Democrats are pushing another federal takeover of elections with so-called John Lewis Voting Right Advancement Act. It’s a power grab forcing states to get permission from the Democrat-controlled federal government before implementing election integrity measures like voter ID and other constitutional protections.
While the fate of the Corrupt Politicians Act (H.R. 1 and S. 1) remains uncertain, Democrats are preparing to implement Plan B, which seeks to undo the constitutional assumption that states play the primary role in elections and Congress and the federal government have only a narrow role in issues such as race-based voting rights violations.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965, enacted to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment, has two main arguments. One is Section 2, which is a lasting, nationwide ban on all state or local election laws that discriminate on the basis of race or color.
The second was Section 5. This section mandated that certain parts of the country must obtain approval from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) or a federal district court in Washington, D.C., before changing any election laws or redrawing legislative district boundaries after each decennial census.
The Supreme Court upheld preclearance in 1966, noting that Congress had identified some states with the most egregious forms of systematic black voter suppression. Make no mistake: We’re talking about fire hoses, attack dogs, beatings, and other shocking images. The justices made clear that only such extreme circumstances could justify something like preclearance.
This America no longer exists. We now live in a country where black men and women are elected to state offices, and a black man was elected president and a black woman was elected vice president.
In fact, black turnout in 2012 exceeded white turnout.
It’s no wonder then that the Supreme Court overturned part of the approval in 2013. Specifically, the justices struck down a section of the law that specified which states must get preapproval, noting that the data in the law dated back to 1972, more than four decades ancient.
The court said Congress could attempt preemptive review again only if it had data showing where in America the same abhorrent repression was occurring today that occurred in parts of the Deep South in the 1960s.
Instead – because no more terrible things are happening in America – Democrats wrote H.R. 4 in 2019, extending preclearance nationwide to any state that tries to implement election integrity laws.
That’s right: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer are saying every state in America is as bad as the horns, fire hoses, and attack dogs of the past. They’re calling America systemically racist.
And make no mistake: A Biden-Harris administration would oppose any state that tries to implement these common-sense protections. Even if a state can take its case to court, it really comes down to when the DOJ finds a state is violating voting rights.
What’s more, since you have to file your lawsuit in liberal federal court in D.C. and then go to liberal D.C. District Court to appeal, you’d likely have to go all the way to the Supreme Court to win—which could take years. At every turn, media pundits and activists call you a racist for even trying.
Senate Democrats have named S. 4263 — their version of H.R. 4 — the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, after the recently deceased congressman who was one of the leaders of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
This year, Biden, Harris and their Democrats have been pushing HR 1, a complete takeover of elections by the federal government. But no Republicans have supported it in the House or Senate, and key moderate Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) has said he is not willing to blow up a century of filibuster rules in the Senate to get the bill through.
Now, Democrats are preparing to reintroduce the John Lewis Act to the current Congress. If they get it, it would give them much of what they tried to do with HR 1.
One of the engaging dynamics of this change is the outsized role that Manchin is playing in it. Manchin issued a statement with moderate GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) urging Congress to pass this legislation, as opposed to H.R. 1/S. 1, which Murkowski opposes outright and which Manchin has expressed concerns about passing in its current form.
Compare that to John Lewis’s fraudulent bill. Manchin and Murkowski support it, though they have also said the bill should pass “through the regular process” — meaning the normal process with all the rules, including the filibuster rule.
That’s why Democrats are trying to portray this bill as a voting rights bill rather than another takeover attempt, hoping to build public support to convince a few more moderates to concede to this bill.
If a state passes a voter ID law, it automatically has to get preclearance. This is despite the fact that elections to show that a majority of black Americans support requiring ID cards for voters, as do a majority of Latinos.
Same thing with redistricting. If the percentage of racial minorities changes—which happens all the time when people move—that also puts the state in the DOJ for preclearance.
In addition to these categories, this law states that if any state has 10 instances of any voting problems, the entire state will be subject to pre-clearance.
Suppose one city or county in a state implemented some ballot measure, and subsequent statistics show that it affects black voters differently than white voters. Even if no one had intended to discriminate, this measure would still be treated as an incident that would place the entire state under the Department of Justice pre-approval requirement.
It gets worse, though, because the resolution of a lawsuit also counts toward the preliminary hearing. If a Democratic-controlled city in a Republican-friendly state adopts a resolution and is sued by the ACLU, the city will immediately settle the lawsuit, which could be considered a violation. Those of us who have been involved in politics for decades can imagine a Democratic mayor having a dinner party with his ACLU buddies, cooking up something that would trigger a lawsuit, then settling the case before anyone could figure out the whole thing was a fraud. They could raise the number of “violations” to bring the entire GOP stronghold under the purview of the Justice Department.
Legal experts say the bill could be challenged if it ever becomes law. But the Supreme Court has burned conservatives so often that no one should put all their eggs in that basket.
Instead, they should oppose John Lewis’s deceitful Voting Rights Advancement Act, which is designed to usurp a far-left power grab.
Ken Blackwell, former Ohio Secretary of State, serves on the Policy Council of the American Constitutional Rights Association. He is a member of the Board of the Public Interest Legal Foundation and a member of the Family Research Council.
