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NOVEMBER 8, 2022

Meyerson on TAP

Voting Rights in Florida? You Jest.

DeSantis tries to bar the feds from enforcing voting rights, in the
spirit of John C. Calhoun and our last two chief justices.

Come now the election monitors-some to ensure Americans get to vote,
others to make damn sure that those who look like they may vote for
Democrats can't.

In Florida today, the DeSantis regime has said
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that a new Florida law prohibits federal Justice Department monitors
from going to polling places to ensure that voters can vote. This has
been a project of the Justice Department since the Voting Rights Act of
1965 charged the department with that duty, and it's something that it
has done thousands of times in thousands of counties since then,
including in 64 counties across the nation today. This is the first
time, however, that a state government has refused them entry. 
DeSantis claims that state law supersedes federal law, much in the
spirit of John C. Calhoun's doctrine of nullification, under which
states can overrule those federal laws (initially, pertaining to
slavery) that their governors don't like.

The reason the feds have deployed to three Florida counties is doubtless
that DeSantis has created his own election police, empowered to stop
suspicious-looking (i.e., Black) voters from voting. This current bout
of racially determined denials of voting rights began when 60 percent of
Florida voters approved a ballot measure giving former felons who'd
served their time the right to vote again. The Republican legislature
responded by requiring those former felons to pay off whatever fines
they still owed, and declined to require the government to contact those
former felons with such useful information as whether they actually
still owed fines and if so, in what amounts. DeSantis then made clear
that voting if a fine was still owed was a criminal offense punishable
by jail time, which, disinterested observers must admit, was a highly
successful way of discouraging voting by Floridians who didn't know
whether they still had outstanding payments due.

Just in case that anxiety wasn't enough to suppress votes, DeSantis
established his very own police force to patrol the polls-where, of
course, they'd have no way of knowing who was paid up and who
wasn't, but where they could certainly challenge anyone they deemed
suspicious (key index: skin color), thereby both intimidating voters and
slowing down the lines so that some prospective voters on unforgiving
schedules would leave. That, in turn, required DeSantis to determine
which lines he wanted to slow down, so the locations where his cops are
deployed would perforce be heavily Democratic and Black.

Hence the presence of the feds in the state's three most heavily
Democratic counties (Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach), where
DeSantis's goons would tend to congregate.

How much of an outlier is DeSantis in the onetime party of Lincoln? Not
much, it turns out. It was Chief Justice John Roberts, after all, who in
his majority opinion in 2013's Shelby County v Holder struck down much
of the Voting Rights Act on the grounds that the racist practices of
yore were long gone. (Apparently, if the racist vote suppressors
didn't wear white sheets and pointy hoods, that couldn't constitute
suppression.)

And Roberts wasn't much of an outlier, either.

In 1986, while working in my final gig as a campaign consultant, I was
managing a retention campaign for three California Supreme Court
justices. In the course of the campaign, I met Jim Brosnahan, an
attorney who was a leading member of the Bay Area legal community and a
major supporter of the three justices. That summer, though, he made a
quick trip to Washington to testify to the Senate Judiciary
Committee's confirmation hearings for one of President Reagan's
judicial nominees.

In 1962, as assistant U.S. Attorney in Phoenix, Brosnahan had been
called to one Election Day polling place where a young Republican poll
watcher was challenging so many Hispanics lined up to vote that the line
had ground to a halt. In his testimony, Brosnahan said
<[link removed]> that the
lawyer who had been doing that challenging was, in fact, the very person
whose nomination was before the Committee.

That person was William Rehnquist, whom the Republican majority on the
Committee and then the Republican majority in the Senate proceeded to
confirm as Chief Justice of the United States. Perhaps due to
Brosnahan's testimony, Rehnquist made no frontal assaults on the
Voting Rights Act while Chief Justice, but Roberts, his successor,
suffered under no such constraints.

So voter suppressors can wear all kinds of robes-white with pointy
hats or black while on the bench. And today, the raiment of DeSantis's
thugs adds new designs to the suppressors' wardrobe options.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

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