Big Voting Rights Drama in Small Town
Another inexplicable decision from the Holder Justice Department.
The Supreme Court recently faced a challenge to the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. A Texas municipality requested that it be allowed to be relieved from the onerous and expensive preclearance provisions of the Act. The Supreme Court avoided a ruling on the constitutional question but did allow the municipality to “bail out “ of the preclearance requirements.
Under those requirements, a number of states and voting districts (mostly in the South, but also including parts of seven non-Southern states such as Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx in New York) must obtain preclearance from the Department of Justice to alter any election provisions.
An even more recent development in the small town of Kinston, North Carolina, shows how the onerous preclearance procedures give inordinate power to the Department of Justice bureaucrats, deprive voters of rational choices, and bring us nearer to the day when the Supreme Court may yet be forced to deal head-on with the constitutionality of this provision of the Voting Rights Act.
The Voting Rights Act was designed to deal with years of voter intimidation and disenfranchisement, and it has proved a very successful tool in the civil rights arsenal. Certainly the conduct it was designed to remedy has long ceased and the preclearance provisions of the Act place an intolerable administrative and budgetary constraint on those covered by the law.
Nevertheless, it remains such a sacred cow that in 2008 the Senate extended the Act’s life by another 25 years by a 98-0 vote. At the time, Jesse Jackson (for whom everything is always Selma) said, “So far, the Department of Justice has favored states’ rights over federal enforcement. We see a pattern.”
Now, states and municipalities are compelled to waste a lot of time and money persuading unelected bureaucrats to let the voters decide the minutia of their balloting procedures. This is because no one had the courage to pull the plug on the Voting Rights Act, which clearly had little reason to be extended for another twenty-five years. Acting Assistant Attorney Loretta King made a ruling that has turned the law itself into what Dickens’ Mr. Bumble would call “an ass.” Indeed, given the terms of the ruling, perhaps a more up-to-date Mr. Bumble would say the law is a jackass.
Most of North Carolina’s local municipalities hold their elections on a nonpartisan basis. Five municipalities in all of North Carolina, including Kinston, hold partisan local elections. Non-partisan balloting saves money because there is no need for primary elections. It also prevents the need for petition drives to get candidates on the primary ballots.
Kinston, a town of 23,000 people, two-thirds of whom are black, was an exception to the rule in North Carolina. It wanted to change its election rules to conform to the prevailing state-wide method of nonpartisan local elections. The town is overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, no one can even remember a Republican holding office in Kinston since Reconstruction. The townspeople voted almost 2-1 to switch to nonpartisan elections, and the vote carried seven of the town’s nine majority-black precincts and both of its white- majority precincts.
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Clarice Feldman is a retired litigation lawyer who lives in D.C. She's a news junkie addicted to the internet.
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25 Comments
1. Marc Malone:Hardball politics. Dems are about power. Why play fair, even when you obviously can afford to? It’s far more fun to exercise one’s power. Keeping the game rigged is fun, too.
Oct 22, 2009 - 3:32 am 2. Ken C.:Progressives always know what’s best and most just for all concerned. The masses need looking after. It’s her duty to the people to minimize the chance that non-progressives might come to power.
Oct 22, 2009 - 4:28 am 3. Paul -Indiana:Chicago-on-the-Potomac.
Oct 22, 2009 - 5:20 am 4. new utopian:“We have elected the enemy.” Jim Quinn (Quinn and Rose)
Oct 22, 2009 - 5:27 am 5. pelaut:Stop the debating, conservatives, because you’re the only one on the stage. You haven’t got an opponent nor an audience. They’re all out playing with what each other in the ruins of the Republic.
Don’t you realize the next election — and the next — and the next — are all won already? Stolen for ever. Acorn, heck, watch all the Ameri-korps, etc.
Oct 22, 2009 - 5:28 am 6. truth-honor-obey:Ha.
That last sentence caused me to laugh out loud.
LOL.
Diminished respect for the law and Justice Dept?
We have horse manure in power but they want us peasants to smell like roses?
Oct 22, 2009 - 7:31 am 7. DaveP.:Thanks, John McCain, for giving us President Obama.
Oct 22, 2009 - 7:43 am 8. RE:From Honduras, to Black Panther voter intimidation, to this one thing remains constant: The Obama administration’s hostility to democracy. They are waging their war at all levels: international, national, and local.
Oct 22, 2009 - 8:09 am 9. Darrell Hancock:It wasn’t a “Texas municipality.” It was a Texas municipal utility district, affectionately known as a “MUD.” MUDs are special-purpose districts to finance water and sewage projects in unincorporated areas.
Oct 22, 2009 - 8:13 am 10. iconoclast:Outright racism and bigotry would go far as well to explain her actions. Further, I am willing to bet that research into her past would find lots of evidence as a race hustler.
But even the conservatives would prefer to avoid the truth on that matter.
Oct 22, 2009 - 8:46 am 11. buddy larsen:off/thread but instructive info re Holder’s #2, Deputy AG David W. Ogden. here’s a snip from the link:
Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said he doesn’t doubt that Ogden is an experienced lawyer, but doesn’t believe he’s fit for the post because of some of the cases he’s argued. Grassley said Ogden has specialized in First Amendment cases, particularly pornography and obscenity cases. Grassley specifically quoted a case in which he argued against legislation designed to ban child pornography.
“Mr. Ogden also has filed briefs opposing parental notification before a minor’s abortion, opposing spousal notification before an abortion, and opposing the military’s policy against public homosexuals serving in uniform,” Grassley said. “Significant concerns have been raised in regard to Mr. Ogden’s nomination. I have heard from a very large number of Iowa constituents, including the Iowa Christian Alliance, who are extremely concerned with Mr. Ogden’s ties to the pornography industry and the positions he has taken against protecting women and children from this terrible scourge.”
Harry Reid, D-Nev., called Ogden “eminently qualified for the job,” having both graduated from Harvard Law School and clerked on the Supreme Court for Justice Harry Blackmun.
(end quote)
Feh. Madisonian this bunch ain’t.
Oct 22, 2009 - 8:51 am 12. Barbara Skolaut:“Since the town is so overwhelmingly black, there’s only one way to read this letter.”
There’s another, more logical way to read it.
The Democrat “Justice” Dept. thinks black people are too stupid to know who they want to vote for unless the government tells them at the polling place.
Of course, that’s leftists in general….
Oct 22, 2009 - 8:58 am 13. cubanbob:The democrats are being infinitely foolish with their arrogance. They are under the delusion that they will be in power as far as they eye can see and can be as high handed and arrogant as they wish to be since they will not suffer any repercussions. The pendulum will swing in the opposite direction and what they are doing now is setting themselves up not only for a repudiation of nearly everything the Obama administration is trying to accomplish but when the backlash comes that tsunami may well go back as far as the FDR administration in removing a great deal of the welfare-socialist state. I would not be at all surprised if the Civil Rights Act is repealed, most of the welfare programs consolidated, restricted and time limited, Bacon Davis and the Wagner act repealed and stronger restrictions on eminent domain and finally a re-write of the tax code both flattening it and eliminating most exemptions and the elimination of most non profit and charitable exemption statuses. I also see a backlash from the states on unfunded mandates imposed by congress, curbs on the federal reserve and on federal meddling in ‘interstate’ commerce on things that are clearly a stretch on what is real commerce.
The national republicans, the RINO’s and the go along to get along crowd will botch the next couple of elections, at the point the republican party will either clean this crap out and become reborn as a limited government party or it will die and be replaced by a new party along those lines and that party or the reborn republican party will clean out the stables.
Oct 22, 2009 - 9:09 am 14. Bender:This is an thoroughly unconstitutional outrage.
But there is an easy way out. Everyone should simply run as a Democrat. That’s what they do here in this one-party town — everyone is a Democrat, even the Republicans are “Democrats.”
Just have every candidate run as a Democrat, and you effectively do a end-run around this imposition and have your “nonpartisan” election.
Oct 22, 2009 - 9:31 am 15. John:Why are you surprised? The Holder Justice Department has been a joke for 9 months; can you name a single thing it has done that is honest or even legal?
This justice department is not interested in the law, it is interested in assisting in the far left’s agenda and the dominance of the Democratic party. Anything that interferes with those two goals is unimportant and will receive a no comment response for every inquiry.
The truth is actually stated in the ruling. The black population will not know who to vote for if you take party affiliation away. The black vote will not know where the plantations boundary line is. They may even listen to the evil Republican candidate’s talking point and realize how badly the Democrat master is treating them. We is just to stupid to listen to the radio or TV and understand any issues that they talk about without Democratic master explaining it to us.
Oct 22, 2009 - 9:46 am 16. JMH:This is such an appalling paragraph. First of all, it represents a DoJ official sanctioning, excusing, and enabling racial discrimiation in voting, since they are trying to preserve the status quo of Kingston voters basing their vote “more on the race of a candidate than his or her political affiliation.” Wonderful.
Of course, the paragraph is also non-sensical, since it says that voters base their choice on race and not party, and therefore we must retain party affiliation to enable voters to continue making their choice based on race. Huh? Perhaps Kingston should drop the (D) and (R) from the ballots and replace them with (B), (W), (H) and (A).
Oct 22, 2009 - 10:18 am 17. progressoverpeace:People should pay very close attention to this for a very basic, and important, reason:
One of the major differences between the US and the rest of the world has been that we are an individualistic nation, as written into our Constitution (and state Constitutions). We are about the only nation on Earth for which political parties are NOT fundamental political entities. Political parties do not exist in our Constituton, which is individualistic and holds the individual as the fundamental political entity. It is the rest of the world, and their moronic, collectivist, party-oriented Euro-style parliamentary systems that have the policital party as the fundamental political entity governing much of the formation and behaviors of their governments. Now, in the US, we have a ruling trying to establish the primacy of political parties, which is a move to collectivism and more towards the backwards, tribalistic, unstable governmental structures that the rest of the world has, and that we have always been the sole nation without.
This is a very ominous development that strikes at the very heart of our nation. Add the insane racial idiocy, and this stands as one of the worst actions by our federal government and judiciary, ever. It is stunning in its un-American and moronic quality. Just stunning.
This is why our nation will likely not survive the Washington junta, intact. National suicide was declared on Nov 4th and it seems almost surely to come to pass.
Oct 22, 2009 - 10:41 am 18. Diggs:Blacks should be required to vote for the Democratic Party candidate. That way actually going to the polls would not be necessary for blacks. Simply count up the number of registered black voters in any given district, and add that number to the Democrat’s tally.
Oct 22, 2009 - 12:14 pm 19. F:Simple. No fuss. Change you can believe in.
I agree that this is both nonsense AND ominous. I think some law school should take this on as a test case and push for a judicial opinion. It is flatout racism and if it isn’t unconstitutional then I’m living under a different constitution than I thought. F
Oct 22, 2009 - 12:59 pm 20. Marty:Not only is it explicable, you explain it: hyperpartisanship.
So don’t go wringing your hands about “oh, I just don’t understand.” Face reality, this is the most partisanly-corrupt DOJ in recent history. The question is, not what it is, but what to do about it.
Oct 22, 2009 - 9:18 pm 21. clarice:F:Apparently under the Act (as I explained) only the township can bring such a suit. They sought to change th rule to save money and aren’t apparently willing to spend more to challenege this.
Ed Lasky has some interesting material to add to this discussion: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/10/does_gerrymandering_for_racial.html. I especially think the last paragraph –that gerrymandered districts by race–something the Act has a role in–is partially responsible for the acrimony in political life because representatives from such districts tend to be the most partisan and extreme.
Oct 23, 2009 - 5:50 am 22. Phranc:15. John:
Why are you surprised? The Holder Justice Department has been a joke for 9 months; can you name a single thing it has done that is honest or even legal?
Oct 23, 2009 - 7:22 am 23. Moho:—————————————————
They did take down a large Mexican drug cartel. Though I doubt it was started and finished under this DoJ. No doubt they take credit for the hard work of the last DoJ……. So no can’t think of any thing honest or legal.
Blacks should be required to vote for the Democratic Party candidate. That way actually going to the polls would not be necessary for blacks. Simply count up the number of registered black voters in any given district, and add that number to the Democrat’s tally.
Simple. No fuss. Change you can believe in.
Rather than engage in such silly bs, you should ask yourself why African Americans feel so repulsed by the Republican party.
Oct 23, 2009 - 7:58 am 24. Moho:Face reality, this is the most partisanly-corrupt DOJ in recent history.
Um….do you remember Alberto Gonzalez. Or should I say, do you recall?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIgbJSrIvWc
Oct 23, 2009 - 8:00 am 25. Frank Black:So much for post-partisan and post-racial. It’s actually pro-partisan and pro-racist.
Oct 24, 2009 - 7:48 am