Prometheus 6

I just keep finding more and more reasons to stay the hell out of Texas. 

Primed for a Voting Rights Act overhaul
A Texas lawsuit seeks to show that '60s-era oversight is no longer neeeded.
By Edward Blum
September 15, 2007 

ON MONDAY, A THREE-JUDGE PANEL of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is scheduled to hear arguments in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 vs. Alberto R. Gonzales. It sounds like a ho-hum case, but a great deal is riding on this lawsuit. The outcome could decide the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act and open the way to ending racial gerrymandering and other political distortions that no longer make good sense or good policy.

When it was passed in 1965, the Voting Rights Act was crafted to achieve one critical objective: ending the scandalous Jim Crow barriers to voting faced by blacks in Southern jurisdictions. The law banned literacy tests, provided federal election registrars and criminalized harassment of black voters. Section 5 was included in the statute as a temporary insurance policy to prevent new and clever ways for Southern jurisdictions to disenfranchise blacks.

Today, Section 5 -- which was set to expire in 1970 but has been reauthorized four times, most recently in 2006 -- affects nine states and counties in seven others (including four in California -- Kings, Merced, Monterey and Yuba), places where minorities once had extremely low voter registration and election participation rates.

It forbids these states and counties -- and every entity in them that holds government elections -- from enacting any changes to voting procedures without the consent of either the U.S. attorney general or the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Whether it be moving a polling location across the street or congressional redistricting, it must be preapproved.

At issue in the Northwest Austin case is whether the municipal utility district -- also known as a "MUD," which levies taxes and is considered a "political subdivision" under the Voting Rights Act -- can seek a "bailout" from Section 5.

The "pre-clearance" requirement of Section 5 is unprecedented. Neither before nor since has Congress passed a statute requiring a state or one of its sub-jurisdictions to seek permission from the federal government before local election laws or rules can go into effect. This provision was, and still is, a direct assault on our nation's constitutional system of federalism. Back in the mid-1960s, it may have made sense to include it in the original law -- given the long, ugly history of the South -- but today it is no longer justified.