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THE WEEKLY REVEAL
Saturday, August 23, 2025
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Why Conservatives Are Trying to Kill the Voting Rights Act
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Kamil KrzaczynskI/AFP/Getty
Hi. It’s Al Letson, host of More To The Story.
This month marked an important milestone: the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. No other piece of legislation has done more to ensure that people of color in this country have equal access to the voting booth. But today, the act is a mere shell of itself. That’s because the conservative movement has worked for years to dismantle it in the courts. The most decisive blow came in 2013, when the Supreme Court ruled that a key section of the act giving the federal government oversight over the way states carried out elections was no longer constitutional. And the act might get hollowed out even more after the Supreme Court agreed to rehear a redistricting case in Louisiana that will again deal with VRA provisions.
Voting rights fights are everywhere right now. Texas is trying a brazen gerrymander that could give Republicans in the state as many as five additional seats in the House of Representatives. California is threatening its own redistricting to counterbalance Texas. And on the federal level, Republicans in Congress are proposing legislation that would require additional documents when people register to vote, a move that election experts say could disenfranchise millions of Americans.
To discuss the long fight to tear apart the VRA and the battle over voting rights in America today, I could think of no better person to talk to than Jamelle Bouie, a New York Times columnist who regularly views today’s events through a historical lens. He sees the Trump administration and the Supreme Court using their power to advance a very specific vision: that some people should have more access to the ballot than others. It’s an important conversation. I hope you check it out.
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Find this episode wherever you listen to Reveal, and don’t forget to subscribe:
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A Baby Adopted, A Family Divided
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Reveal illustration; Charles Deluvio/Unsplash; Dukas/Universal/Getty
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In 2017, David Leavitt drove to the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana to adopt a baby girl. A few years later, during an interview with a documentary filmmaker, Leavitt, a wealthy Utah politician, told a startling story about how he went about getting physical custody of that child.
He describes going to the tribe’s president and offering to use his connections to broker an international sale of the tribe’s buffalo. At the same time, he was asking the president for his blessing to adopt the child.
That video eventually leaked to a local TV station, and the adoption became the subject of a federal investigation into bribery. To others, the adoption story seemed to run afoul of a federal law meant to protect Native children from being removed from their tribes’ care in favor of non-Native families.
This week on Reveal, reporters Andrew Becker and Bernice Yeung dig into the story of this complicated and controversial adoption, how it circumvented the mission of the Indian Child Welfare Act, and why some of the baby’s Native family and tribe were left feeling that a child was taken from them.
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