Kevin Morris

YIKES caught a "self harm" BlueSky warning for this one

I will say that slipping on icy rocks makes for fun body art

Folks I Over Did It for the first big hike out of the season, but happy First Spring to all who celebrate!

12 miles in Harriman and saw exactly one other person

I'm feeling the loss of Bernard Lafayette and Jesse Jackson on this year's anniversary, too. They did the impossible. We must do nothing less.

Here's what I'm thinking about on this big anniversary day for the Voting Rights Act (Selma + SCOTUS affirmation in 1966) and as we wait for this term's VRA case to come down:

Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio meets with Secretary Rubio

Enrique Tarrio and other Proud Boys were convicted of seditious conspiracy. Trump pardoned them.

Tarrio and his men planned the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Tarrio even claimed credit for it, messaging others: “Make no mistake…We did this…”

Now he’s meeting with Sec. Rubio.

This is literally how we found out that the 2020 election had been called (living in Central Brooklyn)

American democracy began in 1965. It will end in 2026 when the Roberts Court overturns the Voting Rights Act.

The VRA was passed five months *to the day* after Selma. Hard to imagine Congress moving so quickly today

#UnpackTheCourts

This sounds awfully recently familiar.

Yes, history is repeating itself in a horrible way, but we must meet that threat with the courage and leadership we witnessed during the Civil Rights Movement.

Together, we can repeat the best of our history, draw inspiration from those that sacrificed so much. and save our democracy!

“Our research shows that, over the half-century period in which this section of the Voting Rights Act was in effect, thousands of racially discriminatory voting policies were stopped before they could go into effect.

But no longer.”

🫡

(Also: I don't cover this in the piece, but it's worth remembering that CJ Roberts cut his teeth in the Reagan DOJ trying to kill the Voting Rights Act. This has been the central throughline of his career)

The Bygone Era of Supreme Court Support for Voting Rights Sixty years after upholding the Voting Rights Act, the Court has dismantled most of it.

Sixty years ago, the Supreme Court upheld the Voting Rights Act to protect Americans of all races, ethnicities, and language backgrounds from discriminatory election rules. Even if today’s justices refuse to do the same, we must continue the fight to protect the vote.
bit.ly/4lagoMy

Someone should write a book about this!

Exactly right.

The Civil Rights Division was able to show that it took exhaustive (and exhausting) work to litigate even the most obvious violations of the voting rights protections in the 1957 and 1960 acts, which ultimately convinced Congress and then SCOTUS that a much broader law was needed.

Sad news

As we all remember the marchers in Selma tomorrow, let's also remember the era when we had a Supreme Court that cared about building up our democracy. We had a Court like that once; we can't give up on the fight to get one once again.

In our book coming out in Sept, Mike Miller and I document how SCOTUS was, for a while, a great ally in building up the Voting Rights Act. Of course, over the past 15 years, it has instead turned into the VRA's fiercest opponent

His take on how the legal system can be weaponized was especially insightful:
"After enduring nearly a century of systematic resistance to the Fifteenth Amendment, Congress might well decide to shift the advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of the evil to its victims."

Writing for the majority, CJ Earl Warren acknowledged the law “create[ed] stringent new remedies for voting discrimination,” but they were needed “to banish the blight of racial discrimination in voting, which has infected the electoral process in parts of our country for nearly a century.”

The Court upheld preclearance by an 8-1 vote. SCOTUS gave Congress great latitude, as the 15th Amendment clearly directs them to (some current justices would do well to re-read Sec 2: "The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.")

Arguing for GA before SCOTUS (and against the VRA), E. Freeman Leverett admitted that the state had committed offenses in the past, but that was over by now (sound familiar??). Instead, he argued, the VRA was enacted after a "mob" in Selma was "threatening revolution and rebellion in the streets"

It was a game of legislative whack-a-mole. When one law or policy was struck down, another arose. By requiring some jurisdictions to "preclear" changes to their elections before they went into effect, the VRA tried to get around this

AG Katzenbach testified that it took thousands of hours to argue a single voting rights case --- at which point, vote suppressors, "even after apparent defeat in the courts, to devise whole new methods of discrimination. And often that means beginning the whole weary process all over again."

The whole point of the VRA was to fight back against the "systematic and ingenious discrimination" plaguing elections in the South. As LBJ argued before passage, "No law that we now have on the books... can ensure the right to vote when local officials are determined to deny it."

The Bygone Era of Supreme Court Support for Voting Rights Sixty years after upholding the Voting Rights Act, the Court has dismantled most of it.

Tomorrow marks the 61st anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama. It also marks the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court first upholding the Voting Rights Act.

We have gotten so, so far away from a Court that cares about democracy.

New from me at @brennancenter.org: