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| A link to the following essay appeared on Professor Heather Cox Richardson's "Letters from an American" daily posting on April 4. Passed on by a follower of her site, it's by Cree Hardegree, an attorney practicing in Georgia, and appeared initially a few days ago on a site found at www.patreon.com, with which I was not familiar. It should be read and re-read and passed on to anyone you know who is interested in saving democracy in the United States. It points at the surrender of the North to the South in the Compromise of 1877 and questions who actually won the Civil War and continues to influence our country. It contains a lot of history pertinent to us today. Please read it. |
Why We Need the John Lewis Voting Rights Act
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| Lewis in 2006 |
Hunting Island sits off the South Carolina coast, twenty miles out from Beaufort. It’s covered with a maritime forest so dense it chokes out the sun, so desolate it intermittently engenders fears of being lost on the narrow sandy trails.
The end of the island is restricted but we easily went around the gates with our bicycles. Just around the curve, the reason for the restricted access was obvious — the road was missing. We biked on across the sand and found another section of a broken-up blacktop road. Then more sand. Large trees were uprooted everywhere; the cabins that had faced the water were empty and abandoned.
Not the result of a hurricane or an earthquake — the sea is simply reclaiming its territory.
It left me with such an odd feeling.
So much wasted effort.
So much desolation.
Such futility.
Back in town, I had the same feeling when we rode around Succession House on ironically-named Craven Street. That’s where the eighteen-hundred’s equivalent of men like Cruz and Hawley and McConnell and Kemp secretly met to plan South Carolina pulling out of the United States and forming a confederacy with other slave-states.
So much wasted effort.
So much desolation.
Such futility.
Five blocks down Craven Street, left on Carteret Street, right on Prince Street is the Smalls House where Robert Smalls was born into slavery.
In 1862, only a hundred years before I was born, Smalls escaped the bonds of slavery in the middle of the Civil War that had been planned just a few blocks from his home.
A year earlier, the Southern traitors had fired the first shots of the Civil War from cannons mounted in the Charleston Harbor, out against the walls of the United States Army’s Fort Sumter located on a barrier island.
The Union Army later laid siege to Charleston Harbor, forming a blockade out in the ocean.
One night Robert Smalls and a crew of slaves were left alone in the harbor on a heavily armed Confederate guard ship while the white officers went into town. Smalls skillfully guided the ship out of the harbor, giving the proper signals as he passed Confederate forts Johnson and Sumter, before lowering the Confederate Flag and replacing it with a white bed sheet his wife had brought along when he stopped to pick up her and other family members.
The Union blockade welcomed the surrendering Confederate ship and congress passed a bill awarding half the value of the ship to Smalls who used the money to purchase his birth home on Prince Street in Beaufort as soon as the war ended.
The 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870 giving black men the right to vote. With the large number of formerly enslaved black men in his district — Charleston had been the slave capital of America — Smalls was elected to Congress in 1874 and served two terms before a trumped-up scandal (for which he was pardoned) caused him to lose in 1878. He returned in 1880 and served three more terms.
But the sensitive white men in the South were feeling persecuted.
Federal oversight was allowing black men to gain power.
The presidential election of 1876 was hotly contested. Democrat Samuel Tilden had won the popular vote and had 184 electoral votes of the needed 185. Republican Rutherford B. Hayes only had 160. South Carolina and Florida and Louisiana controlled 19 electors which had not been awarded because both parties were claiming victory in all three states. A single electoral vote from Oregon was also in question as one elector and been removed and replaced.
The parties were switched back then — Republicans were the enlightened liberals; Democrats were the former Confederates who had fought to preserve slavery and would now do anything to keep the formerly-enslaved people from voting.
The Compromise of 1877 ended the dispute — the racist white-supremacist Democrats in congress known as “Redeemer Democrats” would agree to award the 20 outstanding electors to Republican Hayes, giving him the required 185 electors to become president, if he would agree to implement the racist Redeemer platform: remove federal troops from the occupied-South and end the federal oversight of the South known as “Reconstruction.”
As soon as the federal troops were gone, the Redeemer Democrats — who later became Dixiecrats before becoming today’s Republicans — began instituting voter suppression laws to keep black men from voting. This was their only hope of gaining and retaining power — they couldn’t rely on democracy because in many places in the South, black men outnumbered white men.
These Jim Crow laws passed in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds enforced segregation, successfully removed most black men from the voter rolls, and decimated the growing black middle-class.
They were enforced all the way up until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In the one-hundred years between the ending of the Civil War in 1865 and the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, more than 5,000 black men were murdered by Southern white supremacists.
As a result of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, former slave-states had to get approval from the Department of Justice before implementing any changes to voter laws.
This worked well until 2013 when the US Supreme Court struck down that provision in the case of Shelby County Alabama vs. Attorney General Eric Holder.
Chief Justice Roberts said the election of President Obama in 2008 proved racism no longer exists in the United States — federal oversight of the voting laws in Southern states was no longer needed.
The racist Redeemer Democrats/Dixiecrats now known as Republicans, went to work immediately passing new laws to make it harder for black people to vote.
After Trump’s 2020 loss and the Democrats’ gain of two senate seats in Georgia, the emboldened racist Republicans passed the most draconian attack on voting rights since the Jim Crow laws of a hundred years ago.
Republicans point to some provisions that could actually expand voting rights, if implemented.
But those are the fruits of a poison tree and must die along with the tree. As Delta belatedly realized, the good provisions its team was able to get written into the final bill, do not in any way mitigate against the fact that the entire bill was based on the Big Lie that was fomented and spread by Trump and supplicant Republicans.
Kemp and the Republicans knew it was all a lie. When Kemp had the power and authority and opportunity to call the legislature back into session in December and rectify whatever “fraud” had occurred, he did nothing. When Republican Georgia senate leader Mike Dugan had the power and authority and opportunity to sign onto a request asking the governor to call the legislature into session, he did nothing.
They did nothing because they full-well knew there was no fraud. They are exactly like the lawyers involved in the 60 lawsuits that went nowhere. Lawyers stood before microphones and lied their asses off to the public. But when they walked into the courtroom, they had to tell the truth because a lie to the court will result in the loss of their license to practice law. They were willing to perpetuate the Big Lie for Trump in public, but not willing to lose their ability to continuing practicing law.
When they would have had to actually show evidence of fraud, Kemp and Dugan choked and refused to call the legislature back into session, completely abandoning Trump. But when the danger of being required to actually present evidence had passed, they resumed the big lie in a contemptuous attempt to justify their draconian voting laws.
If there had been any evidence of fraud, they would have called the legislature back into session.
Instead, they abandoned Trump to save their own asses.
And now — terrified of being primaried for abandoning Trump — they have designed the most black-suppressing bill possible in order to redeem themselves with the white racist Trump-worshiping evangelicals.
Any good the bill would purport to accomplish is completely nullified by the worst provision in the bill — the process that allows the Georgia legislature to remove a local election board and replace it with an appointed administrator.
This is racist to its core; it is the point of the bill — it is aimed squarely at predominantly-black Fulton County, Republicans’ favorite target for race-based claims of “incompetence.”
Delta and Coca-Cola are equally full of shit.
Both have a team of lobbyists that studies each bill. They were not caught by surprise. Their silence and acquiescence as the bill was being passed, followed by their outcry now, is by design — they are trying to have it both ways. They allowed the bill to pass with not a word of objection, in order to please Republicans; now that it is too late to stop it, they feign outcry, in order to please Democrats.
The new John Lewis Voting Rights Act passed the House on March 3, 2021 and is now in the Senate designated as “Senate Bill 1.”
It restores federal over sight of voting laws and will preempt the new laws in Georgia.
If Delta and Coca-Cola are serious, they and other corporations need to exert every possible ounce of pressure on Manchin and others to reform the filibuster and support passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. They need to lead with ~actions~ as the MLB is doing; not just words, spoken too late.
Items added on April 4
A follower of this blog claims I did not make it sufficiently clear that the piece directly above was not written by me, but by Georgia attorney, Cree Hardegree. I agree with her, but the words are hers. Okay?
In today's Washington Post, Catherine Rampell's column suggests that by refusing to vote for President Biden's programs in Congress, even though they are supported by a vast majority of Americans of both parties, the G.O.P. is walking away from taking credit for any of these program, and leaving full credit for them with the Democrats. Republicans are terribly afraid that any sign of cooperation with Democrats will bring primary challenges from the Trumpublicans who still believe the "big lies" being spouted by the former president. You may, or may not, be able to read the article by CLICKING HERE. (I'm not sure.)
Too many Republicans still adhere to super-libertarian Grover Norquist's recommendation that "government be drowned in a bathtub" and Ronald Reagan's belief that "government is the problem." They equate anything government does for the people as "socialism," which few of them understand and if they had the opportunity, would abolish Social Security, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act and all of the regulatory agencies which stemmed from the New Deal under Franklin Delano Roosevelt back in the 1930's.
Item added on April 7
Where Do You Look For Answers?
Forget political parties. Concentrate on what, in my opinion, are the “bad” things that have happened in America’s history, regardless of the political party in office. Some of them include:
- the development of a great part of the nation’s economy based upon human slavery,
- the abandonment of the Reconstruction process to remedy that after he Civil War,
- Jim Crow legislation, in both the South and, less formally, in the North,
- emasculation of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments,
- anti-labor laws as industrialization grew,
- discriminatory immigration laws, aimed particularly at Southern Europeans, Jews and Asians,
- reduction of government regulations to protect our environment and that of the planet,
- moving many “safety net” programs from the Federal Government to the States, without providing necessary resources,
- deterioration of the nation’s health care system,
- tax laws which favor the very wealthy and large businesses,
- encouragement of gun violence by misinterpretation of the Second Amendment,
- legislation perpetuating discrimination by sex or gender,
- privatization of government functions such as prisons,
- toleration of harmful misinformation spread by electronic media, as a First Amendment right, and
- de-emphasis of public schools in favor of private and religious institutions.
I can go on!
All these “bad” things (at least in my opinion) have one
thing in common. They were carried out
at State and federal levels by legislators, by judges, by governors and by
presidents, all of whom were elected or appointed in a proper and legal,
democratic, manner. To that extent,
these “bad” things reflect what the American people wanted, as made possible by
the people they voted to put into office.
In dealing with the challenges the nation faces today, in attempting to
return America to the greatness it once had achieved, Americans must pause for
some introspection. What do we really
want? Do they exclude the “bad” things
enumerated above … or are enough Americans comfortable enough with some of them
to vote for candidates whom they know will ultimately vote to perpetuate them.
Look within yourself for answers.
Item Added on April 9
In a recent (Mar. 29) column, the Washington Post's Catherine Rampell said that "The 'swamp' that desperately needs draining isn’t in Washington, D.C. It’s in state capitals around the country, where undemocratic, anti-majoritarian officials are seizing rights from voters and flagrantly thwarting the will of the people."
I agree ... but what are we to do if these States succeed in repressing the will of the American voter ... and put the country back in the hands of those who acquiesced to our "wannabe" dictator from 2017 to 2020, those who fail to see how the actions of January 6 at the Capitol fit precisely into the Constitution's (Art. 3, Sec. 3) definition of treason. What do we do then? (The only alternatives I see are the uncomfortable acts of admitting Puerto Rico and D.C as States, giving the Democrats four more Senators, and increasing the Supreme Court's size. Nasty medicine, surely, but how else can we drain the swamp?) Any ideas?
JL