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Banned
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The milestones that measured progress in the areas of racial, gender, and income equality, and the equal opportunity to vote, came as a result of weakening the "states rights" movement, during the 20th century, not by strengthening it.
I look forward to reading where the significant advocacy for strengthening states rights is coming from, and how it is measured......polling results, etc.
States Rights is an anachronism that harkens back to a dismal, intolerant time in American history. I know that advancing it's theme is part and parcel to the message, turned into reality via the current administration, that the federal government is not competent to accomplish anything. They've intentionally made it that way. It needs new, accountable management, not the dismantling that the people who advocated for and brought about it's dismal, recent performance record, intend for it.
The same folks who support states rights, proclaiming that this...or that...is best left up to each state to decide, or manage...because the federal government "can do nothing right"...are the folks who advocate for "a strong military", and national security apparatus, as if "the purpose", somehow minimizes the incompetency that they perceive permeates all other government functions. FEMA under James Lee Witt in the 90's was transformed....in reverse....by Bush, Brownie, and DHS...and the degradation that resulted, can be reversed, just as the decline in the DOJ can be reversed.
There is no going back....states rights caused a war.....it ended in 1865. It's the 21st century, and conservatism is not what raised the level of rights and protections of women, minorities, and for those working for wages, during the 20th century, and it is certainly not the solution today....
Quote:
http://usinfo.state.gov/scv/Archive/...15-884794.html
The Voting Rights Act in Perspective
By Micheal Jay Friedman
Washington File Staff Writer
.....What The Voting Rights Act Does
The problem was not that African-Americans lacked the legal right to vote -- as we have seen, the Fifteenth Amendment already barred racial discrimination in voting rights -- but rather that some state and local officials had systematically deprived blacks of those rights. The Voting Rights Act accordingly authorized the federal government to assume control of the voter registration process in any state or voting district that in 1964 had employed a literacy or other qualifying test and in which fewer than half of voting age residents had either registered or voted. Six entire southern states were thus "covered," as were a number of counties in several other states. Covered jurisdictions were prohibited from modifying their voting rules and regulations without first affording federal officials the opportunity to review the change for discriminatory intent or effect. Other provisions barred the future use of literacy tests and directed the Attorney General to commence legal action to end the use of poll taxes in state elections.
The introduction of federal "examiners" ended the mass intimidation of potential minority voters. By the end of 1965, the five states of the "Deep South" alone registered 160,000 new African-American voters. By 2000, African-American registration rates trailed that of whites by only 2 percent. In the South, where in 1965 only 2 African-Americans served either in Congress or a state legislature, the number today is 160.
The VRA was originally enacted for a 5-year period but it has been both extended and expanded to introduce new requirements, such as the provision of bilingual election materials. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan signed a 25-year extension of the VRA. "The right to vote is the crown jewel of American liberties," he said, "and we will not see its luster diminished."
Conclusion
Writing in 2005, Representative John Lewis lauded the "tremendous progress since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965." Forty years ago, he continued,<b> only 7% of eligible black Mississippians were registered to vote. The figure today is 70%, and 71 Members of Congress boast of African American, Latino, Native American, or Asian descent.</b> The VRA, he concluded "has indeed been successful and has revolutionized enfranchisement in America during the past forty years."
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Quote:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...n9398915/pg_34
Lincoln, the Declaration, and the "Grisly, Undying Corpse of States' Rights": History, Memory, and Imagination in the Constitution of a Southern Liberal
Georgetown Law Journal, Apr 2004 by Forbath, William E
<< Page 1 Continued from page 33. Previous | Next
From the late 1930s onward, the White House and the non-southern branches of the New Deal Democrats in Congress championed not only broadened labor standards and social insurance but also anti-lynching and antidiscrimination legislation; they were met by eloquent southern Democrats' appeals to Slaughter-House and the Civil Rights Cases and to the congressional Constitution of states' rights and limited federal authority to interfere with local "race and domestic matters" such as welfare and employment. Administration figures like Eleanor Roosevelt and Henry Wallace and leading New Deal lawmakers like Robert Wagner insisted that the future of New Deal reform hinged on attacking Jim Crow and Southern disenfranchisement. They nudged FDR to step into a number of 1938 primary elections in the South, with the aim of defeating reactionary Democrats.283 Roosevelt openly assailed the South's congressional bloc for stymying New Deal reforms simply because those reforms threatened the South's "feudal economic system."284 The president found enthusiastic support among southern labor and tenant farmers, but this support did not translate into defeat for the reactionaries285 because the poll tax and other restrictions kept these supporters from voting.286
Roosevelt's campaign to elect southern liberals did inspire the founding of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare (SCHW), a biracial coalition of southern trade unionists and civil rights activists funded by the CIO to attack disenfranchisement and carry out the liberal realignment of the Democratic Party.287 "There is another South," SCHW President Clark Foreman assured the CIO Executive Committee, "composed of the great mass of small farmers, the sharecroppers, the industrial workers white and colored, for the most part disenfranchised by the poll tax and without spokesmen either in Congress, in their state legislatures or in the press."288 This South, he claimed, was the great majority of the region's population.289 Were this majority mobilized and enabled to vote, the South would become "the most liberal region in the Nation."290
In 1944, the Supreme Court decided Smith v. Allwright, declaring Texas's all-white primary unconstitutional;291 this decision combined with a generous influx of money and black and white organizers from the CIO to produce an extraordinary voter registration drive in the South.292 New Dealers of the North and South hoped to witness a test of Foreman's hypothesis that a latent, biracial, liberal majority existed among the South's disenfranchised citizens. In a few southern states like Alabama and Georgia, the number of black and poor white voters increased severalfold.293 A black leader in Birmingham evoked "those 'first bright days of Reconstruction . . . [which] gave to our region its first democratic governments.' It was time, he said, for 'history to repeat itself.'"294
Instead, however, the SCHW's voting drive was put down by force and fraud. This only confirmed that such a southern movement could not prevail without national support. But the national government and the party system from which such support would have had to emerge were too deeply mired in states' rights and white supremacy, too tied to political bosses like Texas's Jim and "Ma" Ferguson. The Solid South's ongoing defeat of Reconstruction and its promise of national civil and political rights-the "grisly, undying corpse of states' rights"-ensured the defeat of national social and economic rights to work and livelihood in the 1930s and 1940s....
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