St, Johns County Commission Chair Ben Rich, Sr. told Folio Weekly in 2008 that St. Johns County is "one of the last bastions of the Ku Klus Klan." Redistricting of St. Johns County Commission and School Board in 2011-2012 involved sinister efforts by SJC Republican Chair WILLIAM KORACH & Co., to violate the Fifteenth Amendment and to dilute and diminish African-American voting strenth in District 2 from 14.8 % to 9.8%.
During 2011-2012, We, the People, supported by St. Johns County Attorney Patrick Francis McCoremack four of five Schooll Board members and all five County Commissioners rightly stopped KORACH an d misguided SJC Republican apprachiks from violation the Fifteenth Amendment and inflicting gerrymandering.
Our Voting Rights must be preserved and protected, e.g., from misguided rebarbative reprobates and those sometimes claiming to be "patriots," when in fact some of them are segregationists. As LBJ said after Selma, "And we SHALL overcome!"
Then SJC Republican Chair WILLIAM KORACH, later rightly removed by the Republican Party of Florida, led the chorus of unhappy carping harpies supporting racial gerrymandering: KORACH's angry e-mail to School Board showed his hauteur. Defeating his attempted racial gerrymandering helped make St. Johns County a better place. Hastings, Linclnville and West Augustine remain in the same district, and we can be proud that St. Johns County now has an African-American School Board member, who is now School Board Chair, Anthony E. Coleman, Sr., former St. Johns County Sheriff's Deputy.
Some of those who once supported KORACH's gerrymandering scheme in 2011-2012 have since seen the light, particularly my friend, Historic City News owner MICHAEL GOLD, a former Sheriff's deputy, who graciously endorsed me for a seat on our Anastasia Mosquito Control District of St. Johns County in 2024. I still believe in a place called Hope. As my father once explained to me about world religions, "we're all trying to get to the same place."
Watched the Supreme Court decision on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Pray for them!
https://cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com/2012/01/in-haec-verba-angry-republican-and-tea.html
https://cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com/2011/12/st-augustine-record.html
https://cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com/2011/12/blog-post_13.html
https://cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com/2011/11/thank-you-to-school-board-members.html
https://cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com/2011/12/words-to-live-by.html
https://cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com/2011/11/st-augustine-record-school-board-favors.html
https://cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com/2011/12/we-welcome-their-hatred-racists-in.html
From The New York Times;
Will the Supreme Court Use a Louisiana Case to Gut the Voting Rights Act?
The justices have shown a willingness to chip away at the landmark civil rights legislation. A Louisiana case could unravel much of its remaining power.
Reporting from Washington
In a landmark 2013 case, the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that had required some states with a history of discrimination to seek approval from the federal government before changing their voting laws.
In that case, Shelby County v. Holder, the justices split along ideological lines in a decision that showed they differed on how much progress the country had made in race relations since the law was adopted as a crowning achievement of the civil rights movement.
“Our country has changed,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in the court’s opinion, “and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.”
The court’s decision left untouched a central piece of the Voting Rights Act known as Section 2, which prohibits election or voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race. In the Shelby County opinion, the chief justice wrote: “Section 2 is permanent, applies nationwide, and is not at issue in this case.”
A little more than a decade later, Section 2 is now squarely at issue. On Wednesday, the court will consider a challenge focused on this remaining pillar of the Voting Rights Act, the key legislation that aimed to unravel Jim Crow laws in the South and that has served to protect the voting power of Black Americans.
Just how far the court is willing to go may become more clear as the justices hear Louisiana v. Callais, a complex dispute over the state’s congressional map.
After punting on a decision in June, the justices announced they would rehear the case this month and this time focus specifically on whether allowing race to be used as a factor in drawing voting maps is unconstitutional.
For generations, lawmakers seeking to avoid legal challenges under the Voting Rights Act have drawn districts that aimed to maintain minorities’ voting power. A finding that it is unconstitutional to consider race in drawing districts would upend that process.
Election law experts, civil rights groups and politicians are watching Wednesday’s case closely because of the immediate, enormous impact it could have on local, state and federal districts.
At a time when Republican state legislatures are already being pressed by President Trump to redistrict to expand the party’s congressional majority, such a ruling could throw into question majority-Black districts now held by Democrats.
“You’re going to essentially cast doubt on dozens of congressional districts at a time when we’re undergoing incredible political polarization and a lack of confidence in the electoral system,” said Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford and an elections law expert.
Should the justices even signal that they are ready to gut Section 2 and prohibit the use of race as a factor in drawing electoral maps, the effects could be felt quickly.
The Republican speaker of Louisiana’s state House of Representatives has already asked legislators to clear their calendars in the weeks after the argument in case state leaders call a special legislative session to begin redrawing the map.
“If they decide to invalidate Section 2 as applied to redistricting, Louisiana’s going to redistrict,” said Travis Crum, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who studies voting rights, race and federalism. “Alabama’s going to redistrict. This would just add fuel to that fire and would result in the dismantling of many majority-Black districts across the country.”
The Voting Rights Act has faced legal challenges since it was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, in part because of how closely racial voting patterns have tracked political affiliation in many parts of the country.
In a 1993 case, Shaw v. Reno, the Supreme Court showed skepticism of using race to carve up voting districts. In that case, North Carolina had been forced to redraw its voting map after the 1990 census to include a new district with a majority of Black voters. The new, odd-shaped map wound snakelike through multiple counties. A white voter, Ruth Shaw, sued, claiming it violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.
The justices sided with Ms. Shaw in a 5-to-4 decision, setting a precedent that race alone could not be the basis for redrawing district lines. That ruling set in motion a series of challenges to other majority-Black districts in Texas, Louisiana, Florida and Georgia.
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who wrote the majority opinion, said a district that includes voters of the same race but who are “otherwise widely separated by geographical and political boundaries, and who may have little in common with one another but the color of their skin, bears an uncomfortable resemblance to political apartheid.”
Twenty years later, in 2013, came Shelby County, with its fatal blow to the provision of the Voting Rights Act that had required that states like Louisiana and Alabama get preapproval from the Justice Department before changing their election laws.
By then, Chief Justice Roberts had joined the court. The chief justice’s skepticism of the Voting Rights Act dated at least as far back as his time as a young lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department, when as a special assistant to the attorney general, he wrote a series of memos that later became public aggressively pushing back on a bipartisan proposal to shore up the expiring Voting Rights Act.
In 2021, the justices turned to Section 2 in a case called Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. In that 6-to-3 opinion, the justices agreed that the Voting Rights Act prohibited only laws or policies that imposed such substantial and disproportionate burdens on minority voters that it effectively stopped them from casting ballots.
After years of chipping away at the act, the Supreme Court took a surprising turn in 2023 in a fight over Alabama’s voting map. In an opinion written by the chief justice, a majority of the court upheld the court’s precedent that race could play some role in redistricting if it was intended to ensure that minority voters would not have less opportunity than members of the majority to participate in the political process.
Another of the court’s conservatives, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, joined the majority. But he cautioned in a concurrence that the finding might be temporary, warning “the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.”
When the challenge to Louisiana’s voting map arrived at the court, it appeared to be a narrow fight over whether lawmakers had relied too much on race, rather than politics, when they drafted the state’s congressional map that includes two majority Black districts.
The justices heard oral argument in March. But instead of announcing an opinion in the summer, as is typical in major cases, the justices made the rare move of scheduling the case to be reargued. Weeks later, they announced they wanted the new argument focused on the new, broader question of whether considering race in redistricting is unconstitutional.
Since then, court watchers have puzzled over the role this Louisiana case might play in the arc of the voting law. Some have drawn analogies to cases that started small and resulted in decisions of enormous consequence, like the court’s 2010 ruling in the Citizens United campaign finance case, which struck down campaign spending limits on corporations. In that case, too, the justices delayed a decision on a narrow case, then set it for another round of oral argument on a broader question.
Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School and voting rights expert, said the court had clearly been considering race and voting maps since it reviewed the Alabama case two years ago.
And while it is too early to divine the direction of the court this time, he said, the path of the case to this week’s argument seems clear.
“It squarely puts the Voting Rights Act in the court’s sight,” he said.
Abbie VanSickle covers the United States Supreme Court for The Times. She is a lawyer and has an extensive background in investigative reporting.
No comments:
Post a Comment