Just three days before this July Fourth, I had tears in my eyes when I heard that our U.S. Supreme Court justices, in analyzing two Arizona voter restrictions in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, continued voter suppression against Blacks and other minorities.
Barriers to voting — they have existed since we became a country. Only the white man with property was given the right to vote when our country was founded. These barriers were seen until 1965 for Blacks, especially in the Deep South and Texas in the forms of terroristic threatening, beatings, water hosing, dog attacks, burning churches and homes, lynchings and death.
It was white supremacy at its “finest.”
President Lyndon Johnson knew all of this since he grew up in Texas. As a “master of the Senate,” he was able to finally break the Southern legislative gamesmanship that had successfully blocked every attempt at civil rights legislation since the New Deal and pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. LBJ and the Rev. Martin Luther King were at the helm of the most monumental forward movement in race relations in American history.
But in 2013, Shelby County v. Holder broke America by gutting Section 5 of the Voters Rights Act: “Section 5 made it possible for the U.S. Department of Justice to stop discriminatory voter laws before they went into effect.” After Shelby, Republicans in states across the country, such as Arizona, then passed racist laws aimed at stopping Blacks and other people of color from voting.
This Brnovich decision guts Section 2. “Section 2 makes it possible to stop a discriminatory law after it’s been proven to be discriminatory. And so, what this completes is the gutting of the most important piece of democracy legislation created in our country,” noted Ben Jealous, president of People for the American Way.
Now with Brnovich, even an associate attorney general in the civil rights division of the U.S. Justice Department — which filed a federal lawsuit against Georgia for a sweeping voter suppression law against Black voters, adds new voter ID requirement and shortens the window for absentee voting — will not be able to prevail.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was sacred to me as one who had fought tirelessly for voting rights in New Orleans. This law has fostered democracy for over 56 years.
I have often thought that if my father’s racist generation would die off and then mine, and with the younger ones born from the 1970s onward, we would have racial equality, even in New Orleans. But the reality appears not to be so.
In Hawaii we have a different story, fortunately. Our state has a strong history of adopting pro-voting reforms and is now a “beacon of light for other states … during this time of assault on the very foundations of our democracy,” noted Sandy Ma, executive director of Common Cause Hawaii, in a March commentary. On June 28, Act 126 became law, when Gov. David Ige signed Senate Bill 159. Ensuring our access to the ballot, Hawaii now has automatic voter registration, requiring any person who is eligible to vote and applies for a driver’s license or identification card to be automatically registered to vote unless the applicant affirmatively declines.
Nationally, options at this time are either to enlarge the Supreme Court to 13 justices and/or to have Congress pass both the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act to protect voting rights for Blacks and our democracy, all while having Joe Biden become the FDR of the 21st century. Both bills are moving and there’s every reason to be hopeful that both will be passed in this Congress, if U.S. Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema find the courage to stand up for democracy.
Elizabeth Jubin Fujiwara is a Honolulu civil rights attorney, arbitrator and mediator.
