[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 62 (Tuesday, April 28, 2015)]
[House]
[Pages H2477-H2478]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
VOTING RIGHTS AMENDMENT ACT
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from
Maryland (Mr. Hoyer) for 5 minutes.
Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, when the Supreme Court ruled in 2013 to
invalidate the preclearance formula in the original Voting Rights Act,
it issued a challenge to Congress to pass an updated one. That is a
challenge Congress must accept. Until Congress acts, millions will
continue to face barriers at the ballot box.
On April 18, The New York Times editorial board highlighted the
disturbing and flawed argument that preclearance is no longer
necessary. Obviously, the Congress of the United States found
otherwise.
The editorial stated: ``This process . . . stopped hundreds of
discriminatory new laws from taking effect, and deterred lawmakers from
introducing countless more.''
The process to which they were referring was the preclearance process
that the Supreme Court threw out. The editors cited a new study that
analyzed more than 4,000 rights cases.
They write again: ``The study provides the most wide-ranging
empirical evidence yet that Congress was amply justified in finding
that voting discrimination remains concentrated in the covered States
and regions.''
When we reauthorized the Voting Rights Act in 2006, Mr. Speaker, we
did so with an overwhelming vote of 390-33 in the House. In the Senate,
Mr. Speaker, it was 98-0. There was no confusion, there was no doubt in
the minds of the Congress of the United States, and that bill was
signed by President George Bush. It was an overwhelmingly bipartisan
conclusion that preclearance was still necessary some 45 years after
the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
This has traditionally been an issue that brings Democrats and
Republicans together, and I am proud to have cosponsored a bipartisan
compromise bill sponsored by Republican former chairman of the
Committee on the Judiciary, Jim Sensenbrenner, who was the sponsor and
chairman of the committee when the reauthorization was effected in
2006.
The bill that we have introduced, called the Voting Rights Amendments
Act, with Republican former chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary,
Jim Sensenbrenner, and Ranking Member John Conyers, as well as John
Lewis--great hero of the civil rights movement--that would answer the
Supreme Court with an updated preclearance formula, as they suggested.
In fact, in the past 2 years since the Court's ruling, we have seen a
resurgence of efforts to limit when and where minorities can vote.
The editorial goes on to say, Mr. Speaker: ``Voting discrimination no
longer takes the form of literacy tests and poll taxes. Instead, it is
embodied in voter-ID laws, the closing of polling places in minority
neighborhoods, the elimination of early-voting days and hours, and much
more.''
Mr. Speaker, I hope the House will take up a bill to restore the
Voting Rights Act without delay and crack down on these discriminatory
practices that only serve to weaken our democracy by excluding millions
of voices that deserve to be heard.
2015 is the 50-year anniversary of the passing and signing of the
Voting Rights Act. That act was achieved only after some died, many
bled, and a large number participated in the march from Selma to
Montgomery.
That galvanized American public opinion and led the Congress to pass
one of the most significant civil rights and democratic rights bills of
its history. Congress has the responsibility to act and act now.
As I close, Mr. Speaker, let me remind the Members of the Congress
that I discussed this with the majority leader. The majority leader
indicated that we would have discussions about bringing Voting Rights
Act to the floor, as did I and Mr. Cantor, his predecessor as majority
leader.
I look forward to those discussions to facilitate and to speed the
bringing to the floor of the bipartisan restoration of the protections
in the Voting Rights Act amendments.
Mr. Speaker, I will insert into the Record the editorial reference.
[From the New York Times, Apr. 18, 2015]
Voting Rights, by the Numbers
When the Supreme Court struck down the heart of the Voting
Rights Act in 2013, its main argument was that the law was
outdated.
[[Page H2478]]
Discrimination against minority voters may have been
pervasive in the 1960s when the law was passed, Chief Justice
John Roberts Jr. wrote, but ``nearly 50 years later, things
have changed dramatically.'' In this simplistic account, the
law was still punishing states and local governments for sins
they supposedly stopped committing years ago.
The chief justice's destructive cure for this was to throw
out the formula Congress devised in 1965 that required all or
parts of 16 states with long histories of overt racial
discrimination in voting, most in the South, to get approval
from the federal government for any proposed change to their
voting laws. This process, known as preclearance, stopped
hundreds of discriminatory new laws from taking effect, and
deterred lawmakers from introducing countless more.
But Chief Justice Roberts, writing for a 5-4 majority,
invalidated the formula because ``today's statistics tell an
entirely different story.''
Well, do they? A comprehensive new study by a historian of
the Voting Rights Act provides a fresh trove of empirical
evidence to refute that assertion. The study by J. Morgan
Kousser, a professor of history and social science at the
California Institute of Technology, examines more than 4,100
voting-rights cases, Justice Department inquiries,
settlements and changes to laws in response to the threat of
lawsuits around the country where the final result favored
minority voters.
It found that from 1957 until 2013, more than 90 percent of
these legal ``events'' occurred in jurisdictions that were
required to preclear their voting changes. The study also
provides evidence that the number of successful voting-rights
suits has gone down in recent years, not because there is
less discrimination, but because several Supreme Court
decisions have made them harder to win.
Mr. Kousser acknowledges that the law's formula, created
without the benefit of years of data, was a ``blunt tool''
that focused on voter turnout and clearly discriminatory
practices like literacy tests. Still, he says, the statistics
show that for almost a half century it ``succeeded in
accurately homing in on the counties where the vast majority
of violations would take place.''
Members of Congress had seen some of this data in 2006
when, by a near-unanimous vote, they reauthorized the Voting
Rights Act for 25 years. In fact, the legislative record
contained more than 15,000 pages of evidence documenting the
continuation of ever-evolving racially discriminatory voting
practices, particularly in the areas covered by the
preclearance requirement.
But the Roberts opinion showed no interest in actual data.
Nor did it seem to matter that the law was already adapting
to current conditions: Every one of the more than 200
jurisdictions that asked to be removed from the preclearance
list was successful, because each showed it was not
discriminating.
Instead, the court said the coverage formula had to be
struck down because it failed to target precisely all areas
with voting rights violations in the country.
Mr. Kousser's study does not solve this problem, in part
because there is no easy way to compare discrimination in
places that are under a federal microscope with those that
are not. But the study provides the most wide-ranging
empirical evidence yet that Congress was amply justified in
finding that voting discrimination remains concentrated in
the covered states and regions. In other words, the tactics
may have changed, but the story remains largely the same.
Voting discrimination no longer takes the form of literacy
tests and poll taxes. Instead, it is embodied in voter-ID
laws, the closing of polling places in minority
neighborhoods, the elimination of early-voting days and
hours, and much more.
The Supreme Court suggested that Congress could fix the law
by updating the coverage formula to more closely reflect
where violations are occurring today--and a bipartisan bill
introduced in 2014 and reintroduced this year has done just
that. So far it has gone nowhere because most Republicans
oppose it. Even if it were to pass, there is no guarantee it
would survive before a Supreme Court that is highly skeptical
of any race-conscious efforts to reduce discrimination.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department and private groups are
doing what they can to combat the flood of new discriminatory
laws with the surviving provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
But without preclearance requirements for places with the
worst records on racial discrimination, they will always be a
few steps behind.
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