of gender identity qualified as discrimination on the basis of sex whether the discrimination was due to sex stereotyping, discomfort with the fact of an individual's transition, or discrimination due to a perceived change in the individual's sex.^[51][52] In 2014, the EEOC initiated two lawsuits against private companies for discrimination on the basis of gender identity, with additional litigation under consideration.^[53] As of November 2014, Commissioner Chai Feldblum is making an active effort to increase awareness of Title VII remedies for individuals discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.^[54][55]

On December 15, 2014, under a memorandum issued by Attorney General Eric Holder, the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) took a position that aligned with the EEOC, namely the prohibition of sex discrimination under Title VII encompassed the prohibition of discrimination based on gender identity or transgender status. DoJ had already stopped opposing claims of discrimination brought by federal transgender employees.^[56]

In October 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a directive that withdrew the Holder memorandum.^[57] According to a copy of the directive reviewed by BuzzFeed News, Sessions stated that Title VII should be narrowly interpreted to cover discrimination between "men and women". Attorney General Session stated as a matter of law, "Title VII does not prohibit discrimination based on gender identity per se."^[58] Devin O'Malley, speaking on behalf of the DoJ, stated "the last administration abandoned that fundamental principle [that the Department of Justice cannot expand the law beyond what Congress has provided], which necessitated today's action." Sharon McGowan, a lawyer with Lambda Legal who previously served in the Civil Rights division of DoJ, rejected that argument, saying "[T]his memo is not actually a reflection of the law as it is — it's a reflection of what the DOJ wishes the law were" and "The Justice Department is actually getting back in the business of making anti-transgender law in court."^[57]

On December 11, 2017, the United States Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal in Evans v. Georgia Regional Hospital, in which a lower court ruled against the plaintiff, who had argued Title VII protections applied to sexual orientation. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stated in its earlier ruling that only the Supreme Court could determine if Title VII applied.^[59]

Title VIII:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Required compilation of voter-registration and voting data in geographic areas specified by the Commission on Civil Rights.

Title IX:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Title IX made it easier to move civil rights cases from state courts to federal court. This was of crucial importance to civil rights activists^[who?] who contended that they could not get fair trials in state courts.[citation ^needed]^

Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 should not be confused with Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, which prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded education programs and activities.

Title X:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Established the Community Relations Service, tasked with assisting in community disputes involving claims of discrimination.

Title XI:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Title XI gives a defendant accused of certain categories of criminal contempt in a matter arising under title II, III, IV, V, VI, or VII of the Act the right to a jury trial. If convicted, the defendant can be fined an amount not to exceed $1,000 or imprisoned for not more than six months.

Continued resistance

There were white business owners who claimed that Congress did not have the constitutional authority to ban segregation in public accommodations. For example, Moreton Rolleston, the owner of a motel in Atlanta, Georgia, said he should not be forced to serve black travelers, saying, "the fundamental question [...] is whether or not Congress has the power to take away the liberty of an individual to run his business as he sees fit in the selection and choice of his customers".^[60] Rolleston claimed that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a breach of the Fourteenth Amendment and also violated the Fifth and Thirteenth Amendments by depriving him of "liberty and property without due process".^[60] In Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States (1964), the Supreme Court held that Congress drew its authority from the Constitution's Commerce Clause, rejecting Rolleston's claims.

Resistance to the public accommodation clause continued for years on the ground, especially in the South.^[61] When local college students in Orangeburg, South Carolina attempted to desegregate a bowling alley in 1968, they were violently attacked, leading to rioting and what became known as the "Orangeburg massacre."^[62] Resistance by school boards continued into the next decade, with the most significant declines in black-white school segregation only occurring at the end of the 1960s and the start of the 1970s in the aftermath of the Green v. County School Board of New Kent County (1968) court decision.^[63]

Amendments:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Between 1965 and 1972, Title VII lacked any strong enforcement provisions. Instead, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was authorized only to investigate external claims of discrimination. The EEOC could then refer cases to the Justice Department for litigation if reasonable cause was found. The EEOC documented the nature and magnitude of discriminatory employment practices, the first study of this kind done.

In 1972, Congress passed the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. The Act amended Title VII and gave EEOC authority to initiate its own enforcement litigation. The EEOC now played a major role in guiding judicial interpretations of civil rights legislation. The commission was also permitted for the first time to define "discrimination," a term excluded from the 1964 Act.^[64]

Subsequent court rulings:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

The Constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was, at the time, in some dispute as it applied to the private sector. In the landmark Civil Rights Cases the United States Supreme Court had ruled, in 1883, that Congress did not have the power to prohibit discrimination in the private sector, thus stripping the Civil Rights Act of 1875 of much of its ability to protect civil rights.^[65]

In the late 19th and early 20th century, the legal justification for voiding the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was part of a larger trend by members of the United States Supreme Court to invalidate most government regulations of the private sector, except when dealing with laws designed to protect traditional public morality.

In the 1930s, during the New Deal, the majority of the Supreme Court justices gradually shifted their legal theory to allow for greater government regulation of the private sector under the commerce clause, thus paving the way for the Federal government to enact civil rights laws prohibiting both public and private sector discrimination on the basis of the commerce clause.

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, the Supreme Court upheld the law's application to the private sector, on the grounds that Congress has the power to regulate commerce between the States. The landmark case Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States established the constitutionality of the law, but it did not settle all of the legal questions surrounding the law.

In Phillips v. Martin Marietta Corp., a 1971 Supreme Court case regarding the gender provisions of the Act, the Court ruled that a company could not discriminate against a potential female employee because she had a preschool-age child unless they did the same with potential male employees.^[29] A federal court overruled an Ohio state law that barred women from obtaining jobs which required the ability to lift 25 pounds and required women to take lunch breaks when men were not required to.^[29] In Pittsburgh Press Co. v. Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations, the United States Supreme Court decided that printing separate job listings for men and women was illegal, which ended that practice among the country's newspapers. The United States Civil Service Commission ended the practice among federal jobs which designated them "women only" or "men only."^[29]

In 1974, the Supreme Court also ruled that the San Francisco school district was violating non-English speaking students' rights under the 1964 act by placing them in regular classes rather than providing some sort of accommodation for them.^[66]

In 1975, a federal civil rights agency warned a Phoenix, Arizona school that its end-of-year father-son and mother-daughter baseball games were illegal according to the 1964 Civil Rights Act.^[29] President Gerald Fordintervened, and the games were allowed to continue.^[29]

In 1977, the Supreme Court struck down state minimum height requirements for police officers as violating the Act; women usually could not meet these requirements.^[29]

On April 4, 2017, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, sitting en banc, ruled that Title VII of the Act forbids discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation by a vote of 8–3.^[67][68] Over the prior month, panels of both the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta and the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York City had reached the opposite conclusion, finding that Title VII sex discrimination does not include claims based on sexual orientation.^[69]

Influence

Despite its lack of influence during its time, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had considerable impact on later civil rights legislation in the United States. It paved the way for future legislation that was not limited to African American civil rights. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990—which has been called "the most important piece of federal legislation since the Civil Rights Act of 1964"—was influenced both by the structure and substance of the previous Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act was arguably of equal importance, and "draws substantially from the structure of that landmark legislation [Civil Rights Act of 1964]". The Americans with Disabilities Act paralleled its landmark predecessor structurally, drawing upon many of the same titles and statutes. For example, "Title I of the ADA, which bans employment discrimination by private employers on the basis of disability, parallels Title VII of the Act". Similarly, Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, "which proscribes discrimination on the basis of disability in public accommodations, tracks Title II of the 1964 Act while expanding upon the list of public accommodations covered." The Americans with Disabilities Act extended "the principle of nondiscrimination to people with disabilities",^[70] an idea unsought in the United States before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Act also influenced later civil rights legislation, such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968, aiding not only African Americans, but also women.

Note

===

Civil Voting Rights Act VRA 1964-5

After VRA ruling, Benny Johnson suggests the Trump administration “should go full speed ahead in bringing the full force of the federal government against these DEI districts”

Louisiana argues parts of Voting Rights Act are unconstitutional

US Civil Rights Commission shelves recommendations for protecting voter rights in November

Background

Legislative history:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Original bill:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Senate:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

House of Representatives:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Conference committee

Amendments

Origins:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Legislative history:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

House of Representatives

Johnson's appeal to Congress:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Lobbying efforts:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Passage in the Senate:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Vote totals

By party:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

By party and region:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Women's rights

Desegregation

Political repercussions

Major features:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Title I:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Title II:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Title III:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Title IV:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Title V:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Title VI:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Title VII

Precedents and history:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Title VIII:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Title IX:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Title X:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Title XI:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Continued resistance

Amendments:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Subsequent court rulings:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Influence

See also

Note