Voting Rights Act To Face Supreme Court

The 1965 Voting Rights Act will go before the Supreme Court this week. “Over a century after the Emancipation Proclamation, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act,” said Chris Hayes on “Up” this morning. “Which finally ended decades of routine exclusion of people of color from exercising their right to vote.” Section 5 of the act, which requires Federal scrutiny on voting law changes in southern states, is the specific language being challenged. The argument against Section 5 is that it diminishes the sovereignty of southern states and that the south has changed since the era of Jim Crow.

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Chris Hayes: The basic reality of American politics

The “black vote” isn’t overwhelmingly Democratic because they are biased. It’s not blacks who are the problem in this equation, it’s the Republican Party that is the problem. There was a time when blacks did vote Republican in large numbers, but that was before the civil rights movement that was embraced by the Democratic Party, the party that had been the party of many southern white racists. This is the reason the south shifted from blue to red. The south used to be where Democrats could expect to win votes but now the south is where Republicans are in control, and the reason is the civil rights movement. White racists left the Democratic Party and they joined the Republican Party which apparently welcomed them with open arms.

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