House

Black Caucus chair presses Goodlatte on voting rights

by Mike Lillis - 08/10/16 1:52 PM ET

The head of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) is urging House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) to bolster voting rights protections ahead of November’s elections.

Labeling the Voting Rights Act (VRA) “the most successful piece of civil rights legislation in American history,” Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.) wants Goodlatte to consider an update to the landmark law, which was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013.

{mosads}By refusing to consider a bipartisan bill restoring the VRA, Butterfield charged, Goodlatte and other GOP leaders are complicit in state efforts to make it more difficult to vote — efforts Butterfield and other critics contend will affect minority voters disproportionately.

“As members of Congress, we must challenge any and every effort that would discriminate and restrict individuals from exercising their right to vote,” Butterfield said in a statement.

“Republican leaders simply cannot continue to say they support voting rights while refusing to restore the VRA,” he added. “Their inaction has enabled states around the country to enact new restrictions that make it harder for minority voters to participate equally in the electoral process.”

While Butterfield and other Democrats have long hounded GOP leaders to restore original VRA protections, they seem to be intensifying their focus on Goodlatte as the gatekeeper to any reforms.

Top leaders from the NAACP on Monday staged a sit-in at Goodlatte’s office in Roanoke, Va., to highlight his inaction on the VRA. Several were arrested after the six-hour protest.

“We’ve seen a Machiavellian frenzy of voter suppression in states that have worked deliberately and creatively to make it harder for young people, college students, minorities to vote for the candidate and party of their choice on Nov. 8,” NAACP President Cornell William Brooks, who was among those arrested, said afterwards.

Fueling their strategy to target Goodlatte is the fact that House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has said he supports the bipartisan bill updating the VRA, but he’s also promised to maintain a “bottom-up” approach to governing that empowers the committee chairmen to move legislation as they see fit.

Goodlatte held a hearing on voting rights in July of 2013, just after the Supreme Court ruling came down, and he’s since maintained that the court left enough of the law intact to protect voters from discrimination.

In response to questions from reporters, he’s been issuing virtually the same statement for more than a year, saying the VRA “is alive and well and protecting the freedom to vote.”

“While the Supreme Court struck down the old coverage formula that required certain states to preclear their voting rule changes with the federal government, the Court left in place other important tools in the Voting Rights Act, including the section that allows federal judges to place jurisdictions under a preclearance regime if those jurisdictions act in an unconstitutional and discriminatory manner,” Goodlatte said this week.

“So, strong remedies against unconstitutional voting discrimination remain in place today.”

In its 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the 1965 VRA, which required nine states — and nearly 60 counties and townships in states not covered as a whole — with a history of racial discrimination to get federal approval before changing their voting rules.

Behind Chief Justice John Roberts, the court’s conservative majority found that while the federal government has the power to require pre-clearance of voting changes, the formula dictating which states must comply is outdated and therefore unconstitutional.

Roberts invited Congress to “draft another formula based on current conditions.” Such legislation has been introduced in both chambers, but it’s gone nowhere in the GOP-led committees.

Butterfield’s interest in the topic is multi-faceted. Not only is he a former judge who now heads the Black Caucus, but he also hails from North Carolina, a swing state where GOP legislators have adopted what are perhaps the nation’s most stringent new voting laws following the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling.

Last month, a federal appeals court shot down those state laws, which had shortened the window for early voting, eliminated same-day registration and established a photo-ID mandate.

But Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, announced last week that he intends to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to step in with an emergency order reinstating the rules ahead of November.

“Changing our state’s election laws close to the upcoming election, including common sense voter ID, will create confusion for voters and poll workers,” McCrory said in a statement.

The North Carolina decision is among a string of recent court rulings that have struck down tougher voting laws in states across the country, including Texas, Kansas, North Dakota and Wisconsin.

In a statement this week to the NAACP, Goodlatte alluded to such cases in defending his position, noting that the “federal courts have been actively using the VRA, upholding and striking down various state laws.”

Critics are quick to counter that those decisions took years of arbitration to arrive — too late, in some cases, to apply to the 2014 midterm elections or this year’s primaries.

“There’s no way to get those votes back,” Wade Henderson, head of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said following the North Carolina decision.

Tags Bob Goodlatte G.K. Butterfield Paul Ryan