The GOP Effort to Maintain A White Man’s Republic

Trump, Pence and Ross.

Numerous studies have shown that despite the myth that economic angst motivated whites to vote for Donald Trump in 2016, the real motivation was racial and a desire to protect white privilege and white political power.  Under Trump, the GOP has moved from dog whistle racism to overt and express calls to white racism and has emboldened white supremacists across the country.  Having spent last weekend in Charlottesville with family and attending my college reunion, that community remains traumatized over the actions of Trump emboldened white supremacists and Neo-Nazis - those who Trump called "very good people."  Sadly, as a piece in The Atlantic argues, the GOP agenda is to uphold white political power and domination at the expense of racial minorities. Now, the looming question is whether the Supreme Court will validate this effort by allowing the Trump/Pence regime to add a citizenship question to the U.S. census to skew the results to increase white representation.  Here are article highlights:

The disparate approaches taken by two of the Court’s conservatives to the Voting Rights Act reflect the right’s dueling impulses toward civil-rights laws. Where Scalia rejected the very effort to guarantee black people the same right to cast a ballot as white people as a “racial entitlement,” Roberts insisted that he agreed with the law’s underlying premises, but that the statute now did more harm than good.

Lingering beneath the surface was a defining question for the American right: Does it agree with Roberts that “any discrimination in voting is too much”? Or with Scalia, who saw ensuring equal participation in the polity as a black “racial entitlement”?

The Supreme Court’s looming decision over the addition of the citizenship question on the U.S. census will hinge on the answer to that question. The census provides the basis for congressional apportionment and the distribution of federal resources. Empirical studies of the impact of adding the question have determined that it would result in a dramatic undercount of Latinos and immigrants—exactly contrary to one of the Donald Trump administration’s stated rationales, that it would provide a more accurate count.

Since the rise of Trump, the American right has been offered a stark choice between the democratic ideals it has long claimed to believe in, and the sectarian ethno-nationalism of the president, which privileges white identity and right-wing Christianity over all. Scalia didn’t quite have it right: The fundamental question for American democracy since the founding has indeed been whether it is a “racial entitlement,” but only because of those who have tried for centuries to ensure that white people alone are entitled to it.

The Roberts Court has already taken steps in this direction. Last year it endorsed Trump’s travel ban, despite the president’s public statements identifying Muslims as the ban’s target, on the basis that the order itself did not mention religion, a blueprint for allowing further discriminatory efforts to pass constitutional muster as long as the high court’s conservatives retain control. Later that year, the conservative justices, self-styled champions of the freedom of religion, denied a request by a Muslim death-row inmate to have an imam present for his execution, forcing the condemned man to make do with the prison’s Christian chaplain. In both cases, the Court’s conservatives could hide behind the letter of the law in dismissing the government’s official disapproval of Islam. But recent revelations in the census case will force the Roberts Court to decide whether America is a nation for all of its citizens, or a white man’s republic.

On the surface, State of New York v. United States Department of Commerce appears to be a dry question of administrative and constitutional law. In January 2017, the news leaked that the Trump administration wanted to add a question asking census respondents whether they were American citizens. The Trump administration enlisted the acting head of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, John Gore, to state that the question should be included to improve enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. Wilbur Ross, the head of the Department of Commerce, which administers the census, insisted to Congress that this was the reason for the addition of the question. In fact, Ross had sought the addition of the question long before this rationale was provided.

A recent Court filing by groups challenging the addition of the citizenship question shows what the administration really had in mind. The filing shows that Thomas Hofeller, the late Republican redistricting expert, concluded that adding the citizenship question would, in his words, “be advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.” That analysis was offered in a 2015 memo, as Hofeller was helping Republicans draw redistricting lines that they believed would cement a majority in Congress. That memo, along with a 2017 document written by Hofeller on the subject, which contains some language identical to a later Justice Department memo on the matter, was turned over to the liberal group Common Cause by Hofeller’s daughter after his death.

Voting districts are typically drawn using total population. A switch to using the voting-age citizen population would, Hofeller concluded in his 2015 memo, expand white political power at the expense of people of color, and thereby increase Republican advantage. But, Hofeller wrote, that shift could only occur with the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census, which would provide the federal government with data necessary for that switch.

In other words, long before Trump was even elected, Republican Party insiders were plotting to increase white political power at the expense of people of color. After Trump was elected, they implemented this plan by insisting that their actual goal was the protection of minority voting rights. As with the Voting Rights Act, there was the real reason and the stated reason, the truth and the pretext. . . . . “No one believes that anyone in this administration has any intention of enforcing the Voting Rights Act.”

The use of the Civil Rights Division, which was established to protect Americans’ fundamental rights, to undermine those very rights is a perversion of justice. But it also illustrates that Trumpism merely traveled a few stops down the road from where the Republican Party leadership had been. The risk with Trump was not that the GOP would become a vehicle for the preservation of white political and cultural hegemony; it was that he would discredit that project by making its agenda explicit, by saying, as Scalia did, the quiet part loud.

That the Republican effort to increase white political power might be motivated by partisanship rather than racism is little solace. . . . Whether motivated by partisanship or racism, though, the result is the same. If the Roberts Court does not draw a line here, this will not be the last step toward reestablishing a white man’s government it will be asked to take.

The census case does not hinge on whether the citizenship question is discriminatory. Rather, as a matter of administrative law, the executive branch must follow certain procedures before making decisions. The Trump administration’s blatant dishonesty settles the question of whether it followed procedure definitively: It did not.

“This kind of smoking-gun evidence of what the real illicit reason is behind a government action is incredibly rare. Court decisions don’t require it, and it’s really quite shocking to read it so explicitly,” Wendy Weiser, a voting-rights expert at the Brennan Center, told me. “Every procedural constraint on agency decisions was violated in this case, and the reason that was provided, every lower court found, was not the real reason that the secretary of commerce added the citizenship question.”

The census case is not ultimately about administrative procedure; it is, more fundamentally, about whether the Trump administration can use the federal government for the explicit purpose of increasing white political power. The Trump administration, and by extension, the conservative masses, are already on board, convinced by years of right-wing propaganda that all the opposition’s victories at the ballot box are suspect. Those elements of the Republican establishment that funded and conceived of the census scheme are all in, as well. The only remaining question is whether, and to what extent, the high court is willing to ratify this step toward white man’s government. It is not the first time it has been asked to do so.

Trump’s victory settled the question of whether the GOP would seek to expand its base by diversifying it, or rely on the imposition of white political hegemony over a changing electorate. This is a counter-majoritarian strategy that, in the long run, relies on abandoning the pretense of liberal democracy in favor of something else: A white man’s republic, if they can keep it.

Scalia’s Goal Of Unwinding Voter Rights Becoming A Reality

The late Antonin Scalia - a seeming racist and champion of Christofascist rights.

The late Justice Antonin Scalia embodied much of what is wrong with today's Republican Party and its agenda of special rights for right wing Christian extremists and deference to white supremacist inclinations.  This is especially true when one looks at Scalia's hostility to minority rights.  The irony is that given Scalia's own ethnic and religious background - Italian Catholic - that saw his own ancestors targeted for hate and bigotry, one would think the man might have had some tiny shred of empathy for other despised groups.  Any such assumption, however, sadly would be totally wrong.  Now, the entire GOP seeks to roll back voting rights protections to favor whites and to disenfranchise minority voters as the GOP finds it increasingly difficult to attract voters outside of vulture capitalists, Christian extremists and, of course, white supremacists.  A piece in Talking Points Memo by a law professor looks at the danger that the U.S. Supreme Court may further embrace Scalia's agenda and spread America's slide back towards pre-1964 voting obstacles to minority voting rights.  Here are highlights:

In a Supreme Court term already bursting with election cases, from two partisan gerrymandering disputes to a fight about the permissibility of Ohio’s voter purges to a lawsuit challenging bans on political clothing in Minnesota polling places, it’s easy to overlook yet another significant voting appeal the Court will hear later this month. In Abbott v. Perez, the Court will examine whether the state of Texas violated the Voting Rights Act and the United States Constitution when it drew congressional and state legislative district lines in ways that hurt Latino and African-American voters. The protracted and difficult litigation involves redistricting plans from way back in 2011 and shows how much was lost when the Supreme Court killed another key provision of the Voting Rights Act in its 2013 Shelby County v. Holder case.

We may soon fulfill the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s vision of an emasculated Voting Rights Act and much weaker protections for minority voters by the federal courts.

In the pre-Shelby days, the Voting Rights Act offered two main tools to protect minority Voting Rights. Under Section 5, states which had a history of racial discrimination in voting had to get “preclearance” (or pre-approval) from the U.S. Department of Justice or a federal court in Washington, D.C. before making any changes in voting rules and procedures. States had to show the DOJ or the court that any changes would not worsen the condition of minority voters. Under Section 2, the U.S. government or private plaintiffs could bring suit anywhere in the U.S. arguing that a redistricting plan (or other voting rule, like a state voter id law) deprived minority voters of the same opportunity as white voters to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.

The Roberts Court’s record on reading and enforcing the Voting Rights Act has been a disappointing one, which is no surprise given that Chief Justice John Roberts himself was an opponent of a strong Voting Rights Act when he worked in the Reagan Administration to weaken minority voter protections in Section 2.

Even before Roberts became chief justice, the Court already had a relatively weak record enforcing Section 2. . . . . And that’s all aside from non-Voting Rights Act cases cutting back on voting rights such as a 2008 case rejecting challenges to the constitutionality of discriminatory voter identification laws.

The Texas case that the Court will hear this term shows just how hard it is to protect minority voting rights. Texas’ 2011 redistricting plans originally could not be put in place because a federal court had not precleared it under Section 5. A separate lawsuit sought to block parts of the plans under Section 2, and the same federal court issued an interim remedy, which led to Texas passing a similar discriminatory plan in 2013 claiming the re-enactment solved Voting Rights Act problems. The Section 5 lawsuit went away when the Supreme Court decided Shelby County, but the Section 2 lawsuit has dragged on . . .

Since the case started, it is hard to find friends for the Voting Rights Act in any of the three branches of government. The Department of Justice, which came in on the side of minority voters in the Texas litigation, has switched sides now that the Trump Administration has taken over. That means U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco will be arguing in favor of Texas’s position in the case at the Supreme Court.

Congress, meanwhile, has not acted to fix the formula for deciding which states need to get Section 5 preclearance, even though the Court in Shelby County invited Congress to try.

And the Supreme Court is poised to make things worse. With rumors circulating that perennial swing Justice Anthony Kennedy could retire as soon as this term, the Court is likely to lurch to the right. As I argue in my new book, The Justice of Contradictions: Antonin Scalia and the Politics of Disruption, the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia took an even narrower view of Voting Rights than the Court as a whole, and now, after his death, Justice Scalia’s influence is only growing.

Justice Scalia openly expressed disdain for the Act, expressing the view at the Shelby County oral argument that Congress renewed the Act in 2006 by overwhelming majorities because of “a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement.”

The bottom line is that the Court’s mixed record on enforcing the Voting Rights Act could soon get worse if Trump gets another Court appointment. Minority voters, already at a disadvantage in many parts of the country because of enduring racism and the unwillingness of white voters to support minority candidates for office, could soon have tougher political battles ahead. And the scariest part is that, thanks in part to Justice Scalia’s influence, the courts may soon no longer be there as a backstop.

Sadly, the bottom line is that the GOP would love to move the nation back to the Jim Crow era.  Yet another reason why a massive Democrat, moderate and progressive turn out is needed in November to flip the House of Representatives and - ideally - the U.S. Senate to Democrat control.

4th Circuit Rules North Carolina Voter ID Law Intended To Discriminate

Over the last decade, Republican legislators across the country have focused on two tools to remain in poer as the country's demographics have changed: (i) shockingly gerrymandered districts, and (ii) voter ID laws to disenfranchise as many minority voters as possible.   The voter ID law effort, of course, was hidden behind the smoke screen of protecting against "voter fraud" - fraud that has been documented to not exist. Among the more egregious voter ID laws was the one enacted in North Carolina after the GOP take over of the state legislature.  Today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit saw the reality of the North Carolina GOP's agenda and struck down the heinous statute.  Talking Points Memo looks at the 4th Circuit's ruling (the full ruling can be found here).  Here are are highlights:

A three-judge panel of the U.S Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit has found North Carolina's controversial GOP-backed voting restrictions were intended to discriminate against African American voters.

The Friday ruling is a huge win for voting rights activists in a closely watched case in a potential 2016 swing state. The appeals court reversed the ruling of a district court siding with the state.

"In holding that the legislature did not enact the challenged provisions with
discriminatory intent, the [district] court seems to have missed the forest in carefully surveying the many trees," the opinion said. It permanently blocked provisions in a 2013 North Carolina law that required certain photo IDs to vote, limited early voting, eliminated same day registration, ended out-of-precinct voting and prohibited pre-registration of young voters.

In the opinion, the panel of judges said that the law restricted voting in ways that "disproportionately affected African Americans" and that its provisions targeted "African Americans with almost surgical precision." It said the state's defense of the law was "meager."

"Thus the asserted justifications cannot and do not conceal the state’s true motivation," the opinion said.

It noted that the legislation was passed as African American voter turnout had expanded to almost the rates of whites, and that the legislature enacted the legislation after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, which had required North Carolina to seek federal approval for changes to its voting policies.  . . . . 

The appeals court -- citing a lower court's findings -- pointed out that state lawmakers sought data breaking down voting practices by race. The judges said that the law's provisions singled out the practices disproportionately popular among African Americans, such as preregisteration and provisional voting 

[T]he appeals court opinion said. "We recognize that elections have consequences, but winning an election does not empower anyone in any party to engage in purposeful racial discrimination."

The case was a consolidation of a number of lawsuits challenging the legislation, brought by various civil rights organizations and voter advocacy groups, on behalf of voters. The Department of Justice also participated in the litigation, siding with the challengers.

 Sadly, today's GOP's main motivations are racism, religious extremism and misogyny. 

At 50 The Voting Rights Act is Under GOP Assault

When I arrived in Virginia to begin college at the University of Virginia I was shocked to see the remnants of segregation all around me with the vestiges of separate rest rooms and water fountains for blacks still plainly visible - the blacks always got to use the inferior facilities.  Things have improved markedly in the intervening years in large party because of desegregation laws and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.   In recent years, however, the protections of the Voting Rights Act are under constant attack by Republicans who seek to disenfranchise as many potential Democrat voters - read minorities in particular - through voter ID laws that claim to be aimed at voter fraud even though little or no evidence of any such fraud exists.  Controlling women's bodies and keeping blacks from voting are twin pillars of the Virginia GOP.  The New York Times looks at the accomplishments and threats to the Voting Rights Act on its 50th anniversary.  Here are highlights:

For the first 48 years of its existence, the Voting Rights Act — signed by President Lyndon Johnson 50 years ago this week — was one of the most popular and effective civil rights laws in American history. Centuries of slavery, segregation and officially sanctioned discrimination had kept African-Americans from having any real voice in the nation’s politics. Under the aggressive new law, black voter registration and turnout soared, as did the number of black elected officials.

Recognizing its success, Congress repeatedly reaffirmed the act and expanded its protections. The last time, in 2006, overwhelming majorities in both houses extended the law for another 25 years. But only seven years later, in 2013, five Supreme Court justices elbowed in and concluded, on scant evidence, that there was no longer a need for the law’s most powerful tool; the Voting Rights Act, they claimed, had done its job.

In truth, the battle for voting rights has had to be unrelenting, and the act itself has been under constant assault from the start. As Ari Berman writes in his new history of the law, “Give Us the Ballot,” the act’s revolutionary success “spawned an equally committed group of counterrevolutionaries” who have aimed to dismantle the central achievements of the civil rights movement.

Today there are no poll taxes or literacy tests. Instead there are strict and unnecessary voter-identification requirements, or cutbacks to early voting and same-day registration — all of which are known to disproportionately burden black voters.

The relative subtlety of the newer measures does not make them any less insidious. But it does make them more resistant to charges of illegality.

H.B. 589, that North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature passed in a duplicitous maneuver only weeks after the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling. The law rolled back 15 years of voting rights measures, including same-day registration, which 90,000 North Carolinians used in 2012; a week of early voting used by 900,000; out-of-precinct registration; and preregistration for 16- and 17-year-olds.

If North Carolina were under federal supervision, as much of the state had been before the Supreme Court’s ruling, H.B. 589 would almost surely have been blocked for its disproportionate impact on black voters, who tend to vote Democratic. But because of the ruling, the state’s legislators were free to impose a raft of restrictions based on bogus claims of electoral integrity and efficiency. The legislators refused to testify at trial.

This demonstrates the need for the Voting Rights Act’s supervision scheme, which the Supreme Court eliminated. If there was any question that the court had misjudged the reality on the ground, it was answered by the speed with which North Carolina, Texas and other states moved to impose discriminatory new voting laws.

In North Carolina, as in many places around the country that are determined to undermine the right to vote, the past is far from over.

Supreme Court Reasserts Voting Rights Act

Gerrymandered Virginia 3rd District - note how parts are not even contiguous

When the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder invalidated Section 5 of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, many racists conservatives joyfully hoped that the Court was on a track to destroying the Act entirely.  Now, in a ruling Alabama Legislative Black Caucus v. Alabama, the Court seemingly sent a message that it is not ready to open the doors to a return of Jim Crow era gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement. And here in Virginia, the ruling may be very meaningful in the challenge to the GOP gerrymandered 3rcd Congressional District which was carefully draw to loan minority voters into one district and favor Republicans in the surrounding districts.  Here are highlights from Politico:

The Supreme Court stopped just short of ruling Alabama’s redistricting plan unconstitutional on Wednesday, but it sent a clear message to lawmakers across the country that the Voting Rights Act can’t be used to justify maps that predominately group voters together based on their race.

In a 5-4 ruling, the high court sided with black lawmakers and Democrats in Alabama in throwing out a lower court’s decision that upheld the GOP-drawn state legislative map. This was the court’s second high-stakes decision in two years dealing with the Voting Rights Act and will likely have an effect on redistricting legal battles in states like Virginia and North Carolina.

The case was brought by African-American lawmakers in Alabama who argued that the Republican-controlled Legislature packed thousands of black voters into existing majority-black state legislative districts to secure a GOP-advantage in the other districts.

[T]he ruling simply called the lower court’s decision “legally erroneous” and sent the case back to it without ruling whether Alabama’s redistricting plan is unconstitutional.

“The appeals focus upon the appellants’ claims that new district boundaries create ‘racial gerrymanders’ in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in the majority opinion. “We find that the District Court applied incorrect legal standards in evaluating the claims.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy was the swing vote on the case and joined the court’s four liberal justices to make up the majority.

But while Breyer only remanded the case backed to the lower court for further consideration, he strongly suggested that some of the districts should be deemed unconstitutional. “That Alabama expressly adopted and applied a policy of prioritizing mechanical racial targets above all other districting criteria (save one-person, one-vote) provides evidence that race motivated the drawing of particular lines in multiple districts in the State,” he wrote.

For partisan advantage, Republicans have historically tried to “pack” minorities into districts, while Democrats have attempted to “crack” majority-minority districts in the redistricting process to spread minorities into more districts to boost Democratic candidates, even at the expense of providing safer seats for minority candidates.

States lawmakers — of both parties — will now have to employ a much more nuanced way of using race in the redistricting process, said Justin Levitt, another redistricting expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who also worked as the Democratic National Committee’s National Voter Protection counsel in 2008.

“This isn’t a case about Alabama,” Levitt said. “It’s about how officials consider race. Other states have very similar philosophies as Alabama. The court today said, ‘Guess what? They’re wrong.’”

The court’s ruling is a victory for Democrats in Virginia, where a panel of federal judges ruled recently that the Republican-led Legislature’s decision to pack African-American voters into the 3rd Congressional District, which is represented by Democratic Rep. Bobby Scott, was motivated purely by race — a violation of the 14th Amendment.

Virginia’s Republican members of Congress appealed the case to the Supreme Court. The case has given Democrats a chance to push for new lines that could make at least two districts — the 2nd and 4th, currently represented by GOP Reps. Scott Rigell and Randy Forbes, respectively — more competitive once some of the black population from Scott’s district is moved.

“Similar to Alabama, here in Virginia we have suffered from racial gerrymandering by the GOP designed to dilute the voting power of minority voters,” said Morgan Finkelstein, spokeswoman for the Virginia Democratic Party. “Today’s ruling shows that the legal system — and the country — is paying more and more attention to this troubling issue. We need compact, contiguous districts and remain hopeful that Virginia Republicans will stop stalling and work with us towards achieving equal representation for all Virginians.” 

The husband and I used to be in the 2nd District until the Virginia Republicans redrew the boundaries of the 3rd district to move blacks - and certain liberal voting neighborhoods such as ours - into the 3rd district to provide safer seats to GOP Congressman Rigell and Forbes, both of whom need to be voted out of office in my opinion.

Losing Selma's Legacy

Today is the 50th anniversary of the march in Selma, Alabama which put on open display the hate and white supremacy that was rampant in that state and across the South and elsewhere.  50 years later, we have states - Virginia is one of them - where Republicans are working diligently to disenfranchise minorities and instructively, top Republicans will be boycotting Selma as noted in Politico: 

Scores of U.S. lawmakers are converging on tiny Selma, Alabama, for a large commemoration of a civil rights anniversary. But their ranks don’t include a single member of House Republican leadership — a point that isn’t lost on congressional black leaders.

None of the top leaders — House Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy or Majority Whip Steve Scalise, who was once thought likely to attend to atone for reports that he once spoke before a white supremacist group — will be in Selma for the three-day event that commemorates the 1965 march and the violence that protesters faced at the hands of white police officers. 

The Republican Party has become something very, very ugly, and Boehner, McCarthy and Scalise likely understand that their attendance at the event would be deemed an act of heresy  by the increasingly racist Christofascist/Tea Party party base.   A piece in Slate looks at the unfortunate trend where some in America would only be too happy to bring back the bad old days of Jim Crow.  Here are highlights:  

Fifty years ago on March 7, civil rights activists John Lewis and the Rev. Hosea Williams led 600 people on a march from Selma, Alabama, to the capitol in Montgomery. Stopped by a gang of state police and white civilians on the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside of Selma, they were attacked in a vicious display of white supremacist violence. Besieged by tear gas, whips, nightsticks, and other makeshift weapons, they were injured, bloodied—dozens required care and 17, including Lewis, were hospitalized—and pushed back into town. Recorded by national media and broadcast to the world, these events would galvanize thousands of Americans, inspire a larger (and successful) march to Montgomery, and lead President Lyndon Johnson to commit to and push a voting rights act that would stand as the high-water mark of civil rights movement.

Now, in commemoration of “Bloody Sunday,” tens of thousands of Americans have converged on modern-day Selma, where they will memorialize and celebrate the great racial progress of the past half-century. Unfortunately, this happens at a time of terrible retrenchment, as a host of forces pushes back against those hard-fought wins. If the 1960s were a Second Reconstruction—a second attempt to fulfill the promise of emancipation—then our present period is a second Redemption, where a powerful movement attempts to reverse gains and dismantle our fragile efforts at racial equality.

In 1883, the Supreme Court overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875, denying that the 14^th Amendment prohibited private discrimination in public accommodations and declaring that “there must be some stage” where blacks cease “to be the special favorite of the laws.”

What’s striking here is how familiar this sounds, and how Redemption is echoed in the politics of the past 10 years. Then as now, the federal courts are increasingly hostile to race-conscious legislation. In 2007, with Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, the Supreme Court struck down voluntary integration efforts in an opinion punctuated by Chief Justice John Roberts’ declaration that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” In 2013, with Shelby County v. Holder, the same court struck down the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act, which required federal supervision in states with a history of voting discrimination.

The Redemption parallel extends to the states as well. While the 2010 elections brought a wave of reactionary lawmakers to power throughout the country, this was especially the case in the South, where the last white Democrats fell to their Republican opponents, leaving a racially polarized politics of white Republicans and black Democrats. In short order, they imposed new voting restrictions and other laws meant to limit the franchise through obstacles and reduced access. . .

They reduced burdens on the wealthiest residents and replaced them with new fees and sales taxes that placed the heaviest burden on the poorest residents. At the same time, they’ve slashed education budgets, reduced services, and refused federal funds for the Medicaid expansion, keeping millions of low-income people—many of them black Americans—from needed medical services.

In appearance and in effect, the program of 21^st-century conservatives is remarkably similar to the one of 19^th-century Redeemers. It guts civil rights laws, shrinks state spending, and limits the scope of activist government.  

Today’s anti-government conservatism has its roots in the antebellum politics of Sen. John C. Calhoun, was modernized in reaction to the civil rights movement, and was brought to the Republican Party by an alliance of Southern reactionaries and ideological [Christofascist] conservatives.

As I have said before, I wonder when the GOP will commence its city and county committee meetings by handing out white robs with hoods.  It should be noted by LGBT citizens that the same hate and animus borne toward blacks by today's GOP base is likewise directed at gays. 

Cities Are Reviving A Jim Crow-Era Tricks To Suppress Latino Votes

It is disheartening when one sees that the same inhumanity towards others who are different that was a hallmark of the both the Old South and the Jim Crow South remains alive and well, sometimes even in progressive states.  The goal, as has always been the case, is to keep power vested in whites and those who see themselves as "real Americans" even though the nation's Native Americans, the only real Americans were largely eradicated through a policy of genocide by those now claiming the real American mantle and their forebears.  A piece in Think Progress looks at how at large voting districts and gerrymandered districts and other ploys - things that Virginians excel at - are now being used to suppress the Hispanic vote (all of the cities in Hampton Roads utilize at large voting systems).  Here are highlights:

Yakima, WA is one-third Latino, but a Latino candidate has not been elected to the city council for almost 40 years. Santa Barbara, CA is 38 percent Latino, but only one Latino has been elected to its council in the last 10 years. And Pasadena, TX is 43 percent Hispanic, but the ethnic group is not even close to being proportionately represented in the city government. 

All three cities have been or are currently being sued for allegedly using discriminatory at-large voting systems, a voter dilution tactic that has been recently and frequently employed against Hispanic voters. In an at-large system, every city resident votes for each member of the governing body and the city does not divide voters into districts. 

As the Latino population grows across the country, cities have employed at-large voting to dilute the Latino vote and maintain white control of local governing bodies. Instead of allowing each district to elect its own representative, an at-large system means that unless Hispanic populations reach a majority in the entire city, they will have no influence in electing their local members of government. According to Fair Vote, at-large systems allow 50 percent of voters to control 100 percent of seats, typically resulting in racially homogeneous elected bodies. The tactic used to be popular in the South to discriminate against neighborhoods with large African American communities but is now targeting a new threat: Latinos.

Because California has a state voting rights law, it “facilitates this type of challenge,” said Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. As a result, he said we will see a lot of settlements and moves away from at-large systems in California.

Across the rest of the country, where voting rights laws may not be as strong, the only way to challenge at-large systems is by using Section 2 of the VRA [Voting Rights Act], a process that is “extremely time-consuming and expensive,” Saenz told ThinkProgress. As a result, a number of jurisdictions will attempt to get away with at-large systems without being challenged. 

Cities have historically used at-large districts to dilute the African American vote, McDonald said, and many still do. 

Beginning in 1986, a number of cases challenged at-large voting systems in Alabama over the course of a decade. A district court ultimately ruled that 200 jurisdictions were using the discriminatory voting system and required them to adopt new districting.

The problem seemed to have been solved in the South until the Supreme Court gutted the VRA in 2013, opening the door for Southern states to move forward with at-large voting districts. With growing immigrant and Hispanic populations, cities in Texas and other Southern states reverted to using discriminatory systems.

Cities that have gotten away with using at-large systems in the past may also be forced to change their systems as the Hispanic population grows and reaches a critical mass,  . . .

GOP's Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) Plays to Party's Racist Base

When not prostituting themselves to the Christofascists, congressional Republicans can't do enough to make the white supremacists in the party base (the other twin pillar of today's GOP) happy.  A case in point is House Judiciary Chair Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) who said there is no need to undo damage to the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court's ruling in 2013.  Never mind that he once supported the re-authorization of the Act.  Now, the GOP goal is to restrict minority voting as much as possible to compensate for the fact that the party's agenda is increasingly attractive to an aging white demographic that is literally dying off.  Here are highlights from Talking Points Memo:

House Republicans have determined that it's not "necessary" to enact a legislative fix to the Voting Rights Act in the wake of the 2013 Supreme Court decision that gutted a centerpiece of the law, the chairman with jurisdiction over the law told reporters on Wednesday.

"There are still very, very strong protections in the Voting Rights Act in the area that the Supreme Court ruled on, which is the question of whether or not certain states — there were, I think 11 states, all Southern states that were required by law to seek precleareance of any changes in where polling places are located and other matters like that," House Judiciary Chair Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) said at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.

"To this point we have not seen a process forward that is necessary because we believe the Voting Rights Act provided substantial protection in this area right now," he said. "And we'll continue to examine, we'll continue to listen to the concerns of individuals."

Republican support for fixing the Voting Rights Act is scant. One year ago this week, such a proposal was introduced by Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE).

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said Goodlatte's remarks "ought to be of very serious concern for everyone who cherishes the fundamental right" to vote, urging him to consider the Conyers-Sensenbrenner bill.

"I am deeply concerned and disappointed by comments from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte that Congress does not need to take corrective action to address the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Shelby v Holder, which guts one of the most important and effective provisions ever enacted to combat voter discrimination," Hoyer said in a statement on Wednesday afternoon. "As we prepare to commemorate the 50th anniversaries of the march in Selma and the enactment of the Voting Rights Act, it would be a blow against the march toward fairness and equality at the ballot box for Congress to do nothing to address the Shelby decision."

As I have pondered before, when will it become official GOP policy to hand out KKK robes to city and county GOP committees at the start of each meeting.  It's be very popular I suspect, especially in Southern states and Southwest Virginia.