Bernie Sanders: On the 50th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act

Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders wrote this to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. In it, Bernie identifies how voting rights are being systematically stripped from Americans, jeopardizing the very foundation of our democracy. But that is not all. He also denounces the legalized bribery resulting from the Citizens United ruling. Bernie does not stop there; he outlines his proposals for restoring voting rights to all.

Bernie wrote:  

Thursday, August 6 marks the 50-year anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This landmark piece of legislation was a milestone in the fight for civil rights and a great step forward in the advancement of our democracy. This important and popular law passed the House and Senate with the support of large majorities from both parties.

Unfortunately, some people would rather increase the power of the privileged few than defend voting rights. Right-wing groups like the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have been promoting legislative proposals which make it harder for minorities to register and vote. Sadly, those proposals have had some success at the state level.

Then there’s the Supreme Court. The Court’s conservative majority struck a blow against democracy in 2010 with its Citizens United decision. In 2013 it struck another blow, when it overturned a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. That made it very difficult to step in and enforce voters’ rights under the Act.

It is an embarrassment that the Republican-led Congress, in order to preserve its majorities, has refused to consider legislation to repair that damage to the Voting Rights Act and will not act to fix our broken voting system.

We are facing a two-pronged attack on our democracy — unlimited money poured into the political process, paired with the systematic suppression of the vote.

These are two sides of the same coin.

Make no mistake: the billionaire class does not want Americans to vote. Billions of dollars are being funneled into our elections in a form of legalized bribery, even as American voters — especially minority voters — are being discouraged from voting. It is no wonder that government no longer works for ordinary Americans.

There is much more we must do to protect minority voters. In the shameful days of open segregation, “literacy” laws were used to suppress minority voting. Today, through other laws and actions — such as requiring voters to show photo ID, discriminatory drawing of Congressional districts, not allowing early registration or voting, and purging voter rolls — states are taking steps which have a similar effect.

The patterns are unmistakable. An MIT paper found that, nationally, African Americans waited twice as long to vote as whites. Wait times of as long as six or seven hours have been reported in some minority precincts, especially in “swing” states like Ohio and Florida.

This should offend the conscience of every American.

The fight for minority voting rights is a fight for justice. It is also inseparable from the struggle for democracy itself. When the votes of minorities are suppressed, it becomes easier for politicians who represent billionaires and corporations to win and hold elected office.

What can we do? Congress must restore the Voting Rights Act’s “pre-clearance” provision, which extended protections to minority voters in states where they were clearly needed. Then we must expand the Act’s scope so that every American, regardless of skin color or national origin, is able to vote freely.

I have introduced legislation to make Election Day a national holiday, but that’s just a start. We must make early voting an option for voters who work or study and need the flexibility to vote on evenings or weekends. We must make no-fault absentee ballots an option for all Americans.

Every American over 18 must be registered to vote automatically, so that students and working people can make their voices heard at the ballot box. We must put an end to discriminatory laws and the purging of minority-community names from voting rolls.

We need to make sure that there are sufficient polling places and poll workers to prevent long lines from forming at the polls anywhere. We need to fight dishonest practices that keep people from voting through deception or fear. We need to restore voting rights to people who have served their debt to society.

We must repeal Citizens United and take the political process back from the billionaire class. We must restore the Voting Rights Act and protect voters from attempts to disenfranchise them before the elections take place.

Above all, we need to remember the price that was paid for the right to vote. The Voting Rights Act was one of the great victories of the civil rights movement. Now, as then, change comes when the people demand it — in the voting booth, and on the streets in peaceful demonstrations. We must remind ourselves of what’s been achieved in the past, and resolve to do equally great things in the future.

We must remember that the struggle for our rights is not the struggle of a day, or a year, or a generation. It is the struggle of a lifetime, and one that must be fought by every generation. Our time to fight is now.

Here is a peek at what's on RedEye's radar #AmnestyforFerguson

 

  US, Ukraine or Middle East?  #Ferguson images made it hard to tell.

Only in America can a Lawyers bid to become Americas top Civil Rights attorney fails because he supported Civil Rights.  The fact he is black probably didn't help either.

Debo Adegbile, who previously served as the acting head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, is one of the nation’s top civil rights attorneys. He’s also a leading expert on voting rights who twice defended the Voting Rights Act before the Supreme Court — the first time successfully. He was, in other words, an ideal candidate to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division — the division which, among other things, oversees the federal government’s voting rights work in an era where conservative state lawmakers are currently waging a widespread campaign to prevent demographic groups that tend to vote for Democrats from casting a ballot.

Question:  Is the media cry, to hang them high, really about domesticviolence, or is it about racism. 

Why is the NFL under scrutiny, when their domestic violence statistics are better than the norm? Why are there no white athletes, who are the focus of media calls for punishment, and impoverishment?

Let's talk about Adrian Peterson so we won't have to talk about real child abuse.

 A young black man with a towering Afro, Hunt stood out in this overwhelmingly white city about 30 minutes south of Salt Lake City. So much so that just moments before officers killed him in a barrage of gunfire on Sept. 10, passersby pulled out their cell phones and snapped photos of the 22-year-old with the big hair, bright red shirt and toy sword slung over his shoulder.

White America's drug problem is getting worse, but they aren't being thrown in prison for it.

 White people have a painkiller problem. According to new data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, painkiller overdoses accounted for almost 17,000 deaths in 2011. The majority of deaths were among whites, at a rate that’s growing faster than for any other racial group.

What's that you say?  Ferguson Plan for police oversight is derided as "insulting"?  I'm shocked!  Shocked I tell you!  NOT.

 The proposal does not mention whether the board would be empowered to investigate citizen complaints against officers, given resources to conduct independent investigations. The word "review" is not mentioned in the proposal other than to describe the committee as a "review board."

#BlackLivesMatter
#racism

GOP Voter Purges Undermine American Democracy

President Obama recently remarked at the National Action Network Convention that "Justice requires the right to vote."
So it behooves us to take a closer look at just one state that has played a pivotal role in the outcome of our national elections.
Of course, for the November 2014 elections, we're only looking at a non-Presidential election. But that election is pivotal to the timeline that our President has available to to implement meaningful change for all Americans. Unless, of course, you're a teabagger who believes that somehow, someway, President Obama will finagle a third term, however cloaked in the specious suggestion, down-low, that it is "political satire." That's Rand Paul's idea of humor: "suggest, mislead, chuckle. You fools." He published thAT red herring on his website. Sure hope his minions recognize they are being played for fools right up front, if they don't read the "fine print" at the bottom of the article.
But I digress. The point of this post is to look at what is happening in just one state, one critical state, in the upcoming "off-election" (meaning non-Presidential election year) and why this upcoming 2014 election is so important. The election results of this state dashed the Gore presidency, plunging our nation into two long wars for oil and an economic catastrophe. Florida 2000.
Under the guise of removing "non-citizens" from the Florida voting rolls, Governor Rick Scott and his appointed Secretary of State Rick Detzner have removed hundreds of voters from the rolls despite the fact that the national database used to cross-check voter identities is "not current enough for accuracy or reliability." Never mind doing it right, just do it, because the GOP doesn't care about accuracy - the GOP's goal is disenfranchising voters.
The targets of voter suppression tactics are those who the GOP calculates will vote Democratic: college students, disabled, people of color, and low-income voters. Indeed, the former Republican Party of Florida Chairman Jim Greer said: "'The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates,' Greer told The Post. 'It’s done for one reason and one reason only....'We've got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us,’ Greer said he was told by those staffers and consultants.'"

The GOP is just reading the numbers which show that most early voters vote Democratic. "In 2008 Democrats, especially African-Americans, turned out in unprecedented numbers for President Barack Obama, many of them casting ballots during 14 early voting days. In Palm Beach County, 61.2 percent of all early voting ballots were cast by Democrats that year, compared with 18.7 percent by Republicans."
Among the multiple tactics used to suppress voters are: prosecution for voter fraud (which has been shown to be practically non-existent); registration restrictions; limiting early voting; residency restrictions; and, voting ID laws. Our former first black president, Bill Clinton, noted that putting photos on Social Security cards would represent "a way forward that eliminates error" without having to “paralyze and divide a country with significant challenges.” According to the Brennan Center for Justice, as many as 11% of eligible voters do not have government issued photo ID.
In the vanguard of voter suppression is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), who ghostwrites state legislative bills, then sends them to state legislators for introduction and passage. Here's one example crafted to disenfranchise non-drivers, low-income, minority, elderly and students, for whom the state of Florida is currently blocking the use of a college union as a polling place, according to Senator Bill Nelson.
ALEC is funded through corporations, those very corporations where we spend our money. Using the Color of Change letter, you can tell CEOs to stop funding an organization determined to undermine Americans' voting rights.
As President Obama reminded us in 2012: "As citizens, we understand that America is not about what can be done for us. It’s about what can be done by us, together — through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. That’s what we believe."