Unions Back Justice Dept. In Defending Voting Rights Act

(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Shelby County told the justices Section 5 is outdated and that it discriminates against the 16 states or parts of states the law covers.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