Really great news for voting enthusiasts last week:
The U.S. Department of Justice will block the voter ID provisions of an election law passed in South Carolina earlier this year because the state’s own statistics demonstrated that the photo identification requirement would have a much greater impact on non-white residents, DOJ said in a letter to the state on Friday.
Officials in DOJ’s Civil Rights Division found a significant racial disparity in the data provided by South Carolina, which must have changes to its election laws precleared under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, because of past history of discrimination. The data demonstrated that registered non-white voters were 20 percent more likely than white voters to lack the specific type of photo identification required to exercise their constitutional rights, according to a letter sent to South Carolina and obtained by TPM.
Perez wrote that the number of minority citizens whose exercise of the francise could be adversely affected by the proposed requirements “runs in the tens of thousands.” He wrote that the state had “failed entirely to address the disparity between the proportions of white and non-white registered voters who lack DMV-issued identification.”
“data provided by South Carolina”
“the state’s own statistics”
The governor of South Carolina and the conservatives in the state legislature are (apparently) absolutely clueless about the people who live in South Carolina. Conservative leaders might want to get out more. Fewer think-tank funded roundtables and appearances with Fox News personalities, more hands-on work.
It was – assuming good faith – news to Haley and South Carolina conservative representatives that certain parts of South Carolina are poor and rural. They didn’t even have to read the information they submitted to the DOJ. They could have asked this guy:
But having no birth certificate, or having one where the name conflicts with other legal documents, can cause problems today proving one’s identification — and getting the photo ID required to get a job, travel, go into public buildings and, in a recent and controversial change in South Carolina, register to vote.
In some cases, people who have never had a problem before must now go to family court to authenticate the names they have used all their lives.
Joseph Williams, a physician who sees mostly elderly patients in Sumter, guessed as many as 20 percent of his 3,000 to 4,000 regular patients have problems with identification. Some only know the year they were born.
“It’s extremely common for people who are over 50,” said Williams, who is 60. “Record-keeping was poor in our age group.”
Wouldn’t it be great to be a conservative and live your life entirely removed from the gritty, day to day reality the rest of us have to grapple with? Record keeping was poor in rural South Carolina back in the day. Who knew? Not the governor or the conservatives in the state legislature, apparently. Poor, rural South Carolinians have to appear in family court before they may vote? No burden there!
Here is Governor Haley’s response to the DOJ, on Facebook:
“The President and his bullish administration are fighting us every step of the way,” Haley wrote. “It is outrageous, and we plan to look at every possible option to get this clearly political decision overturned so we can protect the integrity of our electoral process and our 10th amendment rights.”
Wow. “Our Tenth Amendment rights”?
Can someone ask Governor Haley why she believes “our Tenth Amendment rights” trump federal civil rights legislation that was reauthorized by a huge Congressional majority as recently as 2006? Can someone ask Governor Haley if she knows that former President Reagan said this when he signed the 1982 reauthorization of the portions of the Voting Rights Act that she objects to on “states’ rights” grounds?
On signing the 1982 extension of the Act, which passed the House by a vote of 389 to 24 and the Senate by a vote of 95-9, President Reagan called the right to vote the ‘crown jewel of American liberties.’
What happened? We went from the “crown jewel of American liberties” when Reagan was smiling for the cameras to a Facebook post babbling something about the Tenth Amendment?
Benjamin Franklin
You’re the electorate’s ombuds(wo)man, Kay.
It’s a game of inches and you are miles ahead/
Gwangung
Yeah, that’s. So,etching everyone can agree on here…keeping a heads up n this voters stuff is important.
Brian S
Reagan also popularized Cadillac-driving welfare queens and young bucks buying steaks with food stamps, so I’d say his Voting Rights Act statement may have been the outlier in his career. Haley and the rest of the GOP are the natural extension of Reagan’s rhetoric.
sherparick
Noah Smith at his blog “Noah Opinion” has a very pertinent blog entry on this subject, especially, since Governor Hayley is calling the Federal Government a bully for preventing her and the wealthy people of South Carolina from bullying and denying the vote to the poor.
I have not been surprised by any of the quotes that have recently come to light from Ron Paul’s racist newsletters. I grew up in Texas, remember, and I know from experience that if you talk to a hardcore Paul supporter for a reasonable length of time, these sorts of ideas are more likely than not to come up.
So does this mean that Ron Paul’s libertarianism is merely a thin veneer covering a bedrock of tribalist white-supremacist paleoconservatism? Well, no, I don’t think so. Sure, the tribalist white-supremacist paleoconservatism is there. I just don’t think it’s incompatible with libertarianism. http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/liberty-of-local-bullies.html
“…I have often remarked in the past how libertarianism – at least, its modern American manifestation – is not really about increasing liberty or freedom as an average person would define those terms. An ideal libertarian society would leave the vast majority of people feeling profoundly constrained in many ways. This is because the freedom of the individual can be curtailed not only by the government, but by a large variety of intermediate powers like work bosses, neighborhood associations, self-organized ethnic movements, organized religions, tough violent men, or social conventions. In a society such as ours, where the government maintains a nominal monopoly on the use of physical violence, there is plenty of room for people to be oppressed by such intermediate powers, whom I call “local bullies.”
The modern American libertarian ideology does not deal with the issue of local bullies. In the world envisioned by Nozick, Hayek, Rand, and other foundational thinkers of the movement, there are only two levels to society – the government (the “big bully”) and the individual. If your freedom is not being taken away by the biggest bully that exists, your freedom is not being taken away at all.
In a perfect libertarian world, it is therefore possible for rich people to buy all the beaches and charge admission fees to whomever they want (or simply ban anyone they choose). In a libertarian world, a self-organized cartel of white people can, under certain conditions, get together and effectively prohibit black people from being able to go out to dinner in their own city. In a libertarian world, a corporate boss can use the threat of unemployment to force you into accepting unsafe working conditions. In other words, the local bullies are free to revoke the freedoms of individuals, using methods more subtle than overt violent coercion.
Such a world wouldn’t feel incredibly free to the people in it. Sure, you could get together with friends and pool your money to buy a little patch of beach. Sure, you could move to a less racist city. Sure, you could quit and find another job. But doing any of these things requires paying large transaction costs. As a result you would feel much less free.
Now, the founders of libertarianism – Nozick et. al. – obviously understood the principle that freedoms are often mutually exclusive – that my freedom to punch you in the face curtails quite a number of your freedoms. For this reason, they endorsed “minarchy,” or a government whose only role is to protect people from violence and protect property rights. But they didn’t extend the principle to covertly violent, semi-violent, or nonviolent forms of coercion.
Not surprisingly, this gigantic loophole has made modern American libertarianism the favorite philosophy of a vast array of local bullies, who want to keep the big bully (government) off their backs so they can bully to their hearts’ content. The curtailment of government legitimacy, in the name of “liberty,” allows abusive bosses to abuse workers, racists to curtail opportunities for minorities, polluters to pollute without cost, religious groups to make religious minorities feel excluded, etc. In theory, libertarianism is about the freedom of the individual, but in practice it is often about the freedom of local bullies to bully. It’s a “don’t tattle to the teacher” ideology.
Therefore I see no real conflict between Ron Paul’s libertarianism and his support for the agenda of racists. It’s just part and parcel of the whole movement. Not necessarily the movement as it was conceived, but the movement as it in fact exists.”
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
Thank you Kay, for continuing to write on this topic. Truly the GOP shows its true stripes as the Confederate Party in these kinds of situations. Of course, the SC Governor only looks bright when compared to her counterpart in Texas, and she’s easily as corrupt as he is. And only a bit less unpopular among her state residents as Fox News Personality King John. But just as much of a creep as either of them.
Poopyman
Speaking of voting irregularities, from the top:
Orly?
Roger Moore
Somebody should also ask her which is a bigger number, ten or fifteen. Cause you see, later amendments, the ones with bigger numbers, can modify earlier ones. The Fifteenth Amendment says the states can’t arbitrarily deny people the right to vote just because they’re black, and Congress has the power to prevent the states from trying. It’s black letter law.
serge
We elected Sara Palin, and Rick Perry, and Scott Walker, and every other nitwit all rolled up into the character known as Nikki Haley (Nooki as we call her). Facebook is as good as it gets. I wish Katie Couric had had the opportunity to ask Nooki what newspapers she reads.
She is a moron. Plain and simple. Moron. By this standard she is, therefor, eligible for public office in South Carolina.
Gwangung
States rights? And they really trump the INDIVIDUAL’S right to vote?
There’s a balancing act, true, but I don’t think it’s going to end up where they are claiming it does…
eric
I have written this before, but i think it bears repeating. These are people that truly believe that the ends justify the means. the non-zealots are straight out Straussians, who believe that the ends pragmatically justify the means. eh religious zealots believe that the goodness of the end sanctifies the means, such that god would never allow the good to happen by any immoral means. Thus, when anything stands in the way, it is a barrier to god’s will and blessing shining upon the actor. They see everything in terms of religious mission, so that ANY interference is heresy and a candidate for demonization.
Maude
Reagan had better speech writers. He was a smooth liar.
Linda Featheringill
Tenth Amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Fifteenth Amendment:
Section 1. The 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.
Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
I believe that the ruling was based not on intent to cheat minorities out of their voting right but on the fact of that being the effect of the state law. The DOJ used the state’s own figures to show that more minority people would be denied the right to vote.
The Guv is full of it.
KG
Pretty sure those second quotes would be prohibitions on the Tenth Amendment “rights” that Governor Haley seems to think are being infringed.
quannlace
Funny how the very people who will blather about the sacredness of the Constitution, will insist that voting is a ‘privilege’ and not a right.
*********
So, go ahead, South Carolina. And exercise your Tenth Amendment right to try and steal other citizen’s right to vote.
Cassidy
Republicans stopped hiding their bigotry.
KG
@quannlace: of course they still run into the probelm of “privileges” being protected by the Constitution
Phylllis
I live in the town where Haley grew up. The county hospital still had side-by-side water fountains when I moved here twenty years ago. The most prominent doctor in town practiced in a building with two waiting rooms (he’d converted one into an office area. Chick apparently spent her formative years with her head up her ass, clueless to the fact that she and her parents would also have been prevented from voting not so long ago.
Roger Moore
@Cassidy:
I don’t think they were making too much attempt to hide it when Reagan was President. The real thing that’s happened is that minorities are becoming a bigger and bigger part of the electorate, and leaning more and more heavily toward the Democrats. That means the Republicans can’t just write minorities off as irrelevant if they do well enough with white racists, and they can’t go very far toward wooing the minority vote without angering the racists. The only remaining option that will preserve their power is massive voter suppression.
wmd
@Poopyman: Caught my eye too. 104 Senators?
KG
@wmd: obviously some of them voted for it before they voted against it.
Cacti
I’m surprised South Carolina was so forthcoming with information on how effective their law would be at disenfranchising minorities.
Ever since the near President entered the WHITE house, it’s like they stopped even trying to hide their motivations.
PeakVT
Here is Governor Haley’s response to the DOJ, on Facebook:
Social media are both useful and great fun, but the overwhelming majority of politicians would be better served by having their staff issue a press release instead of twitting out whatever crosses their mind.
Southern Beale
Nikki Haley has no credibility. She tried to cook the books on the new healthcare law, and used taxpayer money to do it:
She needs to be careful or her “10th Amendment Rights” will land her in jail. Fucking Tea Partiers, really they’re just making this shit up as they go along, aren’t they?
Frankensteinbeck
@Southern Beale:
When McCain picked Palin, he convinced the hateful and crazy that they don’t have to be content with merely greedy assholes representing them. They want to elect people just like themselves.
You know, morons.
Comrade PhysioProf
Of course they know that this law will disproportionately prevent minorities and the poor from voting!!! Why the fucke do you thinke they passed the motherfucken law in the first place!?!?!?
rikyrah
WHEN will my Elders STOP being victimized by JIM CROW in this country.
WHY is record keeping sketchy?
because, if you were NOT WHITE IN THE SOUTH, THE LIKELIHOOD OF YOU BEING BORN IN A HOSPITAL WENT DOWN TO NEAR ZERO.
Ruckus
What happened?
Kay
The reason you are looking for is simple.
Conservative politicians are batshit crazy and have no working decision making abilities.
Find me one that this does not apply to. Go on, give it a shot.
Mike in NC
Not necessarily clueless; they just plain don’t give a shit. 25% of the children in SC live in poverty and the state ranks near the bottom in pretty much any category you’d care to look at.
Karen
Why do they even bother to use the bible in churches anymore? They should just open Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and have the clergy/Ayn Randist read each chapter out loud every sermon. It would be more accurate.
Ira-NY
After South Carolina voted unanimously 169-0 in a special State convention to declare its independence from the United States in December of 1860, the Unionist James Louis Petigru famously remarked “South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.”
Some things do not change.
Brian R.
Haley thinks the DOJ decision is “political”?
Funny, I thought the GOP insisted that these voting suppression efforts had nothing to do with partisan politics. If she’s saying that stopping their efforts is “political” then doesn’t that mean their efforts were partisanly political as well?
Arundel
“It was – assuming good faith – news to Haley and South Carolina conservative representatives that certain parts of South Carolina are poor and rural. ”
You’re too kind to assume such good faith, Kay. They knew exactly what they were doing.
Spaghetti Lee
The ’10 midterms crop of governors is like a Hall of Fame for evil fascist bullshit. They cannot leave office fast enough, as far as I’m concerned. South Carolinians, what’s Haley’s popularity like down there, outside the teabag crowd?
Spaghetti Lee
@Brian R.:
Nope, nope, nope, because, you see, IOKIYAR, and IABIYAD (It’s Always Bad If You’re a Democrat).
The Moar You Know
Conservatives are perfectly aware of every fact you’ve stated. In fact, my money is on them knowing quite a bit more than us libs, who are always late to the party on such issues.
They just like it that way. One of the cornerstones of modern conservative thought is that voting is not a right, but a privilege. They’ll never believe otherwise, and that belief is strengthened by the undeniable fact that universal participation in the voting process was never a part of the Founding Fathers vision of America. Thankfully, that omission has been rectified.
cmorenc
My brother-in-law, who is a hard-core Republican/Fox News follower, was astounded when, in response to his presumably you-have-no-good-answer-to-this question about what’s so wrong with demanding photo i.d. like a driver’s license to vote, when we have to give photo i.d. to do such common things cash a check, get on a plane, drive a car, etc. etc., when I answered: “because if the state charges for it (or otherwise makes it more than trivially easy to get) it becomes a poll tax, which is explicitly outlawed in the US Constitution. Voting is a fundamental right under the US Constitution, as the US Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld, and the history the addition of these rights was specifically meant to address was barriers to voting by minorities.”
Honestly, he had never heard that poll taxes were explicitly illegal under the Constitution, and that the state cannot effectively charge people fees, even indirectly, for exercising the right to vote. Fox has apparently so far failed to even try to convincingly lie about that matter, at least not often enough to reach my brother-in-law the loyal frequent Fox viewer. Fortunately, he did seem to believe me enough to think that if he checked up on it, I was right.
Joe Buck
The short answer to these Tenth Amendment people is that on matters where they conflict, the Fourteen trumps the Tenth. The 14th amendment extends civil rights to the states and gives Congress enforcement powers. Those Tea Partiers who are fond of reciting Congress’s enumerated powers always stop before they get to the amendments.
Calouste
@Spaghetti Lee:
I’m not a South Carolinian (thank the FSM), but IIRC there was a poll a few weeks ago that had Haley with a lower approval rating than Obama in South Carolina.
Calming Influence
@Poopyman: Yes, it’s a little known fact, but During the Reagan years there were actually six U.S. senators representing California. The extra four hid out in the channel islands and only showed up when a, like, rly rly bipartisan vote was needed.
Splitting Image
@Karen:
It’s coming.
As hard as it is to believe, we are watching the end of the Religious Right in North America. I believe that within the next ten years the majority of hard-core “right-wingers” will be militant atheists and actively denouncing the hippie from Nazareth. The Christians that are left will make up the majority of the “centre-left”.
The plus is that I think that this might usher in a new progressive era if there are enough Christians remaining in the country to re-create the New Deal coalition. The minus is that there will be even less possibility of dealing with the Randian crazies (the ones who currently maintain the fiction that they are Christian fundamentalists) when you can no longer corner them by quoting their Bible at them.
I think that years from now, people will look back at Glenn Beck exhorting his audience to run as far as possible from any church that preached social justice as a major turning point. A lot of his audience took that like a blow to the stomach and his numbers immediately collapsed. On the other hand, he’s got plenty of people following his advice.
Lolis
It is pretty awesome that Gov. Haley has a lower approval rating than President Obama in that rabid red state. I am sure she thought she would end up in the White House so it is good to see she is too unpopular to govern her own state effectively.
Admiral_Komack
Nikki Haley is a stupid, lying, bitch.
Yeah, I said it.
The Republicans cannot win the 2012 Presidential election on the merits, so they will try to muddy the waters with “voter fraud”.
Oh, and Arundel is correct at #32.
chopper
lol. ’10th amendment’ usually means ‘fuck over the nigras’ and this is no different.
Admiral_Komack
Republicans dispute Winthrop poll findings
By ADAM BEAM – [email protected]
By ADAM BEAM The State S.C. Republicans are disputing a recent poll showing Republican Gov. Nikki Haley has worse approval ratings in the Palmetto State than Democratic President Barack Obama.
The Winthrop Poll, published exclusively in The State newspaper on Sunday, showed just 34.6 percent of South Carolinians approved of Haley’s job performance, while 43 percent said they disapproved of her.
Obama had a 44.8 percent approval rating in South Carolina, according to the poll. (A subsequent MSNBC poll said Obama was running ahead of potential GOP opponents Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney in South Carolina.)
In a memo released Tuesday, S.C. Republican Party Executive Director Matt Moore said, “This poll is highly questionable.”“Do you honestly think Barack Obama is massively more popular in South Carolina than he is nationwide? I don’t,”
Moore wrote in a memo titled “SCGOP Strategy Memo: Be Aware of Poll Bias.”(A Gallup poll from roughly the same time period put Obama’s approval rating at 42 percent, slightly below his S.C. rating.)
Moore contends the questions asked in the poll were biased and said the pollster, Winthrop, would not release how many of the people polled were Democrats.“What if the sample does not accurately reflect South Carolina’s diverse makeup? For example, the sample might have included too many in a certain age group, too many Democrats, etc.,” Moore wrote.
The Winthrop Poll surveyed 1,073 registered voters in South Carolina.Of those surveyed, 33.7 percent said they were Democrats, 30.1 percent said they were Republicans and 36.2 percent were independents.
Among the independents surveyed, more people said they “leaned Republican” — 32.2 percent — than “leaned Democrat” — 22.1 percent, according to Scott Huffmon, a Winthrop political scientist and the poll director.
Voters do not register by party in South Carolina, so it is difficult to say if those numbers are weighted fairly. However, Hoffman said studies have shown the breakdown in South Carolina is roughly 30 percent for Democrats, Republicans and independents.
Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2011/12/13/2078866/republicans-dispute-winthrop-poll.html#storylink=cpy
Pee Cee
@Spaghetti Lee:
We South Carolinians don’t care much for her either:
She’s got a 34.6% approval rating – according to one major newspaper.
We might have been able to avoid her entirely if the state’s Democratic party weren’t so inept.
Yutsano
@Admiral_Komack: “BUT THE SHERIFF’S A NI-(clang)”
They want to say it so bad. They really do. And they want their reality enforced. But it ain’t happening.
Joseph Nobles
@sherparick: My goodness, it’s like you’ve read the proceedings of the 1901 Alabama constitutional convention. From Day 2, John B. Knox of Calhoun County, the President of the Convention:
http://www.legislature.state.al.us/misc/history/constitutions/1901/proceedings/1901_proceedings_vol1/day2.html
This is the reason why Alabama’s constitution is currently the longest in the nation, and perhaps the world. In order to keep racial equality from creeping in at the local level, the Alabama state government grabs as much as it can. Almost any little decision at the local or county level has to go through the state legislature and amend the constitution. Alabama is, in just so many words, a totalitarian state based on white supremacy as much as Federal law allows, and it will remain thus until the constitution is rewritten. Federal law has unclenched the fist of white supremacy a great deal these days, but the constitution itself is still there, ready to clamp down at the slightest relaxation of grip of the Feds.
Admiral_Komack
@Yutsano:
Yutsano Johnson is right.
Citizen_X
@sherparick: Kickass comment. I’d just emphasize that (as I’m sure you’re aware) “local bullies” usually = the rich and powerful.
Fuck a Ron Paul and a libertarian too.
sherifffruitfly
Tell me some more about how Obama is just like bush. C’mon lie to me, fuckers.
Karen
@sherifffruitfly:
Those will be the Nader/Paul people. Just making a protest vote to show what happens if you don’t kiss Jane Hamsher’s ring.
Just a different grade of PUMA.
Rick Perry on the other hand has kissed Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s ring and is now getting endorsed by him, the Sheriff is campaigning with him.
Platonicspoof
@sherparick:
Thanks for the link, worth saving.
Accurate, as well as useful framing, since no one likes a bully.
AxelFoley
@Mike in NC:
Yup. For instance, if you take I-95 from where I live in Virginia all the way down to Florida, the only part of I-95 in which the roads are TERRIBLE is in South Carolina.
pseudonymous in nc
@Arundel:
Of course they did: you just have to look at the state legislature to see what the state GOP represents.
And he probably hasn’t heard that a large proportion of elderly African-Americans, particularly in the south, lack birth certificates and other foundational identity documentation because Jim Crow decided they didn’t need any of that shit. Home births, midwife births, racist county registrars who couldn’t be bothered filing the paperwork.
Oh, that’s fucking funny.
Admiral_Komack
@sherifffruitfly:
The Professional Left:
STILL full of shit.
Carl Nyberg
Mushy thinking by Gov. Haley.
The vague language of the Tenth Amendment wouldn’t trump the specific language of the Fifteenth Amendment if they were on equal ground.
But they aren’t. The Fifteenth Amendment came later and supercedes any conflict (if there were one).
It’s hard to have a respectful dialog with people who so casually toss aside logic and reasoning in favor of bigotry.
gene108
Nikki Haley’s attempt at restricting access to voting is really not a big surprise. She’s just going with the flow of what Republican governors in Midwest state’s, not governed by 1965 Voting Right’s Act have gotten away with.
What’s surprising about folks like Nimrata Nikki Haley (naa Randhawa) and Clarence Thomas are the fact they are in such denial about the benefits they received from the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960’s and 1970’s, as well as the Supreme Court decisions that destroyed “states rights”, such as Loving v Virginia.
The commenter, who stated her parents are a generation removed from not being able to vote (or have other civil rights), in the south, is spot on. I know an Indian man, who did his graduate school in the U.S. in Florida in the 1950’s and went back to India because of the discriminatory laws in place there.
victory
Passed 95-9 in the senate? 104 votes?
What am I missing?
Glen Tomkins
We need to get rid of the 10th Amendment.
Until we do, folks who use the 10th as their excuse for whatever folly or knavery they devise and can get some state egisalture to pass, will have an excellent excuse.
Sure, we have the 15th, which explicitly removes discrimination by “race, color, or prior condition of servitude” from the list of things states can use as they formulate their separate qualifications for voting. But that still leaves the states enormous discretion in setting those qualifications.
In the Jim Crow era, we saw the outright violation of the 15th. As long as states had some sort of fig leaf rationalziation, as long as their law did not explicitly refuse the franchise to people on the basis of race, the federal judiciary proved willing to accept standards for voter qualification that had the practical effect of racial discrimination. States could have poll taxes or literacy tests enforced only against blacks, or they could have grandfather clauses, and all that passed muster. Jim Crow ended because the federal judiciary became unwilling to accept such rationalizations. One risk for the return of Jim Crow is that the Rs have managed to pack the courts with so many Federalist Society stooges, that it is no longer clear that the judiciary is still unwilling to accept such transparent covers for racism.
But the big risk for a return of a bigger and nastier Jim Crow is that the 15th doesn’t cover the waterfront, it doesn’t forbid disenfranchisement of the much wider set of folks likely to vote against the Rs. Voter qualifications based on wealth are as old as the republic and as constitutional as church on Sunday. Handily enough, discrimination based on wealth, or any number of markers and concommittants of wealth, discriminates pretty neatly against folks likely to vote D. If you’re an R, you don’t really want to discriminate against only the blacks, or even only the blacks and browns. There’s plenty of white race traitors out there you don’t want voting either.
An out-and-out property qualification is not likely to be something that they will try, because that would be bad PR, even if it would pass judicial review. But plenty enough people will buy a limitation based on car ownership, if you just intellectually launder that as an ID requirement. Everyone they know, everyone who is really a person to them, owns a car and has a driver’s license.
Sure, the courts might plow through the rationalizations, recognize a property qualification when they see it, and use the 15th to ban property qualifications based on wealth, on the grounds that one effect would be a differential bias against some races and colors. But that’s a tall order for the pack of originalists we have let the courts be packed with.
Until we get rid of the 10th, until we actually become one nation, the Union promised in the preamble, we will continue to entrust such basic powers as the determination of who can vote, to fifty separate states. The 10th sets the states at a higher level than the federal govt, guarantees them every power not specifically granted to the federal govt. We can try as we might to specify more and more powers granted to the federal govt and taken away from the states, but as long as we leave the states everything else, they will be able to use the general to outflank the specific every time. The history of the 15th and Jim Crow is the classic case. Time we learned from history and concluded that the 10th needs to go.
kay
@victory:
Nothing. It’s wrong. The ACLU link has only the House vote. The Senate number came from a piece about the ACLU link. Sorry :)
Canadakingkong
Isn’t that how Bush got re-elected, by theft of votes and vote rigging in Florida and other states?
James M. Martin
The GOP is very good at griping about denied states’ rights when they want to leech power away from the fed, and wholly “ignorant” of them when, e.g. Bush sues Gore. In his brilliant rant on the opinion in that case, Al Dershowitz showed how, after years of keeping hands off elections — the conservative precedent– the Supremes in Bush v. Gore completely abrogated its own rulings. Are lynchings a states’ right?
centerfielddj
“What happened?”
NULLIFICATION, baby! The 60’s are back! I wonder if the South will play all the greatest hits! Perhaps bombing a church full of black people who might become voters will be among the rich, honorable memories the South will have us revisit.
The Sailor
@AxelFoley: Really? They must be bad because Georgia are the worst I’ve seen, but I drive down from the Midwest.
As soon as you drive over the TN border they start sucking. And that’s before one gets to the ‘construction zones’ that haven’t progressed in 15 years.