Politics: Twilight of the Voting Rights Act

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Politics Twilight of the Voting Rights Act Obama doesn't want a landmark civil rights law to die on his watch—so he's letting it wither away. By Will Oremus Posted Thursday, Mar 01, 2012, at 12:30 PM ET When Georgia's Republican leaders redrew the state's election-district maps last year, Democrats and minorities instantly cried foul. In an increasingly diverse state where 47 percent of voters chose Obama in 2008, the new maps looked likely to hand the GOP 10 of the state's 14 seats in Congress. Perhaps even more significantly, they were drawn so as to give Republicans a shot at a two-thirds majority in both chambers of the state legislature, allowing them to pass constitutional amendments unilaterally. They achieved this in part by "packing" the state's black voters (who overwhelmingly vote Democratic) into a handful of districts in order to make others more solidly white (and Republican). Fortunately for the state's Democrats, federal law seemed to offer a time-tested remedy. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, a landmark civil rights bill passed in 1965 to crack down on poll taxes and other discriminatory practices, requires Georgia and a number of other Southern states to get federal approval for any changes to their voting laws. Any that harmed minorities' chances of fair representation were to be thrown out. And that's exactly what Georgia Democrats expected Obama's Department of Justice to do with Republicans' new maps. Just two years earlier, it had invoked Section 5 to block two Georgia voter-verification laws. Liberals gleefully predicted the Republican gerrymanders would likewise be "DOA at the DOJ." The Republicans held a trump card, however: the threat of a lawsuit challenging the Voting Rights Act ... To continue reading, click here. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate When Did Douche Become an Insult? Yglesias: The Overlooked Data That Show the Economy Is Back on Track During the Fukushima Crisis, Japan Considered Evacuating Tokyo. Were Things Really That Bad?	Advertisement
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