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Supreme Court considers South’s legacy and progress on voting rights

By Robert Barnes,February 23, 2013

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He added: “When you look at the Alabama Supreme Court, there are no blacks there. When you look at the governor’s Cabinet, very few blacks in the Cabinet. . . . We have an economic development department in the state of Alabama that’s lily-white.”

Knight is part of a federal lawsuit challenging a redistricting plan adopted by the Republican-controlled legislature. The challengers say the plan would pack minorities into certain districts to reduce their influence in others. The result would virtually eliminate the state’s few remaining white Democratic officeholders, they say.

“For over a century, the party of white supremacy was the Democratic Party,” they say in the lawsuit. “Now it is the Republican Party pursing a policy of isolating black voters and their elected representatives.”

In the case that brings the issue of votings rights back to the Supreme Court this week, the small Shelby County town of Calera — dubbed the “heart of the heart of Dixie” — held an election over the objections of the Justice Department. It resulted in the defeat of the town’s only black council member.

“So,” asked Sam Walker, a tour guide and historian at the National Voting Rights Museum in Selma, “is that racist or not?’ ”

The attorney general agreed there have been isolated incidents in the state. “Alabama, as I say often and as we say in our brief, we’re not perfect,” Strange said. “We haven’t solved all our racial problems. But we’re not any different from any other state dealing with the same issues.”

Recent history, he said, underscores the state’s compliance with the Voting Rights Act, he said. Some may be unhappy with redistricting, but that’s politics, he said, noting that the plan was cleared by the Justice Department because it would not diminish minority representation. In fact, he said, it has been 16 years since the department objected to a statewide pre-clearance submission from Alabama.

In a state that once virtually refused to register black voters, the difference between white and black registration has been eliminated, the state says. And in the 2004 and 2008 general elections, black voter turnout was greater than that of whites.

The Obama administration’s defense of the law reminds the court that Congress took note of progress in the nine states covered by Section 5 — besides Alabama, they are the Southern states of Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia, as well as Alaska and Arizona — and decided such a strict measure was still needed.

“Congress held 21 hearings, amassing thousands of pages of evidence,” Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. wrote in the federal government’s brief. “And in an era of sharp partisan division within the legislative branch, Congress voted nearly unanimously to reauthorize Section 5.”

Included among those voting yes in 2006 were Alabama’s two conservative Republican senators, Richard Shelby and Jeff Sessions. Spokesmen for both last week said they stood behind their votes.

“There’s a very easy explanation for that,” said state Solicitor General John C. Neiman Jr. “A person who voted against Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act would be called in the press and in the public debate someone who voted against voting rights. The path of least resistance for Congress was simply to re-up for another 25 years.”

The Supreme Court’s conservative justices seemed receptive to Neiman’s assessment the last time the issue came up, in 2009. The court sidestepped the constitutionality of Section 5 then, but Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. delivered a warning.

“Things have changed in the South,” he wrote, adding: “The evil that Section 5 is meant to address may no longer be concentrated in the jurisdictions singled out for preclearance. The statute’s coverage formula is based on data that is now more than 35 years old, and there is considerable evidence that it fails to account for current political conditions.”

Discuss this topic and other political issues in The Post’s Politics Discussion Forums.

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