President Obama used Thursday’s 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act to push for legislation updating the seminal law in his weekly radio address Saturday.
For “too long, too many of our fellow citizens were denied that right, simply because of the color of their skin,” Obama said, referring to the Jim Crow laws that prevented blacks from voting and led thousands to march across the South, launching the Civil Rights movement.
“The Voting Rights Act broke down legal barriers that stood between millions of African-Americans and their constitutional right to cast ballot,” Obama said. “It was, and still is, one of the greatest victories in our country’s struggle for civil rights.”
“Fifty years after the Voting Rights Act, there are still too many barriers to vote, and too many people trying to erect new ones,” Obama continued. “We’ve seen laws that roll back early voting, force people to jump through hoops to cast a ballot or lead to legitimate voters being improperly purged from the rolls. Over the years, we have seen provisions specifically designed to make it harder for some of our fellow citizens to vote.
“In a democracy like ours, with a history like ours, that’s a disgrace,” he said, adding that is why he’s calling on Congress to pass legislation ensuring equal access to the polls.
At least two major bills addressing the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision striking down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act are pending in Congress.
Last Congress, a bipartisan group led by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., drafted compromise legislation rewriting the section that effectively serves as the law’s enforcement mechanism, which the high court struck down in a 5-4 decision. But the bill never cleared the House.
Sensenbrenner and Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., reintroduced the bill in this Congress but now many Democrats, including Leahy and the White House, support alternate legislation with a wider scope that so far has attracted no Republican sponsors.
The Sensenbrenner-Conyers bill would subject states and jurisdictions to federal oversight if they commit five voting violations in any 15 year period. If states or municpalities had been found to “have historically” discriminated against minority voters, they would be subjected to pre-clearance, meaning that the Justice Department would have to approve before they changed their voting laws, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said when introducing this bill.
“The promise that all of us are created equal is written into our founding documents—but it’s up to us to make that promise real,” Obama said, urging Americans to vote “every chance you get.”
