The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“VOTING RIGHTS AMENDMENT ACT” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Justice was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H2477-H2478 on April 28, 2015.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
VOTING RIGHTS AMENDMENT ACT
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer) for 5 minutes.
Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, when the Supreme Court ruled in 2013 to invalidate the preclearance formula in the original Voting Rights Act, it issued a challenge to Congress to pass an updated one. That is a challenge Congress must accept. Until Congress acts, millions will continue to face barriers at the ballot box.
On April 18, The New York Times editorial board highlighted the disturbing and flawed argument that preclearance is no longer necessary. Obviously, the Congress of the United States found otherwise.
The editorial stated: ``This process . . . stopped hundreds of discriminatory new laws from taking effect, and deterred lawmakers from introducing countless more.''
The process to which they were referring was the preclearance process that the Supreme Court threw out. The editors cited a new study that analyzed more than 4,000 rights cases.
They write again: ``The study provides the most wide-ranging empirical evidence yet that Congress was amply justified in finding that voting discrimination remains concentrated in the covered States and regions.''
When we reauthorized the Voting Rights Act in 2006, Mr. Speaker, we did so with an overwhelming vote of 390-33 in the House. In the Senate, Mr. Speaker, it was 98-0. There was no confusion, there was no doubt in the minds of the Congress of the United States, and that bill was signed by President George Bush. It was an overwhelmingly bipartisan conclusion that preclearance was still necessary some 45 years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
This has traditionally been an issue that brings Democrats and Republicans together, and I am proud to have cosponsored a bipartisan compromise bill sponsored by Republican former chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary, Jim Sensenbrenner, who was the sponsor and chairman of the committee when the reauthorization was effected in 2006.
The bill that we have introduced, called the Voting Rights Amendments Act, with Republican former chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary, Jim Sensenbrenner, and Ranking Member John Conyers, as well as John Lewis--great hero of the civil rights movement--that would answer the Supreme Court with an updated preclearance formula, as they suggested. In fact, in the past 2 years since the Court's ruling, we have seen a resurgence of efforts to limit when and where minorities can vote.
The editorial goes on to say, Mr. Speaker: ``Voting discrimination no longer takes the form of literacy tests and poll taxes. Instead, it is embodied in voter-ID laws, the closing of polling places in minority neighborhoods, the elimination of early-voting days and hours, and much more.''
Mr. Speaker, I hope the House will take up a bill to restore the Voting Rights Act without delay and crack down on these discriminatory practices that only serve to weaken our democracy by excluding millions of voices that deserve to be heard.
2015 is the 50-year anniversary of the passing and signing of the Voting Rights Act. That act was achieved only after some died, many bled, and a large number participated in the march from Selma to Montgomery.
That galvanized American public opinion and led the Congress to pass one of the most significant civil rights and democratic rights bills of its history. Congress has the responsibility to act and act now.
As I close, Mr. Speaker, let me remind the Members of the Congress that I discussed this with the majority leader. The majority leader indicated that we would have discussions about bringing Voting Rights Act to the floor, as did I and Mr. Cantor, his predecessor as majority leader.
I look forward to those discussions to facilitate and to speed the bringing to the floor of the bipartisan restoration of the protections in the Voting Rights Act amendments.
Mr. Speaker, I will insert into the Record the editorial reference.
Voting Rights, by the Numbers
When the Supreme Court struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, its main argument was that the law was outdated.
Discrimination against minority voters may have been pervasive in the 1960s when the law was passed, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote, but ``nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically.'' In this simplistic account, the law was still punishing states and local governments for sins they supposedly stopped committing years ago.
The chief justice's destructive cure for this was to throw out the formula Congress devised in 1965 that required all or parts of 16 states with long histories of overt racial discrimination in voting, most in the South, to get approval from the federal government for any proposed change to their voting laws. This process, known as preclearance, stopped hundreds of discriminatory new laws from taking effect, and deterred lawmakers from introducing countless more.
But Chief Justice Roberts, writing for a 5-4 majority, invalidated the formula because ``today's statistics tell an entirely different story.''
Well, do they? A comprehensive new study by a historian of the Voting Rights Act provides a fresh trove of empirical evidence to refute that assertion. The study by J. Morgan Kousser, a professor of history and social science at the California Institute of Technology, examines more than 4,100 voting-rights cases, Justice Department inquiries, settlements and changes to laws in response to the threat of lawsuits around the country where the final result favored minority voters.
It found that from 1957 until 2013, more than 90 percent of these legal ``events'' occurred in jurisdictions that were required to preclear their voting changes. The study also provides evidence that the number of successful voting-rights suits has gone down in recent years, not because there is less discrimination, but because several Supreme Court decisions have made them harder to win.
Mr. Kousser acknowledges that the law's formula, created without the benefit of years of data, was a ``blunt tool'' that focused on voter turnout and clearly discriminatory practices like literacy tests. Still, he says, the statistics show that for almost a half century it ``succeeded in accurately homing in on the counties where the vast majority of violations would take place.''
Members of Congress had seen some of this data in 2006 when, by a near-unanimous vote, they reauthorized the Voting Rights Act for 25 years. In fact, the legislative record contained more than 15,000 pages of evidence documenting the continuation of ever-evolving racially discriminatory voting practices, particularly in the areas covered by the preclearance requirement.
But the Roberts opinion showed no interest in actual data. Nor did it seem to matter that the law was already adapting to current conditions: Every one of the more than 200 jurisdictions that asked to be removed from the preclearance list was successful, because each showed it was not discriminating.
Instead, the court said the coverage formula had to be struck down because it failed to target precisely all areas with voting rights violations in the country.
Mr. Kousser's study does not solve this problem, in part because there is no easy way to compare discrimination in places that are under a federal microscope with those that are not. But the study provides the most wide-ranging empirical evidence yet that Congress was amply justified in finding that voting discrimination remains concentrated in the covered states and regions. In other words, the tactics may have changed, but the story remains largely the same. Voting discrimination no longer takes the form of literacy tests and poll taxes. Instead, it is embodied in voter-ID laws, the closing of polling places in minority neighborhoods, the elimination of early-voting days and hours, and much more.
The Supreme Court suggested that Congress could fix the law by updating the coverage formula to more closely reflect where violations are occurring today--and a bipartisan bill introduced in 2014 and reintroduced this year has done just that. So far it has gone nowhere because most Republicans oppose it. Even if it were to pass, there is no guarantee it would survive before a Supreme Court that is highly skeptical of any race-conscious efforts to reduce discrimination.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department and private groups are doing what they can to combat the flood of new discriminatory laws with the surviving provisions of the Voting Rights Act. But without preclearance requirements for places with the worst records on racial discrimination, they will always be a few steps behind.
____________________
