Disenfranchisement Ahead
By Zachary Roth has a terrific piece about the effects of the Roberts Court’s abominable decision gutting the Voting Rights Act. Here’s exactly how Republicans want to exercise the Equal Majestic Sovereign Dignitude of the States:
Alleging mismanagement and cronyism stemming from the stadium project, a group of white conservatives has used a series of audacious political and legal maneuvers to try to seize control of the board from its black majority. The attempted power grab is just one flash-point in a bitter and racially-charged feud over control of the school board.
The local courts, and many white residents of Beaumont, have made it easy for the conservatives. And they have been helped by developments more than 1,000 miles away in Washington.
In June, the Supreme Court badly weakened the 1965 Voting Rights Act which had been signed into law to make places like Beaumont—places that often fly under the national radar—more equal. And the law worked. For decades, blacks and whites served side by side on the school board and city council, sharing power in a way that would have been unthinkable in the not-so-distant days when blacks were effectively barred from the political process.
The law also protected those important gains. Twice in the last year, the Justice Department cited it to stymie the conservative campaign to take control of Beaumont’s school board. But the Supreme Court ruled this summer that times had changed and special protections for racial minorities were no longer needed.
With that roadblock lifted, the conservative battle to remove the board’s black majority has forged ahead. Whatever the outcome, the no-holds-barred struggle to control a provincial southeast Texas school board is shaping up as a test of something deeper: whether communities once plagued by the ugly rule of Jim Crow have truly changed, or if the Voting Rights Act was the check needed even today.
Definitely read the whole thing. Personally, I preferred the Constitution that still had Section 2 of the 15th Amendment in it to the unilaterally amended version of the five disenfranchisement-supporting reactionaries of the Roberts Court.