Renewing the commitment to our nation’s founding promise. ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

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Tomorrow, the nation celebrates Juneteenth. It was officially recognized as a national holiday only four years ago, during the racial reckoning after George Floyd’s murder by police. We are still feeling our way through what the holiday means for the nation.

Juneteenth commemorates the long-delayed emancipation of the last enslaved Americans. After the Civil War, in which 200,000 Black men fought in the Union Army to defeat the Confederacy, word of this new birth of freedom did not reach Galveston, Texas, until months later. An army general stood on a hotel balcony and proclaimed “absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves.”

In one sense, then, Juneteenth celebrates the triumph of the Black community over historic oppression, and the nation’s second revolution. Once mostly a regional holiday, it was a time for celebration and optimism. Now recognized as a national holiday, it renews our dedication to achieving equality — the struggle to surmount the flawed origins of our country and live up to our loftiest and most challenging ideals.

But we won’t do justice to Juneteenth if that is all we do. It reminds us of the need for action. There has been great progress, but far too little after centuries of struggle. Discriminatory bank lending practices have led to residential segregation and economic inequality that compounds generation after generation. The profound racial imbalance in our criminal justice system is a disheartening indicator of how far we have to go.

At the Brennan Center, we focus especially on access to our political system. The United States only achieved a multiracial democracy when the Voting Rights Act became law in 1965. (In that sense, our democracy is younger than that of many other nations.) For decades, the gap between the participation rates of white and nonwhite voters narrowed; it eventually closed entirely. But then something changed for the worse. Brennan Center social scientists recently analyzed

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nearly 1 billion voter records. The racial turnout gap, they found, has widened all over the country since 2008 for many reasons. In the states once covered by the strongest protections of the Voting Rights Act — before the Supreme Court gutted it in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder — the turnout gap has grown twice as fast as it has elsewhere. Voter suppression laws, plainly, have suppressed the vote.

These moves to squelch participation are not limited to the rules for casting ballots. Entrenched white politicians have found it easy to draw district lines to curb the electoral power of Black and Latino voters. As our study suggested, this practice is often most destructive in the South, where the population is rapidly diversifying but representation lags far behind. It’s one reason why the Brennan Center is expanding our work in the region.

Which brings the story back to Galveston, Texas. As my colleague Kendall Karson Verhovek recounts

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, county officials have “carved up the sole majority district for Black and Latino voters and scattered them across the other three.” Subtle but effective, racial gerrymandering like this can dilute political power as efficiently as the most egregious voting rule. Civil rights groups have challenged the unfair map.

Now the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is considering the claim that Black and Latino voters cannot jointly sue on their own behalf, which is the basis for many of the lawsuits brought by voters and civil rights groups. That’s absurd — it would mean that the Supreme Court never noticed that numerous rulings over the years relied on an imaginary right. This reactionary claim won’t likely become law.

But the fact that a court would consider this — in a story from Galveston, of all places — shows why Juneteenth is a vital holiday. A promise of equality was made at our nation’s founding, and we rightly celebrate the declaration that all are created equal on the Fourth of July. Juneteenth celebrates a step toward the fulfillment of that promise, when Black Americans went from being considered three-fifths of a person under the law to full citizens. Juneteenth does not merely look fondly to the past but celebrates our fitful progress toward becoming the country that our founding documents envisioned.





Keeping Elections Free from Intimidation

Efforts we’ve seen since 2020 to intimidate voters and election workers are likely to continue this year, fueled by ongoing lies that voter fraud is widespread. But federal and state laws make clear that intimidation at any stage of the process is illegal. A new Brennan Center series identifies potential threats to those who participate in and administer elections, such as aggressive monitoring at the polls and drop boxes and unfounded voter challenges, and details the legal tools available nationwide and in key states to prevent and respond to these actions. Read more

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More Government Secrets Aren’t the Solution

Amid concerns about new legislation that dramatically expands the government’s surveillance power, the Senate intelligence committee has put forth a solution that’s nearly as bad as the problem. The proposed bill would make the new conditions for legal surveillance classified information. Elizabeth Goitein argues in Just Security that this lack of transparency would stop people from having a say in the rules governing officials and weaken checks and balances. “It also prevents people from holding the government accountable for violations of the law, which in turn renders such violations much more likely,” she writes. READ MORE

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Congress Shouldn’t Spur FBI Abuses

Lawmakers have urged the FBI to investigate students protesting the Israel-Hamas war, claiming without evidence that the protesters receive Russian funding. The bureau’s long history of using unidentified agents and informants to gather intelligence on and suppress protests shows why such calls are dangerous. Rather than encouraging the FBI to use its investigative authorities against students, “congressional overseers should question how it is acquiring the intelligence it shares with campus administrators and local police, and whether these law enforcement methods protect our democracy, or threaten it,” Mike German writes in The Hill. Read more

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NEW PODCAST EPISODE: What Originalism Means for Women

Our latest episode is about how the Supreme Court’s shift toward the so-called original meaning of the Constitution has come at the expense of decades of progress for women’s rights. This playback of a live panel features Madiba K. Dennie, author of The Originalism Trap; Khiara M. Bridges of UC Berkeley School of Law; Emily Martin of the National Women’s Law Center; and Alicia Bannon of the Brennan Center and State Court Report. Listen on Spotify

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, Apple Podcasts

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, or your favorite podcast platform

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.





Coming Up

VIRTUAL EVENT: A Politicized Supreme Court Is Remaking America

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Thursday, June 20, 3–4 p.m. ET



The Supreme Court is rapidly upending American life as we know it. In recent terms, the Court expanded gun rights, limited reproductive rights, and tossed aside decades of progress on racial justice and voting rights. The 2023–24 term is shaping up to be just as consequential.



The new paperback edition of The Supermajority

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, by Brennan Center President Michael Waldman, includes a new chapter on the 2022–23 term, the ethics scandals that have ensnared Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, and the impact of the Court’s divisive rulings on its public standing. Join us for a live virtual conversation between Waldman and the Brennan Center’s Kareem Crayton on the threat the current Court poses and how this year’s decisions have built on or changed the Court’s previous rulings. RSVP today

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Want to keep up with Brennan Center Live events? Subscribe to the events newsletter.

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News

Patrick Berry on Wisconsin’s confusing system for voting rights restoration for people with felony convictions // WISCONSIN WATCH

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Hernandez Stroud on probes of civil rights violations in policing // NEW YORK TIMES

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Derek Tisler on federal election security funding // USA TODAY

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Daniel Weiner on safeguarding science from political interference // WASHINGTON POST

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Thomas Wolf on rifts in the Supreme Court’s originalist consensus // ABA JOURNAL

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