Lamar W. Hankins : Voter Suppression is Republican Hallmark

Political cartoon by John Darkow / Columbia Daily Tribune. Image from FireIntheBelly.

Voter suppression is a hallmark 
of today’s Republicans

If it took nearly 100 years to assure racial fairness in voting under law, then it might take longer than 48 years to remedy that problem in actual practice.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / July 17, 2013

I have never seen a modern definition of democracy that was not based on near-universal suffrage. It seems that the five Republicans on the Supreme Court prefer a political system that allows states to pass voting laws that suppress the vote, denying voting to many U.S. citizens.

They found section 4(B) of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) unconstitutional because it was not based on current data about voting rights violations in the nine states identified by Congress that have historically engaged in race discrimination in voting. As a result, those nine states, including Texas, no longer are required to get pre-clearance of changes to their voting laws from the attorney general or a three-judge court (section 5) until, or unless, the old data are updated.

Because section 2 of the act was unchanged, state and local governments continue to be prohibited from engaging in election practices that discriminate against and disenfranchise minority voters. However, without pre-clearance, costly and time-consuming lawsuits must be brought against discriminatory voting practices to enforce Section 2.

Congress decided in 1965, and most recently in 2006, that section 2 was not a sufficient remedy for voting discrimination. That’s why it established the pre-clearance requirement.

The U.S. began as a political system that distrusted universal suffrage, limiting the right to vote to those who owned property, were male, were not slaves, and were 21 years of age or older. One of our most revered founders and later president, John Adams, explained in a letter written in May 1776, why women, those under 21, and those who do not own property should be excluded from the voting franchise:

But why exclude women? You will say, because their delicacy renders them unfit for practice and experience, in the great business of life, and the hardy enterprises of war, as well as the arduous cares of state. Besides, their attention is so much engaged with the necessary nurture of their children, that nature has made them fittest for domestic cares. And children have not judgment or will of their own.

True. But will not these reasons apply to others? Is it not equally true, that men in general in every society, who are wholly destitute of property, are also too little acquainted with public affairs to form a right judgment, and too dependent upon other men to have a will of their own? If this is a fact, if you give to every man, who has no property, a vote, will you not make a fine encouraging provision for corruption by your fundamental law?

Such is the frailty of the human heart, that very few men, who have no property, have any judgment of their own. They talk and vote as they are directed by some man of property, who has attached their minds to his interest...”

In 1969, an acquaintance who rented an apartment and wanted to vote in a bond election in the City of Georgetown went to City Hall and rendered his wrist watch for taxation and paid the taxes so that he could vote in the election. At that time, only those who paid property taxes were allowed to vote in bond elections in that town. That same year, the Supreme Court found such voting restrictions violated the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and thereafter bond elections were open to voting by all citizens.

The Voting Rights Act was renewed by Congress in 2006 by overwhelming margins (Senate -- 98-0; House -- 390-33). The data used in 2006, when the act was reauthorized were data from 1975. However, extensive hearings conducted before the 2006 vote yielded 15,000 pages of new testimony showing that persistent voting discrimination based on race continued to exist in the nine targeted states after the 1975 data were compiled.

And the VRA prevented more than 700 discriminatory laws from taking effect in the last 30 years -- over 100 of them occurred in Shelby County, Alabama, since 1982. Shelby County was the plaintiff in the case just decided. Now, many recently-passed laws that suppress the vote (such as the Texas voter ID law) or unfairly discriminate against minorities (such as redistricting that dilutes minority voting) are being implemented.

More than 140 billboards, playing on the myth of "voter fraud," were placed in black and Latino neighborhoods in Ohio and Wisconsin in 2012. Image from Colorlines.

While the VRA eliminated explicit legal barriers to minority voting registration (such as poll taxes and discriminatory literacy tests), the dissent recognized newer forms of discrimination, such as racial gerrymandering to dilute minority votes; at-large voting in cities with large minority populations, which prevent representative elections; and racially-discriminatory annexation by cities to dilute minority votes.

And more recently, we have experienced voter identification laws that require obtaining expensive documents (which may be impossible for poor people to pay for, even if the documents are available), purges of voting rolls aimed at minorities (which often erroneously delete eligible voters from the voting rolls), voter intimidation at the polls, and practices that have yet to be addressed in most jurisdictions, such as tricking voters to vote on non-election days or at the wrong locations, all of which have the effect of reducing minority voting.

Since the voting rights decision, some states are making plans to eliminate early voting, same-day registration, and Sunday voting hours. But the voter ID laws, which are now being rushed into place (including in Texas) are the least justified because there is almost no in-person voter fraud in the U.S. according to a national investigative reporting project funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which called such fraud “infinitesimal.”

It found that the “photo ID laws disproportionately affect minorities, students, the disabled and the elderly,” which is just what today’s Republicans want.

Of course, it was Chief Justice John Roberts’ predecessor, Republican William Rehnquist, who was accused by four witnesses, during his 1986 confirmation hearings as Chief Justice, of voter intimidation and harassment at polling locations in Phoenix in the early 1960s. So it is not surprising that the Republican members of the Supreme Court are insensitive to, or look favorably on, minority voting discrimination.

Another insensitive Republican and Arizona member of the Supreme Court famously ridiculed voters in Florida during the 2000 presidential election case decided by the court in favor of George W. Bush. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor thought that any voters who could not follow voting instructions were too stupid to have their votes counted, even if their intent could be determined by a close examination of the ballots. Evidently, she thought confusing ballot presentations should be blamed on the voters, not the election officials who created the confusion.

But not all Republicans seem to agree with the Supreme Court about the Voting Rights Act. House Speaker John Boehner, commenting on the act’s renewal in 2006, said that it is "an effective tool in protecting a right that is fundamental to our democracy." It is gratifying to see that a majority of Americans seem to agree with Boehner’s assessment. An ABC/Washington Post poll released near the end of June showed that one-third of those polled approve of the Supreme Court’s decision, but just over half (51%) disapprove.

Paul Krugman had this to say in a recent column about voting rights:

America today... (is) a place where everyone celebrates the right to vote, yet many politicians work hard to disenfranchise the poor and nonwhite... But that very hypocrisy is, in a way, a good sign. The wealthy may defend their privileges, but given the temper of America, they have to pretend that they’re doing no such thing. The block-the-vote people know what they’re doing, but they also know that they mustn’t say it in so many words. In effect, both groups know that the nation will view them as un-American unless they pay at least lip service to democratic ideals -- and in that fact lies the hope of redemption.

I wish I shared Krugman’s optimism. But I view the likelihood that America will be redeemed from its sins of hypocrisy about discrimination about as much as I believe that most Republicans will embrace the Affordable Care Act. The Americans who work to deny voting rights and disenfranchise minorities without admitting that this is what they are doing are like those who will not utter racially and ethnically derogatory names in polite company, but who are under their skin vicious racists. I know these people because some of them are my relatives and acquaintances.

A few years ago, these people who would deny fundamental rights if they have sufficient cover to do so included both Democrats and Republicans. But now, most of these hypocrites have moved over to the Republican Party or are members of fringe groups. This movement is as true of Supreme Court Justices as it is of politicians. The Republicans on today’s court torture logic and routinely ignore precedent in their efforts to justify their political conclusions. They often seek indirect ways to achieve the results they favor, as they have done in the VRA case.

Justice Ginsburg’s dissent to the VRA ruling raised the point that it took nearly 100 years after passage of the Fourteenth Amendment (adopted in 1866 to guarantee equal protection of the laws for African-Americans) and the Fifteenth Amendment (adopted in 1870 to guarantee the right to vote for African-American men), to pass the Voting Rights Act to end the discrimination those amendments were intended to address.

If it took nearly 100 years to assure racial fairness in voting under law, then it might take longer than 48 years to remedy that problem in actual practice. Fixing society is not a mechanical process like fixing a car that has broken down. Human beings and societies are more difficult to fix than engines.

Republicans want to suppress the vote of people who may vote for Democrats. That is the clear purpose of unneeded and unjustified laws that impact the voter turnout for elections. And gerrymandering is almost always used to reduce the election of members of the opposite party. The evidence supports these facts, even if most Republicans are too disingenuous to admit it.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Texas Law Prof Gerald Torres on Voting Rights, Affirmative Action & More

University of Texas law professor Gerald Torres in the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, Friday, July 12, 2013. Photos by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcast:
UT-Austin law prof Gerald Torres
joins us on Rag Radio

We discuss the recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions on voting rights and affirmative action, plus immigration reform, Atmospheric Trust litigation, Native American sovereignty, and much more.

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / July 17, 2013

University of Texas law professor Gerald Torres was Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, July 12, 2013. Torres, who holds the Bryant Smith Chair in Law at the University of Texas, is an expert on environmental and agricultural law, critical race theory, and federal Indian law.

And he plays a mean harmonica!

Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download this episode of Rag Radio here:


Among issues that Professor Torres discusses with us on the show are the recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions on voting rights and affirmative action, plus immigration reform, Atmospheric Trust litigation, and Native American sovereignty.

Gerald Torres, who was associate dean of the University of Minnesota Law School before coming to UT-Austin, has served as deputy assistant attorney general for the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., and as counsel to then U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno.

His book, The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (Harvard University Press), written with Harvard Law Professor Lani Guinier, was described by Publisher’s Weekly as “one of the most provocative and challenging books on race produced in years.”

Gerald Torres in performance!

Professor Torres is a past president of the Association of American Law Schools. He has served on the board of the Environmental Law Institute, the National Petroleum Council, and on EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Law Institute.

Torres was honored with the 2004 Legal Service Award from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) for his work to advance the legal rights of Latinos. He currently is Board Chair of the Advancement Project, the nation’s leading social and racial justice organization. He is also on the board of the Natural Resources Defense Council and is Vice-Chairman of the Board of Earth Day Network.

He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Stanford, and Yale law schools.


Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement.

The show has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, July 19, 2013: Sociologist, media critic, and author Todd Gitlin.
Friday, July 26, 2013: Sanford, FL-based political science prof Jay D. Jurie, on the consequences of the Trayvon Martin verdict.

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Van Gosse : What Would an American Left Look Like?

Radical reconstruction: root and branch. Image from en.academic.ru.

Begin the walk:
What would an American Left look like?

I propose that a consequential Left can only proceed as a project for reconstructing American democracy, root and branch.

By Van Gosse / The Rag Blog / July 7, 2013

Begin with what could be, ask what has been, and finish with what should be done now, to move forward.

What could be is relatively simple. The term “an American Left” should mean a convergence of movements and institutions capable of generating permanent change, rather than the current de facto Left, a hodge-podge of defensive, issue-focused groups, focused on immediate problems, with little unity.

What has been is evident. There is ample precedent for revolutionary change in this country. At decisive points, powerful movements generated the institutions that won a “transformative egalitarian order,” in the words of the political scientists Rogers Smith and Desmond King, describing the antislavery movement that birthed the Republican Party.

After decades of defeat, in the 1930s the radicalized labor movement took advantage of the New Deal to organize the industrial working classes, then at the center of our political economy, altering the balance of power in U.S. politics.

Most recently, between the 1930s and the 1970s, what the historian Jacqueline Dowd Hall calls “the long civil rights movement” broke up the South’s white supremacist oligarchy, and ushered in a new democratic order which has spread out to include every caste, ethnicity, sex, or gender formerly denied equal citizenship.

What is to be done? We are not finished with making this country a real democracy. We need to complete the process of Radical Reconstruction that began after the Civil War, and stalled until the Second Reconstruction of the mid-twentieth century. A Third Reconstruction is required to sweep away the power of deeply-entrenched racial and regional minorities, which sharply skews the U.S.’s political system in their favor.

As these references suggest, a strong dose of history is called for, to escape the trap of “presentism,” the fixation with our own time. Since the 1970s, American radicals have been plagued by two tendencies -- either despair about the thuggish, backwards nature of this country, or a pollyanna-ish optimism presuming the nation needs only to be returned to its true self -- the Popular Front delusion.

Both are versions of romanticism, the opposite of historical consciousness. Instead of these romantic illusions, a real American Left will proceed from a grounded historical understanding that is neither dystopian, as in “this is the worst of all possible countries,” nor subject to the utopian fantasy that American Democracy was always just about to be perfected.

To remove a perennial sticking point, we should dispense with the old debate over parliamentary versus extra-parliamentary strategies. To be viable, an American Left needs a long-term electoral strategy, not occasional gambits focused on charismatic leaders, but a plan to compete at all levels: town and city; county and state; finally, the federal and national.

Whether that option is in or out of the Democratic Party is a secondary question, because the Tea Party’s rise has made it evident that our “parties” are vessels waiting to be filled, and what you put in will determine what you can get out.

But however necessary, electoral power never will be sufficient. We must be inside the state, making “the long march through the institutions,” as Italian communists proposed back in the 1970s, but at the same time, working outside and even against the state.

A permanent Left will consistently mobilize non-electoral pressure, moving back and forth with agility rather than fetishizing particular tactics, whether nonviolent action, mass demonstrations, lobbying, or occupying and “sitting-in.” Keeping one leg outside will avoid the snare of submergence in parliamentarianism, where what matters is holding onto office, although this danger will never go away as long as we are serious about taking and maintaining governance.

A coherent electoral strategy and a multi-pronged swarm of tactics for popular mobilization will be nothing, however, without a long-term project. So what is it? Where to start?

I propose that a consequential Left can only proceed as a project for reconstructing American democracy, root and branch. What we have right now are the seductive shreds of cultural and political democracy, bits and pieces of power without actually threatening the core structures of political and economic authority.

We need to focus on how to turn this vast, polyglot nation-of-sorts into a genuine social, economic, and popular democracy based on majority rule, a free and fair ballot available to every citizen (a profoundly radical move in America’s historical context), and the application of the one-person, one-vote principle at all levels of government.

The latter alone would immediately overturn the main anti-democratic feature of our constitutional order: the composition of the Senate and, in turn, the Electoral College.

Why should democracy be the focus for making revolutionary change, rather than the depredations of corporate capitalism? Because until we deal with the former, we’ll never be able to tackle the latter. Despite the “Rights Revolution” extending from “Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall,” in Obama’s evocative phrase, this is still a halfway-democratic state pockmarked by anti-popular legal structures and anti-majoritarian exceptions and exclusions, many of them dating from the nineteenth century, if not before.

The problem is and always has been federalism, so-called, or “states’ rights,” which is to say, a license for local oligarchies to maintain their control. There is not now, nor has there ever been, a federally-guaranteed uniform right to vote in this country, other than the negative prescriptions of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, and the Nineteenth Amendment exactly 50 years later, which barred the explicit use of race or gender (or previous condition of servitude) to prevent someone from voting.

From the republic’s founding, state legislatures have tinkered with their own state’s voting regulations, and county and township officials have interpreted those regulations as they see fit, ignoring the ones they don’t like, based on which construction of state law will serve partisan interests.

We justly celebrate Brown v. Board of Education, but the Supreme Court’s 1962 Baker v. Carr decision, invalidating imbalanced legislative districting in the states (to minimize the potential black or city vote) and insist on “one-person, one-vote” proportionality of representation was, in its own way, just as radical. Along with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it’s one of the few instances where the national government has intervened to invalidate the mechanisms used to block the popular democratic will.

A perfect contemporary example of how to trump basic democratic rights is the summary refusal of students’ right to vote where they attend school. Even though the Supreme Court ruled as far back as 1979, in Symm v. United States, that local or state officials could not use student status to deny someone’s right to vote, massive evidence from many states demonstrates that this right is largely dependent on the whim of whichever of the three thousand county boards of elections supervises the local process.

Just as some secretaries of state (the chief elections officials in most states) proclaim, as did Maine’s in 2012, that they did not consider students to be legal residents of their state, others issue new regulations about which forms of identification will be accepted at the polls, or where the polls will be located, or when they will open and close.

A different case in point: this is a twenty-first century nation-state with more technological and material resources than any government in history. It can find and kill with surgical precision anywhere in the world. Yet it still finds it either difficult or unnecessary to count votes quickly and accurately.

President Obama’s victory margin in the popular vote has grown substantially since election night, when it was reckoned at 2.3%, or about three million votes. As of now, it is almost 3.9%, about five million votes. Imagine if the election had been really close, what it would mean to somehow not get around to counting two million ballots: Mitt Romney declared the winner of the popular vote, and based on extremely incomplete returns, of the Electoral College. Does anyone imagine he or any other “conservative” would truly abide by the law, if two million votes were duly counted for their opponent in the weeks after Election Day?

Arizona is even more to the point. Long after Election Day, 600,000 ballots were still being processed in that state, enough to change many local and state races, and only militant mobilization by the state’s Latino citizens got those votes tabulated.

In these instances, as in so many other ways, ours is a deeply, consciously undemocratic system, since the failure to count votes immediately and transparently is the oldest trick in the book of electoral manipulation -- “counting them out,” whether in Alabama and Mississippi in the 1890s, or Mexico City in 1988, control of the official tabulation and how it is reported is ultimately decisive.

To get to a true, deep democracy, so that the whole people participate in making a new society together, we need to focus sharply on how state power is articulated in our particular state, with its origins in the late eighteenth century, and its archaic system of gerrymandering in favor of small rural areas and states, so that a citizen residing in North Dakota or Vermont has effectively 50 times the electoral and legislative weight of a Californian.

At every point in our history, the net effect of this arrangement has been to protect various forms of racial and ethnic privilege. The United States was organized as a racial state, and despite the massive changes and the effective democratization of much of that state, it remains one today, because of the bulkheads of white privilege guaranteed by federalism. Until we overcome that problem, everything else we try will be hamstrung, stymied and defeated by the white super-minority using the tools of our antiquated state system.

Embodying the SNCC imperative of “move on over or we will move on over you,” we must confront the federal character of the American state order, and either reform its profoundly undemocratic features, or wall-off and disempower those polities (e.g. the Deep South states) which we cannot control and which, much of the time, rule over us.

Our majorities, when we achieve them, must not be blocked by arbitrary devices. “One-person, one-vote” must be fully extended in all respects, to guarantee equality of power between all citizens. Systematic electoral reform mandating a universal, binding processes, and the banning of the many forms of quasi-legal voter suppression, is an imperative demand.

At the most basic level, to trump the ability of reactionaries to set up roadblocks to democracy, we should start with a constitutional amendment specifying that “the absolute right to vote of all citizens, born or naturalized in the United States, 18 years of age or older on the day of election, shall not be abridged on any grounds, including but not limited to residency, student status, employment, proof of age or identity, or any previous conviction for a crime.”

In addition, a new Voting Rights Act should guarantee early voting procedures and a uniform national voter registration process, incorporating portability.

Moving beyond that premise is the biggest boulder in the road: the Senate. Remember that for the majority of our history, this was an openly undemocratic body, insulated from any form of popular control. Party caucuses made deals with each other in state legislatures, and sent a grab bag of hacks and genuine leaders to Washington, including many who never could have won an actual election.

Finally, exactly 100 years ago, progressives in both parties pushed through the Seventeenth Amendment, providing for the direct election of senators. What we need now is an amendment guaranteeing each state representation (one senator) and additional seats on a proportional basis, by expanding the body and dividing up the seats.

For those who say it is impossible to imagine such a constitutional reform achieving sufficient support to pass, consider how far we have come on the question of the Electoral College, once considered sacrosanct. After a series of elections whose results (as in 2000), and process (ever since then) have made a mockery of popular democracy, we are moving steadily towards a consensus that, in one way or another, it must be abolished or reformed into irrelevance, such as by a compact between a majority of the states to instruct their Electors to vote for the candidate who has received the highest number of votes nationally.


What is keeping us from getting there?

Our own ignorance or arrogance, functionally the same thing. What the glum, dystopian liberal intelligentsia and impatiently radical, often anarchistic youth have in common in the Obama era is an impatience with the challenge of understanding their country, the notion that it is too provincial to be worth really studying, coupled to the well-founded sense that as citizens of a profoundly chauvinistic world empire, we have an obligation to learn about the world.

But study the U.S. we must, the way people like Karl Rove have done in their diligent exploitation of its dark side, its fears, if we want to bend it towards the arc of justice.

Never mind loving “America” or feeling patriotic, we had better get a handle on what is effectively not one but five or six nations defined by specific geographies, political economies, and regional cultures, tied together mainly by power and self-interest.

Right now, the level of uninformed distance on the Left from this political and cultural complexity is profound. Few progressives get further than wondering. “What’s the matter with Kansas?” If they are serious, they might read about “America in the King Years,” but that still only addresses the second half of the last century. Anything before that is treated as the dead hand of the past.

That Lincoln is the only real revolutionary to hold power in our history; that the high tide of American radicalism came before the Civil War, not after; that for most of its history, the Democratic Party existed to defend white men’s privilege -- this makes no sense to people who think that “the Left” can only be seen through the prism of a European-style Marxist party (or a Third World-style national liberation front).

A big caveat: among people of color, these strictures do not hold, at least not to the same degree. African Americans, Chicanos, Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, Asian Americans -- they can’t afford to live in a fantasy world where history either doesn’t exist or is made up to justify unearned privilege. Adopting the stance of “I’m not really an American, I just live here,” so proudly articulated by white progressives, doesn’t work for peoples who have had to fight every inch of the way to enjoy some of the basic rights of Americans.

Sooner or later, refusing to acknowledge one’s membership in this polity looks like just another species of privilege, the political equivalent of being a tax exile.

Which of these problems are self-inflicted and subject to our agency? What strengths do we have to call upon?

1. We, as leftists, liberals, and progressives, can educate ourselves politically and historically; we can find a common ground about what’s deeply wrong with the United States, and what is worth building upon, celebrating, or reviving. We lack the will, not the means.
2. We have, collectively, the active or passive affiliation of tens of millions of people, in local community and environmental organizations, public sector institutions like libraries, hospitals, schools, colleges and universities, unions and cooperatives, and a vast array of issue-based lobbies.
3. We raise and spend billions of dollars, and have the capacity to raise and spend far more, entirely apart from the multi-billion dollar major donors like George Soros, and their philanthropic apparatuses.
4. We are the legatees of extraordinary movements, not just for abolition and civil or union rights, but feminism’s second wave that began in the 1960s and continues unabated today, the remarkable movement for gay and lesbian equality which has generated a revolution in gender and sexuality in just the past ten years, and the post-Vietnam campaigns for solidarity and global justice in South Africa, Central America, and now Israel-Palestine.

What are those factors for which we must account but which are out of our control?

1. We will have no capacity to shape the international political economy for a long time to come; all we can do, for now, is to (like the rest of our fellow citizens) seek to weather its storms, and lobby for the least punitive response globally and at home, and equally shared burdens via sharply progressive taxation policies.
2. There will be massive demographic changes in the U.S. for the foreseeable future, akin in their scope to the suburbanization of the post-1945 era, and later, the transfer of populations, production, and wealth to the Sunbelt. It is impossible to predict what these shifts, premised on increasing multi-racialization of the U.S. population, will mean politically, and it would be optimistic in the extreme to think that a new non-ethnic right, premised on the mystique of “free markets” and entrepreneurialism, was impossible.
3. Finally, unlike much of Europe, most of Latin America, and parts of Asia, we do not have deeply-rooted traditions of a “statist” provision of public goods, transcending divisions between left and right. So let’s stop pretending that the New Deal and the Great Society, a thirty-year lurch in that direction, is the equivalent of those traditions. What we do have are the legacy of the Declaration of Independence, the egalitarian implications of birthright citizenship and due process built into the Fourteenth Amendment, and the world’s oldest systems of free public schools.

What, therefore, should be our program?

That is entirely the wrong question to be asking, if a radical reconstruction of American democracy is the task ahead. Yet it’s the question we on the Left keep mistakenly answering, proposing lists of substantive or even revolutionary reforms.

Instead of demanding this or that, we should focus on empowering the great mass of citizens -- both the 40 percent who never vote, and the 60 percent who only vote in presidential elections -- to think for themselves what this country needs, what they need.

Do we trust the alienated, desperate, disfranchised poor and working-classes of the United States to work out their own revolution? We had better trust them, because their solutions will probably be less orthodox and more radical than any of us can imagine right now.

So rather than invoking any of our genuine radical heroes, whether Dr. King, Ella Baker, Frederick Douglass, Eugene V. Debs, or Dorothy Day, I will conclude by quoting a revolutionary thinker from a different part of America, the Brazilian Paolo Freire, who urged us to “make the road by walking,” by engaging in the struggle itself rather than laying out a plan for revolution.

That is really what we need to do -- begin the walk.

[Van Gosse is an Associate Professor of History at Franklin and Marshall College and author of numerous books and articles on U.S. politics. He has been active in antiwar and solidarity politics since 1982. His historical and political writing can be found at his website, www.vangosse.com. He is co-founder of the Post-Capitalist Project, a cooperative, nonsectarian venture of Left journals, popular education centers, and electronic media, and blogs on The Huffington Post.]

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Tom Hayden : The Right-Wing War on Democracy

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act, 1965. Photo from AP.

The right-wing war on democratic rights:
Voting rights, immigration reform imperiled

Lost in both the partisan spin and rhetorical legalisms is that the scale of political power is being tipped far to the right in spite of progressive majorities which elected and reelected President Obama.

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / June 27, 2013

With the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington approaching, is the time at hand for mass protest and civil disobedience against the Republican/Tea Party's war against voting rights and immigrant rights?

That's among the immediate questions as the Roberts Court has dropped its hammer on the 1965 Voting Rights Act while a dubious "immigration reform" bill passed the Senate on its likely way to an even worse fate in the Tea Party-controlled House.

Together with the Court's Citizens United decisions protecting secret money in campaigns, Republicans are doing everything possible to cement a grip on power as a numerical white minority bloc. Successful Republican efforts to gerrymander House seats to gain ground in the Electoral College, combined with the rising tide of anti-abortion restrictions in southern states, reinforce the drift towards a new civil war -- one fought by political means with recurring episodes of mass violence.

The Court's narrowing of affirmative action also guarantees a widening of the racial divide in education and economic opportunity.

The Court's composition reveals its underlying partisan character, with the decisive tilt occurring after the 2000 election between Al Gore, Ralph Nader, and George Bush, in which the Court usurped the verdict of a majority of voters, thus becoming a de facto branch of the Republican apparatus.

Photo by Richard Ellis / Getty Images.

The Republican bloc now includes: Roberts [Bush, 2005], Alito [Bush, 2006], Scalia [Reagan, 1986], Kennedy [Reagan, 1988], and Thomas [Bush, sr., 1991]. The Democratic bloc includes Ginsberg [Clinton, 1993], Stephen Breyer [Clinton, 1994], Sonia Sotomayer [Obama, 2009], and Elena Kagan [Obama, 2010].

The Republican tilt is likely to continue indefinitely, with Obama only able to appointment replacements to retiring liberals. The tilt will become a lock if a Republican president is elected in 2016.

Lost in both the partisan spin and rhetorical legalisms is that the scale of political power is being tipped far to the right in spite of progressive majorities which elected and reelected President Obama.

In the voting rights decision, the Court has prevented aggressive action by the Justice Department to deter egregious methods of suppressing voter turnout among communities of color. University surveys show that most whites in the Southern states, with the addition of Pennsylvania, are more prejudiced than the national average [Annenberg survey, 2008 data].

Most lost or settled voting rights cases have occurred in the South. {New York Times, June 23]. It is true that both blatant and more subtle cases of voter suppression occur outside the states covered by the Voting Rights Act, but that is an argument for expanding the Section 5 protections, not weakening them.

The point is that Barack Obama was elected twice with the support of 75-95 percent of African-American, Latino, and Asian-American voters, and any government-imposed inhibitions on their registration and turnout will make the difference in close national and state elections. Without federal intervention, the challenge of protecting voting rights will be left largely to massive volunteer efforts by civil rights and labor organizations.

With respect to the immigrant rights bill passed by the Senate this week, the measure shifts U.S. military buildups from the Muslim world to the Mexican border, airports, and coastlines. The Statue of Liberty is replaced by a Minuteman at the watchtowers.

Border wall boondoggle. Photo by
Scott Olson/Getty Images.

The projected cost is $40 billion, which is sure to rise with overruns, making the costs comparable to other major military operations. The total number of Border Patrol agents will double to 40,000, and the fencing is to cover 700 miles. Sen. Patrick Leahy was right in calling the bill a boondoggle for Halliburton. [For the historical record, the original fencing metal strips came from Halliburton's corporate predecessor, Brown and Root; the metal was from landing strips installed for U.S. aircraft during the Vietnam War.]

The billionaires' boondoggle aside, the question is whether -- and when -- the immigrant rights bill will include voting rights, if ever. Obama temporarily legalized the DREAM Act youth who participated heavily in the 2012 election. Their future now is linked to the immigrant rights bill, or will require an extension of Obama's executive order.

It is estimated that between 800,000 and 1.2 million of the DREAM Act generation could become empowered to vote. In addition, there are one million projected voters in the category of Title II, the Agricultural Worker Program. That would leave about 9 million immigrants facing the pitfalls of the so-called "pathway to citizenship" which will take perhaps 13 to 20 years.

According to an analysis by Peter Schey, it is likely that 4 to 5 million mostly low-income immigrants will be unable to adjust their status because of roadblocks to eligibility.

It is anyone's guess whether the Tea Party Republicans in the House will accept any immigration reform, especially reform that will empower low-income, brown-skinned people to vote. That would shift the political balance of power towards the multicultural majority, now represented by Obama, for the coming generation.

The all-important electoral balance will shift away from the Republican Party in Florida, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, and elsewhere -- through the fault lines of the Mexican War of the 1840s.

The point is that the Tea Party, the Republican Party, and Corporate Agriculture will consent to between 2 and 7 million brown-skinned people becoming new voters. If the conservatives finally acquiece, it is reasonably certain that they will make the "pathway to citizenship" as uphill, filled with obstacles, and gradual as possible.

This is not only about raw partisan political power, but about the last stand of the xenophobes and nativist elements in America's political culture. Those who consider these words an exaggeration should read again Patrick Buchanan's State of Emergency [2006] with its foaming fear of a new reconquista in California, or Reagan Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger's prediction of war with Mexico.

Historically, it was difficult enough to achieve democracy in America as a form of minority rule. The British had to be defeated and a new republic given birth where the minority of while male property owners were enfranchised. Each expansion of democratic voting rights has come in the wake of war or massive civil strife.

Now, even with a new and more tolerant American majority coming into view, the resistance from the Right will harden in every way. Politics, including the politics of American progressives, will be seen increasingly through this lens.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. Hayden is director of the Peace and Justice Resource center and editor of The Peace Exchange Bulletin. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Roger Baker : Which Side Are You On, Austin?

Most Austin City Council members are elected from four affluent zip codes, in red above.
Which side are you on?
The people's plan versus the politicians' plan

The struggle for populist control of the City of Austin government by means of 10 independent district elections can be seen as the 1960s struggle for civil rights brought up to date.

By Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / October 18, 2012

[I make no claim to be unbiased. I fully support and have worked for Proposition 3, which I believe to be the best option to bring more democratic government to Austin. (I also recommend The Austin Bulldog -- Austin's current gold standard for local political reporting -- as the best source to learn more about this issue.) Those who want to participate in what can be a historic victory should contact the 10-1 office -- to make sure that the advantage of people power gets translated into distributed door hangers and yard signs. -- R.B.]

AUSTIN -- Which side are you on? A historic grassroots fight for district representation in Austin, supported by an amazingly broad coalition of citizen groups, has emerged.

It's about money power versus people power. If Proposition 3 is approved by the voters in November, it will be arguably the most meaningful and important Austin populist political victory in decades: a no-holds-barred fight for democratic control of Austin government.

Currently, Austin government is in the hands of six council members plus a mayor, all elected citywide by all Austin voters. As such, Austin is now the biggest city in the United States without districts to bring representative government down to the local level. With Austin's current at-large system, big money tends to dominate Austin City Council elections. This is because non-wealthy candidates who might locally be very popular can't afford the hundreds of thousands of dollars of media buys needed to run big citywide media campaigns.

One result of this is that almost all of the Austin City Council since the 1970s has been elected by a small affluent part of Austin centered in four zip codes -- 78701, 78703, 78731, and 78759 -- which together comprise only 10% of Austin's population. Fifteen out of 17 Austin mayors in the last 40 years have come from this area, as have 50% of the City Council members. Meanwhile, the large numbers of voters in the lower income areas of South and East Austin have elected few Council members.

The struggle for populist control of the City of Austin government by means of 10 independent district elections can be seen as the 1960s struggle for civil rights brought up to date. With 10 districts, there would likely be at least two Hispanic seats on the Austin City Council, plus the high probability of an African-American seat.

It all boils down to a populist battle for control of Austin city government that directly challenges Austin's entrenched political and consultant establishment, largely comprised of Democrats, who have an interest in maintaining control of those who profit from weak development restrictions and growth subsidies. The prevailing interests in Austin government have long favored a banker/developer/land speculator group who profit from suburban sprawl development.

Austin's "growth at any cost" promoters have been in a political alliance with the Texas Department of Transportation  (TxDOT) and the Texas road lobby, building roads with public money to subsidize private growth, often in satellite cities like Round Rock within easy commuting distance.

There is no economy of scale with growth for a sprawling city the size of Austin. Rapid growth of low density sprawl outside the city limits tends to benefit land developers at the expense of existing city taxpayers. There is a lot of money to be made by perpetuating current pro-developer growth policies, both inside and outside Austin city limits. If snubbed by city growth regulations, developers can sometimes get Austin development restrictions weakened or overturned by the threat of going to the Republican-controlled Texas legislature.


Why now?

The people's plan, Proposition 3 on the November ballot, got its start as a result of the fact that the Austin City Council set up a new citizen Charter Review Commission. This group can meet as often as every two years to suggest possible changes to Austin's city charter form of government, subject to subsequent voter approval. When city politicians want to change some basic governance policy, they appoint such a Commission. However there is no guarantee that it will do what they want, or tell them what they want to hear.

Supporters of the 10-1 City Council plan at meeting of Austin's 2012 Charter Revision Committee, Feb. 2, 2012. Image from Trust Austin.
A core group of mostly liberals and political reformers saw this as an opportunity for reform, including veteran political strategist Peck Young and veteran organizer Linda Curtis, and many others (including the author). This citizen group was later known as Austinites for Geographical Representation (AGR), recently renamed "Trust Austin."

AGR started meeting about a year ago in response to this citizen input opportunity. Eventually the group agreed to support a 10-district plan, and urged its members to lobby before the Charter Review Commission. The Charter Review Commission itself, including its chair, former Texas Senator Gonzalo Barrientos, finally, approved the 10-1 citizen plan by a narrow vote They then sent their 10-1 majority recommendation to the City Council.

The City Council, however, saw the 10-1 citizen plan more as a threat than an opportunity for reform. What amounts to an Austin shadow government fought back. Support from the Real Estate Council of Austin (RECA) soon led to the submission of a competing 8-2-1 charter proposal by Mayor Lee Leffingwell, who told the Charter Review Commission that this had to be accepted as a compromise. The battle lines were thus drawn.

The same 8-2-1 plan was decisively rejected by the voters 10 years ago, as had been a number of other attempts to get district representation passed over the last several decades. This spurred the effort to gather at least the 20,000 citizen initiative signatures needed to force the Austin City Council to place the 10-1 plan on the ballot. AGR worked from January and way into the summer this year getting the signatures, ending up with over 33,000 signatures, comfortably more than were required.

The citizen plan, Proposition 3, calls for 10 districts plus the mayor. It is being supported by an amazingly wide-ranging coalition of 29 organizations, including the NAACP and LULAC, the League of Women Voters, the Austin Firefighters and Police Associations, and the Austin Neighborhoods Council. Political support ranges from the Travis County Greens, to Democratic Hispanic groups, to the Travis Republicans and the Austin Homebuilders Association. At least two ex-mayors, Frank Cooksey and Bruce Todd, support it.

Political spending on elections is now largely conducted by political action committees or PACs. It costs a lot to get the word out -- more than $100,000 to do it right. The Populist 10-1 plan has its "Trust Austin" PAC. The politician's plan, 8-2-1, is being promoted by the "Austin Community for Change" PAC .


Why doesn't Austin already have districts?

Austin's current system of at-large elections originated during the era when Austin was much smaller, and has its roots in a racist past. The near win of a city council seat by popular community leader Arthur B. DeWitty in 1951 caused the city to adopt an at-large system. This was then seen as the best way to keep an African-American from winning a seat on the then effectively segregated Austin City Council. This link tells the story.

During the 1970's the on-going conflict between the land development interests nnd the environmental community heated up. Groups such as AARO, the Austin Area Research Organization, were organized to promote business and real estate interests that felt threatened by populist politics. Beginning in 1977, and as part of their program, the business interests that benefited from rapid growth provided enough money to make sure that both an African-American and a Hispanic were always elected to the City Council.

This was the basis of the "gentlemen's agreement," still in effect. Failing to elect at least one African-American and one Hispanic would trigger federal intervention under the 1965 Voting Rights acts. Since Austin was and still rather narrowly is a white majority city, it took a well-funded effort to always elect two minorities to the City Council in order to legally protect the at-large voting system. Retaining business community control of Austin government required the politically active business interests to always promote the two minority campaigns sufficiently to make sure one of each minority would remain in office.

According to KUT, Austin's public radio station,

Ed Wendler and Bill Youngblood were two big players in Austin politics in the ’70s. Peck Young says Youngblood was afraid if there wasn’t Hispanic or African-American presence on the council, the city would be open to a federal lawsuit that might force single-member districts. So they came up with an unspoken rule that the Place 5 council was the “Hispanic seat” and Place 6 was the “African-American seat.” But the agreement wasn’t aimed at encouraging council diversity -- it was aimed at controlling that diversity. “You have minorities, but you don’t have minorities elected by minority voters,” Young said.

In a number of ways, the current fight recalls the earlier epic "Battle for Barton Springs" in 1991. This earlier citizen-led environmental rebellion also led to a grassroots petition effort that succeeded in forcing the issue of environmental reform onto the ballot. Then, as now, an innocent-sounding proposal was placed on the ballot as competition to try to kill the citizens' initiative. Despite the business community's opposition, the 1992 citizens' initiative won big, with the help of united environmentalist support. This led to a successful ordinance to protect the Edwards Aquifer, Austin's fragile recreational and groundwater supply aquifer.

San Antonio already has its own 10-1 system of city government in place, and it works to promote popular leaders of modest means. Having districts doesn't necessarily guarantee good government but it helps. San Antonio's Democratic Mayor Julian Castro was the keynote speaker at the recent Democratic Party convention in Charlotte NC.


The politicians' plan, Proposition 4, has a few problems

The 8-2-1 plan, Proposition 4 on the November ballot, is conspicuously less democratic than 10-1. It was put on the ballot with no signatures, and without much popular support. The photo of a racially diverse group of "supporters" featured on their website is a stock photo they bought.

The politicians' 8-2-1 plan has support from RECA, professional consultants, and political power brokers; it amounts to a full employment act for a handful of campaign consultants. One reason that the current City Council voted to put the politicians' plan on the ballot is the pressure brought about by political strategist David Butts, a top strategist in the 8-2-1 campaign, who makes his living largely from City Council and other local political races. The way Prop. 4 is written it would allow the council to draw and gerrymander the 8-2-1 districts in such a way as to keep their seats. The current City Council members live relatively close together, and without some creative design of the new districts, many would likely end up within the same districts.

The main Austin media have not been neutral. In July, the Austin Chronicle featured a story by news editor Michael King titled "Point Austin: The Usual Suspects; The argument over council districting takes a nasty turn." King's biased political coverage in this case elicited a strong rebuke from UT law professor and national expert on election law, Steve Bickerstaff. He had been a pro-bono adviser for 10-1 on its legality, but had remained otherwise neutral, declining to advocate for either ballot Proposition. Prof. Bickerstaff does believe in fair reporting, however, and the Chronicle spin was too much.

...the Chronicle story was catty, cynical, biased, and poorly reasoned -- unlike most articles written by Michael King. AGR has secured more than 33,000 voter signatures on its petition, the support of many different community organizations, and the recommendation of the Charter Revision Committee. Whether or not Mr. King or the Chronicle supports the group's 10-1 proposal, they should respect this outstanding achievement and laud the vision and hard work evidenced in this exercise of democratic rights.

Council Member Mike Martinez explained his vote in favor of putting this proposal (unchanged) on the ballot as a means of recognizing this group's achievement. Supporters of an 8-2-1 election system could have used a petition drive to show the degree of public support for their plan; they did not.

Also, I was surprised that the Chronicle, which has been so critical of the gerrymandering and self-interest shown in redistricting by the Texas Legislature, could be dismissive of an independent redistricting commission at the city level. Independent commissions have operated successfully in California at the state level and in a number of cities, such as San Diego and Minneapolis. They can take much of the self-interest and politics out of redistricting.

The Chronicle should be supporting the need for an independent commission in Austin as an essential part of any charter amendment changing from our at-large system. The Charter Revision Committee (13-2) politically endorsed creation of an independent commission. Many of the members of the City Council that the Chronicle identifies as preferring an 8-2-1 plan have voiced support of such a commission. Election district lines should not be drawn by the same politicians who seek election in those districts, or by committees appointed by such politicians.

It might be argued that as a halfway step in the direction of democratic district government, 8-2-1 is better than what we have now. However, its real impact, and the reason for the City Council putting it on the ballot very late in the game, is to act as a sort of a poison pill proposal. It was placed on the ballot in response to wide support for 10-1, with the hope of attracting enough votes away from the 10-1 plan to kill the latter.

The politician's plan, the 8-2-1 plan, would appear to have one important flaw. It invites a legal challenge since it seems to be incompatible with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Proposition 4 would be subject to legal challenge because Austin's African-American population -- which is about 7 percent of the city's total population -- has largely been forced out of its historic areas of concentration in East Austin over recent decades by a combination of gentrification and high property taxes.

This means that it will take a lot of districts of equal size, at least 10, to be able to draw one with sufficient African-American concentration to make it reasonably easy to win an election without outside support, particularly from the business community. With any fewer than 10 districts, according to recent census data, no contiguous district can be drawn that would give Austin's remaining African-American population a legally defensible ability to elect their own representatives.


Bottom Line: Reasons to support Proposition 3 in the November 2012 Austin election, 10-1, the People's plan:

1. Citizen Districts: The 10-1 plan would establish a Citizen Redistricting Commission which would exclude city politicians, lobbyists, and consultants. The record shows that political insiders tend to draw gerrymandered district maps that favor their own interests.
2. The 10-1 plan makes all neighborhoods equal, and ends the current concentration of power in a small part of Austin.
3. Every vote becomes more important. The more districts, the more the candidate’s merit and local appeal become important.
4. It is supported by 29 major organizations and 33,000 petition signatures gathered following a year-and-a-half-long transparent process (fully reported in The Austin Bulldog).
5. At least 10 districts are required for a geographic representation system to be legally defensible for Austin under the Voting Rights Act.
6. The 10-1 plan ends Austin’s racist “gentleman’s agreement” because minorities can best choose their own representatives.

Reasons to oppose Proposition 4, the 8-2-1 Politician's plan

1. Lacking the safeguards in the 10-1 plan, the 8-2-1 plan allows Austin districts to be gerrymandered by politicians, lobbyists, and consultants.
2. The two at-large districts retain the unequal legacy of the four privileged ZIP codes.
3. Having only eight districts denies African-Americans an opportunity district, meaning it will very likely be challenged in court.
4. The mayor and the two at-large council seats will tend to remain controlled by the special interests.
5. It perpetuates the “gentleman’s agreement” by which African-American and Hispanic seats can be chosen by power brokers.
6. As a ploy to defeat the people's plan, the 8-2-1 plan was put on the ballot by politicians with very little grassroots citizen input, even though the same plan failed by a wide margin 10 years ago.

For those who wish to follow the populist fight for Austin district representation in depth, to understand how we got to this point of decision over the past year and a half, the outstanding source is veteran investigative reporter Ken Martin's pro-bono, online Austin political journal, The Austin Bulldog. There are several dozen Bulldog stories on the citizen meetings that led to the People's 10-1 district representation plan, dating back to March 2011, linked here.

By contrast, Austin's daily newspaper, the Austin American-Statesman and Austin's sporadically liberal alternative weekly, The Austin Chronicle, have offered sparse and politically slanted coverage of the Austin district issue.

[Roger Baker is a long time transportation-oriented environmental activist, an amateur energy-oriented economist, an amateur scientist and science writer, and a founding member of and an advisor to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil-USA. He is active in the Green Party and the ACLU, and is a director of the Save Our Springs Association and the Save Barton Creek Association in Austin. Mostly he enjoys being an irreverent policy wonk and writing irreverent wonkish articles for The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Roger Baker on The Rag Blog.]

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Judge Wiliam Wayne Justice : Hispanics and The Right to Vote

Top, Austin polling place. Photo by T hom / Flickr. Below, Judge William Wayne Justice. Photo from Dallas Morning News.
Judge Justice and single member districts:
Bringing voting power to all Texans

By George Korbel / The Rag Blog / October 27, 2009

[Judge William Wayne Justice was a Texas federal district judge who died at age 89 on Oct. 13, 2009, in Austin. His rulings on landmark class-action suits led to school integration in Texas, as well as sweeping prison reform, the education of undocumented immigrants and much more. David Richards wrote of his legacy in The Rag Blog. Attorney George Korbel now provides a lawyerly take on Judge Justice’s profound effect on voting rights in Texas.]

I came to Texas in late 1971. Since that time I have usually represented Hispanic plaintiffs. Oscar Mauzy had driven up to Tyler to file the case attacking the 1971 House and State Senate redistricting. He then turned it over to David Richards. There was a concerted effort to remove Wayne Justice as the organizing judge. He hung tough and ended up on the panel.

His opinion in Graves v. Barnes affirmed as White v Regester was the first case in which the Supreme Court affirmed a finding of discrimination as a result of at-large elections. Four year later the findings in Graves/White formed the basis for the extension of the special provisions of the Federal Voting Rights Act to Texas. The Judge chronicled the decades of discrimination against Hispanics and litigation to redress it. And he explained how it all impacted the electoral process.

The litigation flowing from the Supreme Court affirmance of his Graves opinion sped up change in Texas. In 1971, all Texas cities and school districts elected their boards of trustees and councils at large which resulted in minimal Hispanic and virtually no African American representation. By the end of the decade, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, Waco and a host of other cities and school districts were forced into single member districts as a result of Graves/White and the Federal Voting Rights Act.

Now virtually all of the urban areas in Texas, along with the rest of the South with the exception of Austin, elect by single member districts. Every person from every one of these jurisdictions has example after example of what changes were caused by geographic representation.

In San Antonio, every time it rained there were floods. Property was destroyed and people inevitably drowned. Virtually the first effort of the single member district city council was drainage and we have no floods now. The mother of the current mayor of San Antonio was one of the plaintiffs in the single member litigation. Such a simple concept as fair elections not only improved social and economic conditions but provided countless role models for the minority, the poor and the dispirited.

In a suit filed by David Richards, the judge issued first injunction enforcing Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Texas was going to purge all of the registered voters and start over from scratch in 1975. This would have been a major setback to minority voting. Fully eight million stamped sealed letters to all of our registered voters were stopped at the last moment.

Judge Justice’s impact on the expanded governmental use of the Spanish Language was likewise significant if less appreciated. His US v. Texas was a grand desegregation suit involving the entire state. An offshoot of that case was his opinion in the Del Rio school case tried by Warren Burnett in the early 1970s circa Graves/White. Judge Justice not only desegregated the schools but ordered bilingual education. Within a few years in one form or another it was common, controversial but common.

The decision in the Del Rio school case together with the Graves findings relating to problems of non-English speaking voters formed a significant part of the legislative history which resulted in the language provisions of the 1975 Voting Rights Act. Literally overnight, all election documents had to be translated into Spanish. People were allowed to vote in a language that only years earlier they had been punished for speaking in school. The success of elections in turn eventually led to the translation of virtually all forms that people have to fill out to obtain benefits from the state.

So many children have benefited from learning in Spanish. So many elections have been won and the benefits of government shared as a result. Though I was not all that close to him, some years ago I had a long chat with him at a reception in his honor in Del Rio where he often sat after moving to Austin. The questions he asked showed how interested he was in the language issues and the types of changes that had come about from single member districts. I ticked off a laundry list of the changes that I had seen. Finally I told him, “Judge, you started all of that.”

[George Korbel is a prominent attorney who specializes in voting rights issues. His offices are in San Antonio.]

Also see David Richards : The Judge Who Brought Justice to Texas by David Richards / The Rag Blog / October 22, 2009

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Texas Republican to Asian-Americans : Please Simplify Your Names

Texas Rep. Betty Brown, R-Terrell, made the remark during House testimony on Tuesday. Photo from the Houston Chronicle.

Here's a classic Texas story! It was published by the Houston Chronicle and is being circulated by the Huffington Post. -- Jeff Jones / The Rag Blog

Lawmaker defends comment on Asians
Call for voters to simplify their names not racially motivated

By R.G. Ratcliffe / April 9, 2009

AUSTIN — A North Texas legislator during House testimony on voter identification legislation said Asian-descent voters should adopt names that are “easier for Americans to deal with.”

The comments caused the Texas Democratic Party on Wednesday to demand an apology from state Rep. Betty Brown, R-Terrell. But a spokesman for Brown said her comments were only an attempt to overcome problems with identifying Asian names for voting purposes.

The exchange occurred late Tuesday as the House Elections Committee heard testimony from Ramey Ko, a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans.

Ko told the committee that people of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent often have problems voting and other forms of identification because they may have a legal transliterated name and then a common English name that is used on their driver’s license on school registrations.

Easier for voting?

Brown suggested that Asian-Americans should find a way to make their names more accessible.

“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?” Brown said.

Brown later told Ko: “Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?”

Democratic Chairman Boyd Richie said Republicans are trying to suppress votes with a partisan identification bill and said Brown “is adding insult to injury with her disrespectful comments.”

Brown spokesman Jordan Berry said Brown was not making a racially motivated comment but was trying to resolve an identification problem.

Berry said Democrats are trying to blow Brown’s comments out of proportion because polls show most voters support requiring identification for voting. Berry said the Democrats are using racial rhetoric to inflame partisan feelings against the bill.

“They want this to just be about race,” Berry said.

Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle

Source / Houston Chronicle

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