Unions Back Justice Dept. In Defending Voting Rights Act
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
(PAI Staff Writer Mark Gruenberg)Arlene Holt Baker doesn’t want to go back to the 1950s, when her mother, a
domestic worker making $5 a week, couldn’t buy her shoes because she was
saving money to pay the poll tax, so the family could vote.
And she
doesn’t want to go back to when her grandparents were banned from the right to
vote – and so much more.
Yet that is what Holt Baker, a veteran of the
civil rights movement who is now AFL-CIO Executive Vice President, and millions
of other Americans, could face if Shelby County, Ala., wins its case, argued
before the U.S. Supreme Court on Feb. 27.
“Before the Voting Rights Act
passed in 1965, there were so many hurdles” for her parents and other
African-Americans in the Fort Worth, Texas neighborhood of Riverside, Holt Baker
told a press conference during the AFL-CIO Executive Council meeting in Orlando,
Fla.
“She couldn’t buy me shoes so she could pay the poll tax.
They’d have this (registration) test where they’d ask us things like ‘How
many bubbles are in a bar of soap?’ Those things were asked so that we
could not participate in a democracy.”
The AFL-CIO, the Service
Employees, the NEA and civil rights groups fear those days could return if the
Supreme Court votes the wrong way on Shelby County’s case.
Shelby
County asked the justices to toss out the enforcement provision, Section 5, of
the 48-year-old Voting Rights Act. That section says states and cities
with a history of racial discrimination in voting must get federal Justice
Department approval of their voter-related laws and their representation laws
– such as those deciding who your congressional representative, state
legislators and even city council members will be.
And if those
laws have the practical impact of stripping African-Americans, Hispanics and
other minorities of their votes, their right to be represented by whom their
voters really want, or both, or if the intent of the laws is discriminatory, the
feds can turn them down or get courts to turn them down.
Shelby County
told the justices Section 5 is outdated and that it discriminates against the 16
states or parts of states the law covers. The county wants the justices to
toss out Section 5. Various Radical Right groups sided with the
county.
Civil rights groups, unionists and their allies staged a rally in
front of the court, in D.C., during the session on the Voting Rights Act,
and Holt Baker discussed it at the AFL-CIO Executive Council meeting – at the
same time the justices heard the case. The Justice Department and its legal
allies retort that Shelby County’s argument is ridiculous. Recent state
practices – such as voter ID laws – show Section 5 and the Voting Rights Act
are still necessary.
The AFL-CIO, the National Education Association and
SEIU joined a pointed, detailed “friend of the court” brief filed by the
Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, demanding the justices uphold
Section 5.
Their brief pulls no punches: Kill Section 5, it
says, and areas that discriminated against African-Americans in the past will go
right back to doing so, against African-Americans and Hispanics, among others
– including in Holt Baker’s birth state of Texas.
“Relying on Section 5, federal courts have blocked new laws in
Texas, South Carolina and Florida that had the potential to disproportionately
prevent minority voters from casting ballots,” their brief told the
justices.
“This included a strict new voter ID law in Texas and
restrictions on early voting in Florida,” it added. The courts also
tossed out, for future elections though not for 2012, Texas’ congressional and
state legislative districts. The Justice Department showed, and the judges
agreed, that the Texas legislature openly discriminated against Latinos – who
provided the state’s population gains.
And the Texas voter ID law was
so arduous that voters in almost half of Texas’ 254 counties would have
trouble either getting the needed documents to prove their right to vote,
usually from the Department of Public Safety office or then paying high fees to
register, even with those documents in hand.
Holt Baker says that’s not
the sole impact of the law. When the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed,
including Section 5, and her parents and other African-Americans could vote,
unhampered, in Texas elections, things got done.
“The street I grew up
on was a dirt road. But when they (her community) was able to vote for the
city council, it got paved.”
And her mother used to have to walk a mile
and a half to the nearest bus stop. After African-Americans got the vote
in Fort Worth, that walk shrunk.
In their brief to the High Court, the
unions and civil rights groups focused on Texas, South Carolina and Florida.
“The law would weigh heavily on Texas’ poorest residents, and
the evidence shows” those residents are minorities, the brief says.
Federal judges tossed the Texas voter ID law, the Leadership
Conference-AFL-CIO-SEIU-NEA brief said.
“The legislature ignored
warnings that the bill, as written, would disenfranchise minorities, and tabled
or defeated amendments that would have defeated or ameliorated these
practices,” the brief adds. Though the brief did not say so, Republicans
overwhelmingly control the Texas legislature and the governorship,
too.
And South Carolina’s voter ID law was almost as stringent as the
one in Texas – until legislators there realized it would run afoul of Section
5, and be tossed. So they inserted language waiving their law’s tough
provisions in many circumstances and openly said Section 5 required that
waiver. South Carolina, too, is Republican-run. The Justice
Department approved the South Carolina law.
- report by PAI Staff
Writer Mark Gruenberg