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 at 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.
—Al Letson
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