[Mb-civic] Still Seeking a Fair Vote - Nick Kotz - Washington Post op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Still Seeking a Fair Vote

By Nick Kotz
Monday, January 16, 2006; A17

Forty-one years ago, on Jan. 15, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson 
placed a phone call to congratulate the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on 
his 36th birthday -- but mainly to strategize about how they could win a 
monumental victory for equal rights. King was in Selma, Ala., where he 
had just launched a dramatic campaign to show how African Americans in 
the Deep South were being denied the right to vote. He had chosen Selma 
because of that city's notorious success in blocking its black residents 
from the polls. Those who dared to attempt to register risked their 
lives. They endured bloody beatings, lost their jobs, saw their homes 
and churches bombed. Some were brutally murdered.

"There is not going to be anything, Doctor, as effective as all [black 
citizens] voting," the president told King in that birthday call. "That 
will give you a message that all the eloquence in the world won't bring, 
because the candidate or elected official will be coming to you then, 
instead of you calling him."

"You're exactly right about that," King replied. "It is so important to 
get Negroes registered to vote in large numbers. It would be this 
coalition of the Negro vote and the moderate white vote that would 
really make the New South."

After a brilliant political campaign orchestrated by the president and 
the preacher, Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The law swept 
away the most brazen tactics used to keep minorities from the polls. 
Millions of black citizens surged onto voter registration rolls 
throughout the South. The ballot power of those new voters -- combined 
with the 1964 Civil Rights Act's prohibition against segregation and 
employment discrimination -- ushered in the hopeful beginnings of the 
kind of New South that King and Johnson had envisioned.

Civility replaced official repression and terrorism. Hundreds of blacks 
won public office at all levels, including in Congress, where Artur 
Davis, a Harvard-educated lawyer, now represents the Alabama district 
that includes Selma. A growing black and Hispanic middle class has 
prospered in the South and Southwest.

But despite the enormous gains, old problems persist. The winds of 
Hurricane Katrina blew away the veil shielding complacent eyes from the 
desperate poverty of the blacks in New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward. And a 
Texas congressional redistricting dispute now before the Supreme Court 
has cast a spotlight on the lengths to which politicians will go for 
narrow partisan advantage -- even disenfranchising minority voters.

Masterminding the controversial redistricting plan approved in 2003, 
then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay shuffled thousands of African 
American and Hispanic voters between Texas congressional districts like 
pawns on a chessboard. With mathematical efficiency, DeLay redrew voting 
district boundaries to ensure that Republicans would gain five 
additional House seats. His goal: to further cement his own power and 
Republican control of the House of Representatives.

In Dallas and Austin, Republicans won new congressional seats after the 
DeLay map broke up large concentrations of urban black and Hispanic 
Democratic voters, then scattered them thinly throughout other 
Republican-dominated districts -- many extending into rural areas far 
from the voters' homes. These maneuvers violated standard redistricting 
principles, such as trying to maintain geographically compact districts 
and respecting county and city boundaries.

Gerrymandering for partisan advantage is almost as old as the nation 
itself. But the Voting Rights Act, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, 
forbids state and local governments from creating districts that clearly 
reduce the ability of minority voters to elect "candidates of their 
choice." Civil rights organizations that have appealed the Texas 
redistricting contend that it violates the 1965 law, stripping away the 
ability of tens of thousands of minority voters to elect candidates of 
their choice.

A large majority of black and Hispanic voters regularly favor Democratic 
candidates. Therefore, Republican politicians, particularly in Southern 
and Southwestern states, have used redistricting to break the 
minorities' power to help elect Democrats. Democrats, in turn, have 
sought to manipulate the minority voter pool to elect as many from their 
party as possible -- both minority and white candidates. Caught in this 
crossfire, black and Hispanic Democrats at times have made tacit 
"devil's bargains" with their Republican foes, in which they ensure at 
least some victories for themselves in districts with heavy minority 
populations. These "pragmatic" Democrats also ensure Republican 
victories in heavily white districts.

The Supreme Court has the opportunity to reaffirm and clarify the 
central purposes of the Voting Rights Act. And Congress can and should 
honor King's memory by renewing important parts of the voting rights law 
that otherwise will expire next year, thus advancing his ideal of a more 
representative democracy.

Nick Kotz is the author of "Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin 
Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America." He will answer 
questions at 2 p.m. tomorrow onhttp://www.washingtonpost.com.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/15/AR2006011500928.html?nav=hcmodule
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