One hundred fifty years after Gettysburg and nearly 50 years after the March on Washington, the forces of reaction are feeling empowered by the 5-4 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder. Fred Grimm writes in the Miami Herald that Florida might be the next Rethuglican-dominated state to try some minority voter suppression shenanigans again:
Just two hours after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act last week, Texas celebrated by reinstating a discredited voter ID law, designed to tamp down those damn nuisance minority voters. Mississippi was not far behind.It's now clear that voting rights and marriage equality are the civil rights struggles of our time. Those struggles will be waged on the national, state and local levels, and over time we should expect defeats as well as victories. Progressives have to be determined to fight a long battle with these reactionaries whose philosophical forbears lined up against justice and equality at Little Round Top, Seminary Ridge, Selma and Montgomery.
Florida, I expect, will be more subtle. The politics hereabouts, in an evenly divided state, are a bit more delicate.
Texas was among a slew of states, including Florida, that leading up to the 2012 election passed clever new laws designed to diminish voter turnout. [snip]
But you’ve got to worry, with the Voting Rights Acts crippled, with the good ol’ boys in Texas and elsewhere in the Confederacy raring to push another round of election “reforms,” that the gang in Tallahassee might get inspired to come up with new and novel ways to limit the turnout of certain demographics.
Odd, isn’t it, how our governor and legislative leadership defend gun rights with such fervor, based on a single, ambiguous passage in the Constitution. Meanwhile, the phrase “right to vote” shows up in the 14th, 15th, 19th, 24th and 26th Amendments. You’d think our legislators might defend that right to vote with as much enthusiasm as they champion our sacred right to shoot.
