Now Is the Time for a Third Reconstruction - Abolishing Jim Crow Once and for All

By Rep Mondaire Jones, The Washington Post

14 April 21

hite supremacists are closer to restoring Jim Crow than at any time in memory. They are staging an assault on the right to vote: reducing early voting, restricting registration and reversing the rollout of voting by mail. We all know why: They need to entrench their diminishing hold on power by disenfranchising voters of color.

As a member of the most diverse Congress in U.S. history and one of the first openly gay Black members of Congress, I know that we are closer to building a true, multiracial democracy than ever before. But twice before in our nation’s history, we have tried to build a multiracial democracy. And twice before, white supremacists have devised ways to disenfranchise people of color.

In 1870, during Reconstruction, Congress adopted the 15th Amendment, outlawed disenfranchisement on the basis of race and created the Justice Department in part to empower Black voters.

But white supremacists soon got around that. If they couldn’t disenfranchise on the basis of race, they would disenfranchise people like me using proxies for race.

They required voters to pass arbitrary “literacy tests,” then denied Black citizens access to education. They required voters to pay poll taxes, then plundered Black communities. They barred people convicted of crimes from voting, then invented new crimes and found Black people guilty of them. And they killed whomever they had to in order to overthrow multiracial state governments.

These strategies led millions of Black Americans, including my grandparents, to flee the Jim Crow South in search of freedom. After North Carolina reelected George Henry White to Congress in 1898, the South would not elect another Black American to Congress until 1972, when Texas elected Barbara Jordan to the House and Georgia elected Andrew Young to the same body.

In 1965, during what many call the Second Reconstruction, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which renewed our democracy’s opposition to racial discrimination. The law enacted real protections to safeguard voting rights for Black people across the South for the first time. And it restored the Justice Department to its original primary role of ensuring that we were not systematically denied the right to vote.

But in recent years, a far-right majority on the Supreme Court has enabled white supremacists to circumvent the Voting Rights Act, striking down the strongest protections — as in Shelby County v. Holder — and weakening others.

We now find ourselves at a crossroads. For the first time in 10 years, the Democratic Party controls Congress and the White House. Building a multiracial democracy will not be easy. But if we do not act now, it may soon be impossible.

Now is the time for a Third Reconstruction — one that abolishes Jim Crow once and for all. That means making voting as easy as possible for everyone, by establishing automatic voter registration, protecting our voter rolls from purges, and ensuring universally accessible ballots for seniors, people with disabilities and anyone else who needs an accommodation. That means restoring that right to the 5.2 million people, disproportionately Black and brown, who have been disenfranchised because of felony convictions.

Second, we must end partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts. That’s the distorting system that has evolved to permit politicians to choose their voters rather than voters to choose their politicians. Congress’s power to right this wrong is beyond dispute. As even Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the Supreme Court in 2013, the Constitution’s elections clause gives Congress the “authority to provide a complete code for congressional elections.” Until we end partisan gerrymandering, a declining White minority will wield it to deny communities of color the representation they deserve — packing them into safe districts to waste their votes or spreading them out to diffuse their power. Meanwhile, QAnon conspiracy theorists will continue coasting to victory in general elections after prevailing in Republican primaries. These are distortions of our democracy.

Third, we must end the pernicious power of Big Money, which converts the racial wealth gap into a political power gap. An under-told truth of our politics is that the donor class often anoints the candidates who make it on the ballot. That donor class is overwhelmingly White and conservative. And that big-money gatekeeping disproportionately excludes candidates of color, who rely more on small donations.

Public campaign financing would amplify the voices of communities of color. The For the People Act, commonly known as H.R.1 or S.1, would match every dollar donated up to $200 with $6 raised from penalties on corporations that have broken the law. A $50 donation would become a $350 donation. In New York City, a limited, small-donor matching program has already fostered more representative donors and candidates for city offices.

This transformation of our democracy will not happen overnight. But Congress can bring us closer than ever before by passing the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — uncompromised. If we squander this opportunity, future generations will not — and should not — forgive us.

Country Catching Up to Bernie Sanders's Way of Thinking

By Jeff Robbins, The Boston Herald

14 April 21

ernie Sanders was never the most all-American of presidential candidates. The Brooklyn-born socialist senator from Vermont has an overpowering New York accent. Lecturing America relentlessly on its ills, he presented as a cross between Scrooge and the Grim Reaper, seemingly as likely to appeal to American voters as Leon Trotsky, with whom he appeared to share a hair stylist. He did not slap backs, could not tell jokes and spouted policy prescriptions that sounded right out of “Das Kapital.”

First in 2016 and then again in 2020 he was underestimated, and even dismissed. New York Times reporter Amy Chozick recounts missing the meaning of Sanders’ message in 2016, nearly blowing off the opportunity to interview him early in that campaign in favor of a physical fitness class. “I initially brushed Bernie off with such casual nonchalance, such ill-informed elite media snobbery,” she has written, “that I almost canceled our first one-on-one coffee because I didn’t want to miss abs-and-back day at boot camp.”

Today it’s clear that on issue after issue, Sanders’ thunder on the left has carried the day among a majority of Americans, including substantial numbers of Republicans. Conservative attacks on Sanders-style proposals for universal health care, raising taxes on the wealthy, raising the federal minimum wage and other programs as “European socialism,” once tried and true, are increasingly falling flat.

So say the polls, in any event.

In announcing his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, for example, Sanders proclaimed “We say to the American people that we will rebuild our crumbling infrastructure: our roads, our bridges, our rail systems and subways and our airports,” vowing to create millions of jobs in the process. And he promised to tax the rich to pay for it. “The wealthy and multi-national corporations in this country,” Sanders said, “will start paying their fair share of taxes.”

Americans are with him. Asked last month whether they would support President Biden’s massive public infrastructure plan even after passage of a $1.9 trillion COVID relief act, 77% of Democrats, 57% of independents and 61% of Republicans told Data for Progress pollsters that they would. A Morning Consult poll two weeks ago found that 54% of Americans supported funding those improvements by raising taxes on those earning over $400,000 a year and by raising the corporate tax rate. Unsurprisingly, this included 73% of Democrats. More notably, it included 52% of independents and 32% of Republicans. Fifty-seven percent of voters told the pollsters that they would be more likely to support Biden’s infrastructure plan if it included raising taxes on high earners; only 17% said it would make them less likely to do so. Forty-seven percent of Americans said they would be likelier to support the bill if it was paid for by raising corporate taxes, while only 21% said it would make them less likely to support it.

Raising taxes to invest in public infrastructure is not the only issue on which America’s political sands are shifting. A poll taken last fall by the Kaiser Family Foundation concluded that 53% of Americans supported a national health plan that would insure everyone. This included 58% of independents and 21% of Republicans. A contemporaneous Pew Research Center poll found that 63% of American adults believe that government bears responsibility for providing health care coverage for all, up from 2019. This included 34% of Republicans. And a recent Morning Consult poll found that a majority of Republicans support raising the federal minimum wage.

It has been a very long time since Bernie Sanders could be ignored. If once it could be said that he was ahead of his time, it must now be said that Americans are catching up to him.