They
might as well have burned a cross on Dr. King's grave. The Jim Crow
majority on the Supreme Court just took away the vote of millions of
Hispanic and African--American voters by wiping away Section 4 of the
Voting Rights Act of 1965.
I'm so angry, so distraught by this, that I've asked my foundation to release my film, Election Files, for free. This is a no-BS, no charge download of my series of investigative reports for BBC Television and Rolling Stone.
Furthermore, I'm directing the Palast Investigative Team to drop
all other work for a "round-the-clock investigation of the Theft of 2014
and 2016 elections that the Supreme Court's ruling sets in motion. Help us, join us.
When I say "millions" of voters of color will lose their ballots, I'm not kidding. Let's add it up.
Last year, the GOP Secretary of State of Florida Ken Detzner tried to
purge 180,000 Americans, mostly Hispanic Democrats, from the voter
rolls. He was attempting to break Katherine Harris' record.
Detzner claimed that all these Brown folk were illegal "aliens."
But Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act requires that 16 states with a
bad history of blocking Black and Brown voters must "pre-clear" with the
US Justice Department any messing around with voter rolls or voting
rules. And so Section 4 stopped Detzner from the racist Brown-out.
I'll admit there were illegal aliens on Florida's voter rolls -- two of them. Let me repeat that: TWO aliens -- One a US Marine serving in Iraq (not yet a citizen); the other an Austrian who registered as a Republican.
We can go from state to state in Dixie and see variations of the
Florida purge game. It quickly adds up to millions of voters at risk.
Yet the 5-to-4 Court majority ruled, against all evidence, that,
"Blatantly discriminatory evasions [of minority voting rights] are
rare." Since there are no more racially bent voting games, the
right-wing Robed Ones conclude there's no more reason for
"pre-clearance."
Whom do they think they're fooling? The Court itself, just
last week, ruled that Arizona's law requiring the showing of citizenship
papers was an unconstitutional attack on Hispanic voters. Well, Arizona's a Section 4 state.
You'll love this line from the Ku Klux Kourt majority. They wrote that
the "coverage" of Section 4 applies to states where racially bent
voting systems are now "eradicated practices."
"Eradicated?" I
assume they didn't see the lines of Black folk in Florida last
November. That was the result of the deliberate reducing of the number
of polling places and early voting hours in minority areas. Indeed, if
the Justice Department, wielding Section 4, hadn't blocked Florida from
half its ballot-box trickery, Obama would have lost that state's
electoral votes.
And that's really what's going on here: The problem is not that the
Court majority is racist. They're worse: they're Republicans.
We've had Republicans, like the great Earl Warren, who put on the robes and take off their party buttons.
But this crew, beginning with Bush v. Gore, is viciously
partisan. They note that, "minority candidates hold office at
unprecedented levels." And the Republican Supremes mean to put an end
to that. See "Obama" and "Florida" above.
And when they say "minority" they mean "Democrat."
Because that's the difference between 1965 and today. When the law was
first enacted, based on the personal pleas of Martin Luther King,
African-Americans were blocked by politicians who did not like the color
of their skin.
But today, it's the color of the ballot of minorities -- overwhelmingly Democratic Blue--which is the issue.
Pre-clearance goes WAY north of the Confederacy to Alaska where
Alaska's Natives are often frozen out of the voting system--and West to
California.
In the Golden State, an astonishing 40% of voter registration forms
were rejected by the Republican Secretary of State on cockamamie
clerical grounds. When civil rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy and I
investigated, we learned that the reject pile was overwhelmingly Chicano
and Asian--and overwhelmingly Democratic.
How? Jim Crown ain't gone, he's moved into cyberspace. The new trick
is lynching by laptop: removing voters, as was done in Florida and
Arizona (and a dozen other states), by using poisoned databases to pick
out "illegal" and "felon" and "inactive" voters--who all happen to be of
the Hispanic or African-American persuasion. The GOP, for all the tears
of its consultants, knows it can't rock these votes, so they block
these votes.
Despite the racial stench of today's viciously anti-democratic ruling,
the GOP majority knew they were "handicapping" the next Presidential run
by a good six million votes. (That's the calculation that RFK and I
can up with for the racially-bent vote loss in 2004--and the GOP will
pick up at least that in the next run.)
And the Court knew full well that their ruling today was the same as
stuffing several hundred thousand GOP Red votes into the ballot boxes
for the 2014 Congressional races.
The Republican court knows that to swipe 2016, they had to replace the
Voting Rights Act with a revival of the Katherine Harris act.
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