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Carving Up the Country
by CHARLES M. BLOW
July 26, 2013
Our 50 states seem to be
united in name only.
In fact, we seem to be
increasingly becoming two countries under one flag: Liberal Land
— coastal, urban and multicultural — separated by Conservative Country —
Southern and Western, rural and racially homogeneous. (Other parts of the
country are a bit of a mixed bag.)
This has led to incredible
and disturbing concentrations of power.
As The New York Times reported after
the election in November, more than two-thirds of the states are now under
single-party control, meaning that one party has control of the governor’s
office and has majorities in both legislative chambers.
This is the highest level of
such control since 1952. And Republicans have single-party control in nearly
twice as many states as Democrats.
This is having very real
consequences on the ground, nowhere more clearly than on the subjects of voting
rights and women’s reproductive rights.
Almost all jurisdictions
covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the section that
requires federal approval for any change in voting procedures and that the
Supreme Court effectively voided last month — are in Republican-controlled
states.
So, many of those states have
wasted no time following the court ruling to institute efforts to suppress the
vote in the next election and beyond.
Within two hours of the
Supreme Court ruling, Texas announced that a voter identification law that the
Department of Justice had blocked for two years because “Hispanic registered
voters are more than twice as likely as non-Hispanic registered voters to lack
such identification” would go into effect, along with a redistricting map
passed in 2011 but blocked by a federal court.
The department is trying to
prevent those actions in Texas,
but it’s unclear whether the state or the feds will prevail.
Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina have also
moved forward with voter ID bills that had already passed but were being held
up by the Justice Department. (Virginia
has passed a bill that’s scheduled to go into effect next year.)
And on Wednesday, a federal
court gave Florida
the go-ahead to resume its controversial voter purge by dismissing a case filed
against the state that had been rendered moot by the Supreme Court decision.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
is not surprised by this flurry. She voted with the minority on the Voting
Rights Act case, and she wrote in a strongly worded dissent: “The sad irony of
today’s decision lies in its utter failure to grasp why the VRA has proved
effective. The Court appears to believe that the VRA’s success in eliminating
the specific devices extant in 1965 means that preclearance is no longer
needed.”
She continued, “With that
belief, and the argument derived from it, history repeats itself.”
History does appear to be
doing just that. In an interview this week with The Associated Press, Ginsburg
reiterated her displeasure with the court’s decision and her lack of surprise
at what it has wrought, saying, “And one really could have predicted what was
going to happen.” She added, “I didn’t want to be right, but sadly I am.”
While Republicans may claim
that voter ID laws are about the sanctity of the vote, Republican power brokers
know they’re about much more: suppressing the votes of people likely to vote
Democratic.
Last week Rob Gleason, the Pennsylvania Republican Party chairman, discussed the effects of his state’s voter ID laws on last
year’s presidential election, acknowledging to the Pennsylvania Cable Network: “We probably had
a better election. Think about this: we cut Obama by 5 percent, which was big.
A lot of people lost sight of that. He won — he beat McCain by 10 percent; he
only beat Romney by 5 percent. I think that probably voter ID helped a bit in
that.” [emphasis added]
[Ed. Note: Finally a politician tells it like it is.
Voter fraud in the United
States is a minuscule problem. Disenfranchising
minorities by imposing voter ID laws is a huge, purely politically motivated
problem.]
And on women’s reproductive
rights, as the Guttmacher Institute reported
earlier this month, “In the first six months of 2013, states enacted 106
provisions related to reproductive health and rights.” The report continued,
“Although initial momentum behind banning abortion early in pregnancy appears
to have waned, states nonetheless adopted 43 restrictions on access to
abortion, the second-highest number ever at the midyear mark and is as many as
were enacted in all of 2012.”
A substantial majority of the
new restrictive measures — which include bans on abortion outside incredibly
restrictive time frames (at six weeks after the woman’s last period in North Dakota),
burdensome regulations on abortion clinics and providers, and forced
ultrasounds — were enacted in states with Republican-controlled legislatures.
These are just two issues
among many in which the cleaving of this country is becoming an
incontrovertible fact, as we drift back toward bifurcation.
***
1 comment:
Basically a good piece, but he lost me after stating that the south and the west are 'racially homogenous'. He needs to get out more.
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