What’s Next , Lynching Blacks Who Try To Vote?

Some of you may recall me say­ing from time to time that I fun­da­men­tal­ly believed for years now that African-Americans have fall­en asleep in their beliefs that the war has been won against racism.
I was nev­er con­vinced that there was any gain not won by the sheer pow­er of arms that could not be reversed.
When you depend on the same peo­ple and insti­tu­tions that have sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly abused you for hun­dreds of years to find the bet­ter angels with­in them­selves sud­den­ly, your path to jus­tice becomes even more tedious.
When there are no bet­ter angels (in fact, there are no angels at all), with­in those on whom you depend to do the right thing, yet you con­tin­ue to wait for those bet­ter angels, even a sin­gle angel to emerge from the dev­ils, then.….….….….….…..

The Trump vot­er fraud, stop the steal lie, was a cal­cu­lat­ed move designed to steal the pres­i­den­tial elec­tions in 2020 that even Republican offi­cials deemed the fairest elec­tions ever.
But the dark and murky intent behind the Trump lie was far more sin­is­ter than just the plan to steal the pres­i­den­tial elec­tions; it was designed to lay the ground­work for an all-out assault on vot­ing rights across the country.
When Black Americans vote, Democrats win. Republicans do not get the Black vote because they are opposed to Black autonomy.
But the fix was in for the new­ly found pow­er African-Americans were flex­ing, [par­tic­u­lar­ly after they came out in num­bers and elect­ed Barack Obama, the nation’s first African-American President in 2008, and again when they showed out and elect­ed a Jew and a Black preach­er in the heart of ‘dix­ie.’
Barack Obama was re-elect­ed in 2012, but by 2013, the Republican major­i­ty on the US Supreme Court led by Chief jus­tice Jon Roberts a Reagan admin­is­tra­tion lawyer opposed to vot­ing rights, evis­cer­at­ed Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act as uncon­sti­tu­tion­al in its June 25, 2013, rul­ing. … The Court declared that the Fifteenth Amendment “com­mands that the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of race or col­or, and it gives Congress the pow­er to enforce that command.

Writing for Politico Magazine in August of 2015, Ari Berman wrote; Just months before Roberts came to Washington, the Supreme Court had sig­nif­i­cant­ly lim­it­ed the scope of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965. As a young lawyer, Roberts eager­ly took up the con­ser­v­a­tive cause, becom­ing a key foot sol­dier in the effort to pre­serve that deci­sion and weak­en the VRA. It was a fight Roberts would con­tin­ue decades lat­er when he replaced Rehnquist as chief jus­tice and authored the major­i­ty opin­ion in a land­mark case gut­ting the VRA in 2013. Fifty years after the pas­sage of the land­mark civ­il rights law and 35 years after he first worked so hard to dis­man­tle it, Roberts remains at the cen­ter of an impas­sioned debate about vot­ing rights in America, one that shows no signs of end­ing any­time soon.
John Roberts clerked for William Rehnquist; an avowed ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive Berman wrote, “Rehnquist’s oppo­si­tion to civ­il rights laws on fed­er­al­ism grounds and the rebrand­ing of that oppo­si­tion as prin­ci­pled “col­or blind­ness” would become a sta­ple of con­ser­v­a­tive jurispru­dence on civ­il rights issues.
In 1952, as a 28-year-old clerk to Justice Robert Jackson, William Rehnquist wrote; “It is about time the Court faced the fact that the white peo­ple of the South do not like the col­ored peo­ple,” “The Constitution restrains them from effect­ing this dis­like through state action, but it most assured­ly did not appoint the Court as a soci­o­log­i­cal watch­dog to rear up every time pri­vate dis­crim­i­na­tion rais­es its admit­ted­ly ugly head.”
John Roberts, the present Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, was indoc­tri­nat­ed by the Rehnquist ide­ol­o­gy. It was that hatred for Black-Americans’ civ­il rights that led to John Roberts and his cronies strik­ing down Section 4(b) of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that has led to this new Jim Crow 2.0 attack on the rights of African-Americans & Native-Americans to vote.

Section 4(b) con­tains the cov­er­age for­mu­la that deter­mines which juris­dic­tions are sub­ject to pre­clear­ance based on their his­to­ries of dis­crim­i­na­tion in voting.
Section 4(b) of the land­mark 1965 Act man­dat­ed that offi­cials in states like Alabama, which has made it dif­fi­cult and in some cas­es impos­si­ble for minori­ties to vote, could pass no elec­tion laws that impact­ed vot­ing unless the law passed Federal clearance.
By strik­ing down sec­tion 4(b), John Roberts and his cabal on the high­est court flung the doors wide open for states to embark on a new set of vot­er-sup­pres­sion laws like the ones we are wit­ness­ing in Republican-run states, and the law passed by the Republican leg­is­la­ture in Georgia and signed by their Governor Brian Kemp sur­round­ed by white men under a por­trait of a slave plantation.

The American Democracy is now caught up in a cyclonic whirl­wind of anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic activ­i­ties engi­neered by Republicans, geared at wip­ing out lit­er­al­ly all of the gains achieved by the civ­il rights strug­gles over 50-years ago.
Regardless of what even­tu­al­ly occurs in response to the Jim Crow laws Brian Kemp signed, those chal­lenges will end up, you guessed it,(a) before John Roberts, a man whose life’s work has been open oppo­si­tion to the right of African-Americans to vote,(b) the same man who vot­ed to strike down sec­tion 4(b), Neil Gorsuch who ille­git­i­mate­ly sits in the seat in which Merrick Garland should be, Brett Kavanaugh who it is alleged no real FBI back­ground check was done on for alleged improp­er actions against women, the likes of Amey Coney Barrett who was ille­git­i­mate­ly foist­ed on to the court, Samuel Alito & Clarence Thomas a negro who thinks he is white.
This is fur­ther enhanced by the timid­i­ty of the Democratic Party and indi­vid­ual elect­ed mem­bers of that par­ty based on that par­ty’s iden­ti­ty politics.
Frozen in fear of los­ing their per­son­al seats, indi­vid­ual politi­cians like Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly place their own polit­i­cal sur­vival over the agen­da of the vot­ers who elect­ed them to office.
So even when the Democrats have the major­i­ty, seri­ous and con­se­quen­tial issues like vot­ing ‑rights, end­ing the fil­i­buster in the Senate, and adding more jus­tices to the supreme court to right the wrongs per­pe­trat­ed on the nation by Mitch McConnell in the Merrick Garland case can­not get done.
Republicans know that Democrats are squea­mish; they know they are afraid to go bold and big even when most American peo­ple vot­ed them into pow­er to do the big, bold things.
Stricken with fear of the minor­i­ty par­ty and divi­sion in their ranks, the Democrats who now con­trol the White House, the Senate, and the House, are unable to pass their agenda.
Republicans could care less; when they have the pow­er, they change the rules to suit them­selves and ram through their agen­da while the Democrats whine like puny babies.
When Democrats do not do the same, Republicans make the case that, ‘see when you elect them, they do noth­ing, so elect us.’ And they are again giv­en the pow­er to cause more harm.
In addi­tion to that, Democratic vot­ers refuse to vote In off-year elec­tions; this gives Republicans con­trol of state leg­is­la­tures and the abil­i­ty to define con­gres­sion­al dis­trict lines and auton­o­my on state laws, even in so-called blue states.
For exam­ple, in Georgia, the same vot­ers who gave Joe Biden the state in 2020 and elect­ed two demo­c­ra­t­ic US Senators also have the pow­er to elect Democrats. Still, they sit on their hands and allow Republicans to wield pow­er they should not have as a minor­i­ty party.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.