Texas Launches Modern Day Poll Tax

By Brentin Mock, Colorlines

14 July 12

arlier this week, Attorney General Eric Holder declared in his address to the NAACP national convention in Houston what many voting rights advocates had been saying for months: That the photo voter ID law passed in Texas is a poll tax. Determining whether voter ID laws are as unconstitutional as poll taxes won’t be up to him, though. That honor goes to the U.S. Supreme Court justices who lately have been signaling they may be ready to gut the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

What this means is that a legal challenge to a voter ID law in Texas could be the trigger for the demise of the constitutional act that made it possible for people of color to vote in much of the country. Rightwing pundits have all but conceded this week’s US District Court hearing over Texas’s voter ID law to the Department of Justice. There’s agreement on the left and the right that Texas didn’t do a good enough job proving that the law has no discriminatory purpose nor effect. Experts have testified that almost 1.4 million Texans could be disenfranchised due to lacking ID.

The state’s argument wasn’t helped by Texas state Sen. Tommy Williams, an author of the voter ID law, who said, “I think people who live in west Texas are accustomed to driving long distances for routine tasks,” when confronted with the fact that the closest DMV for some low-income Texans could be dozens of miles away.

None of this may matter, though. If the district court judges rule that Texas’s law should not be cleared by DOJ, then that could set it up for a fast-track hearing before the Supreme Court. And the court has indicated that it is ready to throw Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act—the part that gives DOJ preclearance authority over Texas’s election laws—out altogether, which would trigger a rollback of voting rights expansions made since the civil rights movement. There is little optimism that Chief Justice John Roberts will do for VRA what he did for the Affordable Care Act. Section 5 is to the VRA what the individual mandate is to ACA, but Roberts has little sympathy for laws that remedy histories of racial discrimination.

Duke University election law professor Neil Siegel told Politico, “He’s a deeply committed conservative on matters of race. On the challenge to the Voting Rights Act, he’s warned Congress we’ll strike it down if you don’t change it.”

If the Roberts court overturned VRA, it would be a grand departure from the SCOTUS decision of 1944, Smith v Allwright, which helped launch the movement toward civil rights and voting justice for all Americans. That 1944 case involved an African-American man named Lonnie E. Smith who challenged the Texas Democratic Party, which forbade anyone except white people from voting in its primaries. Since Texas at the time was a one-party, Democratic-ruled state, the primaries determined who would win its general elections, guaranteeing black Texans would have no say in who would represent them in government.

Smith v Allwright was argued by Thurgood Marshall, who considered it his most important case. When the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Smith, it was considered a turning point in the burgeoning civil rights movement. Marshall called it “a giant milestone in the progress of Negro Americans toward full citizenship.” The victory led to an emboldened black electorate and surges in NAACP membership throughout the South—surges that provided the NAACP with the resources to win more voting rights and civil rights battles in court, all the way through to the Brown v Board of Education victory 10 years later and the passage of the Voting Rights Act roughly 10 years after that.

A fully nourished NAACP legal team was needed in the years after Smith v Allwright mostly because that decision didn’t automatically grant easy, fair access to the vote, in Texas or anywhere else. That 1944 decision actually led to a proliferation of new poll tax requirements throughout the South that placed typically insurmountable barriers in front of black people seeking to vote.

Still, the number of African Americans registered to vote after Smith v Allwright expanded significantly—Southern black registration quadrupled between 1940 and 1947, from 3 percent to 12 percent—and this is exactly what drove segregationists to continue launching poll tax deterrents and other attacks (like Ku Klux Klan terrorism). Southern whites didn’t want black people voting because they feared they would lose political power.

This was laid bare when Mississippi Sen. Theodore Bilbo, in protest of a law to ban poll taxes, said, “If the poll tax bill passes, the next step will be an effort to remove the registration qualification, the educational qualification of Negroes. If that is done we will have no way of preventing the Negroes from voting.”

When the Voting Rights Act finally passed in 1965, made possible by the Smith v Allwright decision 20 years earlier, it once and for all banned any instrument, law or policy that would prevent anyone from voting based on race or color. Texas has been fighting back ever since.

When Texas was designated as a Section 5 state due to discrimination against Latinos, it grew increasingly defiant of the Voting Rights Act. According to a report by the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, “Voting Rights in Texas 1982-2006,” only one state challenged Section 5 in court more than the Texas in that time period—and that’s Mississippi. From 1982 to 2006, Texas registered at least 107 Section 5 objections. Meanwhile, during that same time period, Texas lead the nation in several categories of voting discrimination, including Section 5 violations. Further, from the MALDEF report:

“Texas had far more Section 5 withdrawals, following the DOJ’s request for information to clarify the impact of a proposed voting change, than any other jurisdiction during the 1982-2005 time period. These withdrawals include at least 54 instances in which the state eliminated discriminatory voting changes after it became evident they would not be precleared by the DOJ.”

In other words, at least 54 times in 25 years, Texas had to back down from an effort to restrict the vote—thanks to the power granted the federal government under the Voting Rights Act. That power may soon be removed by the Roberts court.

The VRA enforcement represents an imposition of the federal government on state sovereignty, according to many Texas state officials today. Gov. Rick Perry said that DOJ’s enforcement of VRA in South Carolina, for instance, represented a “war” on states rights. The current state attorney general, Greg Abbott, has sued the federal government 24 times since he took office in 2004 over a number of federal law enforcement measures, not limited to voting rights.

But the same fear of expanding the electorate to people of color that existed in the years after Smith v Allwright seems to have spurred Texas state legislators to create the voter ID law currently challenged in court. During this week’s district court hearing, voting rights and race expert Morgan Kousser, of California Institute of Technology, testified that “there was considerable concern” among white state legislators about “losing control” of the legislature. “There is such a correlation between partisanship and race that any bill that has partisan effects would have racial effects,” said Kousser.

In Harris County, where Lonnie E. Smith first challenged the all-white right to vote, the expansion of the non-white electorate shows a clear political power shift. In 2008, Barack Obama won the county, the first Democrat to do that since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. Johnson, of course, went on to sign the Voting Rights Act into law the following year. Meanwhile, whites who were the majority in that county in the 1980s, are today the minority, representing only a third of the county’s population. Harris County encompasses Houston.

It’s population shifts like this that led to redistricting wars in Texas this year, also fought along VRA terms in federal courts, and to what looks like an agenda to keep political power in white hands. This is the lens through which DOJ and civil rights advocates are viewing the voter ID law, which according to the state’s own data would exclude as many as 600,000 Latinos who are eligible to vote but lack the ID now required. While Texas is offering to issue voting ID cards for free, the documents needed to obtain that ID are not free. Birth certificates and other documents needed for the ID cost upwards of $20 and that doesn’t figure in the transportation costs of those who’d have to travel 20, 30, or 40 miles to a DMV office to get the ID. That amounts to a poll tax, and no doubt Holder had Smith v Allwright in mind when he made that declaration.

Romney's 'Free Stuff' Speech Is a New Low

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

13 July 12

ow. If you live long enough, you’ll see some truly gross things in politics, but Mitt Romney’s work this past week "courting black support" was enough to turn even the strongest stomach.

Romney really showed us something in his luridly self-congratulating N.A.A.C.P. gambit, followed by the awesomely disgusting "free stuff" post-mortem speech he delivered the next night in front of friendlier audiences. The twin appearances revealed the candidate to be not merely unlikable, and not merely a fatuous, unoriginal hack of politician, but also a genuinely repugnant human being, a grasping corporate hypocrite with so little feel for how to get along with people that he has to dream up elaborate schemes just to try to pander to the mob.

At first, it was hard to say what exactly Romney was thinking when he decided to address the N.A.A.C.P. He plunged into the speech with a creepy kamikaze smile and a rushed, weird (even for him) delivery, acting like someone proud of what a ballsily moronic dare he was attempting – like a high school kid mooning a squad car from the back of a school bus, or Peter McNeeley rushing face-first into the ring with Mike Tyson.

Now, it would have been one thing if Romney had put some real thought into this, if he had taken a day or two or three and really pondered the question of why 90% of black voters vote Democratic. That’s a serious question, and it would have been something if Romney had really attempted to bridge what has turned into a disturbingly ugly gap between most nonwhite Americans and political conservatives.

Without accepting blame or admitting guilt, he could have talked about the increasingly strident tone of the national debate over racially charged issues, and wondered aloud if politicians on both sides perhaps needed to find a new way to talk about these things without fearmongering, stereotyping, or trading accusations. He could have met the racial-tension issue head on, in other words, and simply declared it to be something that both parties need to work on. This was an opportunity to make history as a peacemaker, just by saying out loud the simple truth that white and nonwhite Americans, and Democrats and Republicans both, need to find more civilized ways to talk about their political concerns. If he had owned the problem, that would have been a big step forward, for all of us.

Of course, that’s expecting a lot. But even if he had just come up with a fresh, earnest new way to articulate the conservative argument, something beyond the usual sloganeering, that would have been really interesting.

But he didn’t. He came out with the same half-assed, platitude-filled stump speech he usually doles out at campaign stops, literally the same exact speech, only he added quotes from Frederick Douglass, Benjamin Hooks, and Dr. King. As he told a mostly white audience in Montana the next night: “I gave them the same speech I am giving you.” He seemed almost proud of the fact that he didn’t put any extra thought into what he was going to say in his first big address to black America. If some speeches feel like a verbal embrace, Romney’s felt like a stack of cardboard emptied from the bay of a dump truck.

So given that he didn’t say anything new in the speech besides what he always says – government is the enemy of all life forms, we can’t blame the rich, etc. – the true meaning of the speech had to be in the very fact that he gave it in the first place. So what was he trying to accomplish? Surely he didn’t think he was going to be getting converts by promising to repeal “Obamacare,” crush teachers’ unions, and “help those who need help.”

No, he delivered those lines like a man expecting, maybe even wanting to get booed. And sure enough, after the event, it was hard not to notice how gleefully Fox and Hannity and the like played and replayed the video of the Mittster gamely dying on the cross of racial outreach. The rhetorical theme on those outlets was something like, “This is what happens when you promote the cause of free enterprise and self-sufficiency in front of the N.A.A.C.P.!” As Charles Blow in the New York Times put it:

The speech sounded like it was designed not for the audience in the room, but for those in Republican living rooms.

It sounded as though he wanted to show force and fearlessness: “Look folks, I walked into hostile territory unafraid and unbowed.” This was his version of a Daniel in the lions’ den speech.

Talk tough. Get heckled and booed for telling the truth to those who don’t want to hear it. Take the president down a couple of pegs in front of the most loyal segment of his supporters…

So Romney did that, and then the next night he went to Montana and he discussed the experience in front of a friendlier audience. And this is what he said:

When I mentioned I am going to get rid of Obamacare they weren’t happy, I didn’t get the same response. That’s O.K, I want people to know what I stand for and if I don’t stand for what they want, go vote for someone else, that’s just fine…

But I hope people understand this, your friends who like Obamacare, you remind them of this, if they want more stuff from government tell them to go vote for the other guy — more free stuff.

So now this is the message: I tried to reason with the blacks, I really did, but it turns out they just want a free lunch.

How’s that for bridging the racial divide? Time to wake up the Nobel committee in Oslo!

As far as free lunches go, we of course just witnessed the biggest government handout in history, one that Romney himself endorsed. Four and a half trillion dollars in bailout money already disbursed, trillions more still at risk in guarantees and loans, sixteen trillion dollars in emergency lending from the Federal Reserve, two trillion in quantitative easing, etc. etc. All of this money went to Romney’s pals in the Wall Street banks that for years helped Romney take over companies with mountains of borrowed cash. Now, after these banks crashed, executives at those same firms used those public funds to pay themselves massive salaries, which is exactly the opposite of “helping those who need help,” if you’re keeping score.

That set of facts alone made the “free stuff” speech shockingly offensive. But the problem isn’t just that Romney’s wrong, and a hypocrite, and cynically furthering dangerous and irresponsible stereotypes in order to advance some harebrained electoral ploy involving white conservative voters. What makes it gross is the way he did it.

Romney can’t even be mean with any honesty. Even when he’s pandering to viciousness, ignorance and racism, it comes across like a scaly calculation. A guy who feels like he has to take a dump on the N.A.A.C.P. in Houston in order to connect with frustrated white yahoos everywhere else is a guy who has absolutely no social instincts at all. Someone like Jesse Helms at least had a genuine emotional connection with his crazy-mean-stupid audiences. But Mitt Romney has to think his way to the lowest common denominator, which is somehow so much worse.

Most presidents have something under the hood – wit, warmth, approachability, something. Even the most liberal football fan could enjoy watching an NFL game with George Bush. And even a Klansman probably would have found some of LBJ’s jokes funny. The biggest office in the world requires someone who buzzes with enough personality to fill the job, and most of them have it.

But Romney doesn’t buzz with anything. His vision of humanity is just a million tons of meat floating around in a sea of base calculations. He’s like a teenager who stays up all night thinking of a way to impress the prom queen, and what he comes up with is kicking a kid in a wheelchair. Instincts like those are probably what made him a great leveraged buyout specialist, but in a public figure? Man, is he a disaster. It’s really incredible theater, watching the Republicans talk themselves into this guy.