Voting Rights--and Wrongs The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections

by Thernstrom, Abigail; Williams, Juan

• ISBN13: 9780844742694
• ISBN10: 0844742694
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-06-16
• Publisher: Aei Press

Summary

The 1965 Voting Rights Act is the crown jewel of American civil rights legislation. Its passage marked the death knell of the Jim Crow South. But that was the beginning, not the end, of an important debate on race and representation in American democracy. When is the distribution of political power racially fair? Who counts as a representative of black and Hispanic interests? How we answer such questions shapes our politics and public policy in profound but often unrecognized ways. The actOs original aim was simple: Give African Americans the same political opportunity enjoyed by other citizens_the chance to vote, form political coalitions, and elect the candidates of their choice. But in the racist South, it soon became clear that access to the ballot would not, by itself, provide the political opportunity the statute promised. Most southern whites were unwilling to vote for black candidates, and southern states were ready to alter electoral systems to maintain white supremacy. In this provocative book, Abigail Thernstrom argues that southern resistance to black political power began a process by which the act was radically revised both for good and ill. Congress, the courts, and the Justice Department altered the statute to ensure the election of blacks and Hispanics to legislative bodies ranging from school boards and county councils to the U.S. Congress. Proportional racial representation_equality of results rather than mere equal opportunity_became the revised aim of the act. Blacks came to be treated as politically different_entitled to inequality in the form of a unique political privilege. Majority-minority districts that reserved seats for blacks and Hispanics succeeded in integrating southern politics. By now, however, those districts may perversely limit the potential power of black officeholders. OMax-blackO districts typically elect candidates to the left of most voters; those officeholders rarely win in majority-white settings. Such race-conscious districting discourages the development of centrist, Opost-racialO candidates like Barack Obama (who was defeated when he stood for Congress in one such district). The Voting Rights Act has become a period piece that today serves to keep most black legislators clustered on the sidelines of American politics_precisely the opposite of what its framers intended. A radically revised law would better serve the political interests of all Americans_minority and white voters alike.

Author Biography

Abigail Thernstrom is an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, vice-chair of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, and a member of the board of advisers of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Foreword	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 1
Unconquered Territory	p. 4
The Constitutionally Daring Design	p. 5
Racism Wanes while Federal Power Expans	p. 7
A Disconnection from Reality	p. 9
The Constitutional Order Distorted-By Necessity	p. 11
The Importance of Black Legislators	p. 13
A Partial Truth	p. 15
Expected and Unexpected Results	p. 17
A Medley of Normative Questions	p. 21
The Fundamentals	p. 25
The Orginal Design	p. 26
The Emergence of Section 5	p. 31
The Amendments of 1970	p. 34
Amended Again in 1975	p. 36
An Imaginative Solution to a Problem	p. 38
Section 2 Rewritten	p. 41
Combating Southern Racism: The Forgotten Goal	p. 44
Interpreting Section 5: The Mess the Courts Have Made	p. 47
Allen v. State Board of Elections	p. 49
Discrimination Redefined	p. 53
The Annexation Cases	p. 54
Beer v. United States	p. 58
Bossier I	p. 61
Bossier II	p. 64
Ashcroft	p. 66
Unresolved Issues	p. 70
Interpreting Section 2: Judges Lost in a Political Thicket	p. 73
Assessing Racial Equality	p. 74
Whitcomb v. Chavis	p. 77
White and Zimmer	p. 78
Bolden and the 1982 Amendments to Section 2	p. 80
Thornburg v. Gingles: The Court Weighs In	p. 84
O'Connor's Concurrence	p. 87
Three Preconditions	p. 89
The Totality of Cicrumstances	p. 97
A Statute in Search of a Theory	p. 106
Divvying Up	p. 109
Section 5 Enforcement: The Mischief That Government Bureaucrats Can Make	p. 111
The Roadblocks Ahead	p. 112
A Law Office Working for Minority Plaintiffs	p. 114
No Discernible Standards	p. 117
The 1980s: Detours around Retrogression	p. 120
The 1990s: A Lawless Civil Rights Division	p. 124
John Dunne's Section 5	p. 127
Merging Sections 5 and 2	p. 130
Detailed Data and Sophisticated Software	p. 133
The Justice Department Memo	p. 135
The Fog	p. 139
The Fourteenth Amendment Cases: Trafficking in Racial Stereotyping	p. 143
Miller	p. 148
Post-Miller	p. 151
Misguided Hyperbole	p. 154
The View from the Academy	p. 156
Race-Districts: A Defective Hybrid	p. 159
Expressive Harms	p. 162
A Rorschach Test	p. 164
The Serbonian Bog	p. 167
Competing Principles	p. 170
The 2006 Voting Rights Act	p. 179
Dueling House and Senate Reports	p. 178
Revisiting Section 2	p. 182
Waiting for NAMUDNO: Section 5 in Jeopardy	p. 187
How Much Has the South Changed?	p. 191
Debate among Scholars	p. 196
Conclusion: Moving On	p. 199
A Period Piece	p. 202
From a Biracial to a Multiracial Polity	p. 203
Section 2: What Next?	p. 206
Whither Section 5?	p. 209
Racial Progress Stymied	p. 214
In Conclusion	p. 220
	p. 225
Jurisdictions Covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act	p. 225
	p. 229
The Voting Rights Act of 1965	p. 229
Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King Voting Right Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 2006	p. 239
Notes	p. 243
Index of Voting Rights Cases	p. 303
General Index	p. 307
About the Authors	p. 315
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