Washington, DC–(ENEWSPF)–November 18, 2016
Here’s how Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general responded to the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. Jeff Sessions said, basically, sure, voting rights oversight was needed in the past, but the decision “was good news, I think, for the South, in that [there was] not sufficient evidence to justify treating them disproportionately than say Philadelphia or Boston or Los Angeles or Chicago.” After all, Sessions said:
But now if you go to Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, people aren’t being denied the vote because of the color of their skin.”
That might have a little something to do with the law that prevented those states from denying people the vote because of the color of their skin, which means Sessions could not reasonably give those states credit for allowing black people to vote.
And what do you know! We’ve seen what’s happened since. In North Carolina, Republicans passed voter ID laws that a federal appeals court said “target African Americans with almost surgical precision,” and a federal district judge described subsequent actions against black voters as being “like something that was put together in 1901.”
But I don’t hear Sessions calling real loudly for the VRA to be strengthened now that we’ve seen that gutting it did in fact cause people to be denied the vote because of the color of their skin.
Source: http://dailykos.com
