Today's headline in the Onion
reports that the Supreme Court "s docket next year will include one
deliberation over whether human beings deserve equal rights.
It actually does. SCOTUS will debate
the legitimacy of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, passed by LBJ to
do away forever with the Jim Crow abuses that have so plagued all
underprivileged classes for more than a century.
Well, now that
everything is hunky-dory and we all have equal rights in every area including
voting rights, why not repeal the ruling that requires certain states, including
all of the former Confederacy, to report all changes in election practices to
the Department of Justice for approval, because in the past (certainly not
today) they were guilty of the most racist practices in the country.
And if that is
true, then Jill Stein won the presidency and now occupies the oval office.
Indeed, racist
practices characterize most every state in the Union. Ohio's have been
egregious, as reported over the preceding twelve years. In Nebraska, former
ES&S CEO Chuck Hagel stepped down only to run for the Republican senatorial
seat and miraculously swept all of the all-black neighborhoods that normally
voted Democratic, to put it mildly.
In Harlem in the
2008 election some precincts delivered zero Democratic votes and in others
Clinton triumphed, which is a bit hard to believe. A black man who lived in New
Jersey gave me a pathetic look when I asked him how it was to vote there.
In Florida, only
five counties require preclearance before changing electoral policies, where
statewide in the 2000 presidential election at least 50,760 blacks were illegally
labeled as felons and turned away from the polls. Other black high school
graduates, excited about their first chance to vote, never got to. Roadblocks
were set up, polls in black districts closed early, and so on. The situation in
Ohio mirrored this miasma at least partly because J. Kenneth Blackwell worked
as an election operative in the Sunshine State in 2000 before becoming
secretary of state who presided over the 2004 presidential election there.
But did you know,
did you know, that Section 5 also
applies to Arizona and Alaska, as well as some counties in California, New
York, and South Dakota, as well as some townships in Michigan and . . . in New Hampshire?
Fine with me.
Racist anecdotes cover our country's entire map. For this reason, I suggest
that the Supremes extend the preclearance provision nationwide instead of
considering the inverse, to lift this cumbersome burden off the innocent
shoulders of Yankee as well as Rebel states.
The Pars pro Toto fallacy is actually valid
here: if some of the nation is guilty, then we all are, and justifiably so. We
must extend justice wherever it is needed. I'd guess racists inhabit all fifty
states. Prove me wrong. I hope I'm wrong.
There's another
case to be argued by SCOTUS next year. Arizona
v InterTribal Council of Arizona will question the rule that all Grand
Canyon State citizens who wish to vote must first demonstrate proof of citizenship
when registering.
Native Americans having to prove citizenship?
That's like requiring a cow to prove that it eats grass when herded to an
appropriate meadow. The term Native
American
is proof enough.
Sometimes, when
preaching to the choir, I say that Hispanic immigration signifies nothing more
or less than other native Americans reclaiming land torn from them brutally--did
Columbus discover America or ravish
it blind?
Today an article
in the Nation by Aura Bogado and
Voting Rights Watch 2012, and another by Greg Palast, exhort that just because
Obama regained the White House we can't rest on our laurels, "we" meaning the
Election Integrity movement.
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