Vice President Biden seems to believe that the threats to black Americans’ voting rights are nearly as pervasive and pernicious today as they were 48 years ago when blatant racial discrimination in elections was common:
Biden, the first sitting vice president to participate in the annual re-enactment, said nothing shaped his consciousness more than watching TV footage of the beatings. “We saw in stark relief the rank hatred, discrimination and violence that still existed in large parts of the nation,” he said.
Biden said marchers “broke the back of the forces of evil,” but that challenges to voting rights continue today with restrictions on early voting and voter registration drives and enactment of voter ID laws where no voter fraud has been shown.
In other words, if you support voter ID laws, you are an opponent of voting rights.
Biden’s views were similar to those expressed by the mayor of Baltimore and others:
Today's anniversary of Bloody Sunday reminds us of the ongoing struggle for voter protections.
— Stephanie (SRB) (@MayorSRB) March 3, 2013
Says Julian Bond of the #NAACP on the Voting Rights Act – "Things have changed marginally, but nothing has made it no longer necessary."
— The War Room (@TheWarRoomCTV) February 27, 2013
Almost fifty years later, and voting rights still not secure in the South. Remembering: Bloody Sunday, Revisited http://t.co/AwpfnaFzMk
— Greg Garrett (@Greg1Garrett) March 3, 2013
Watching John Lewis on news. After being beaten fighting 4 voting rights seeing that possibly being undone by SCOTUS is very sad.
— Kathy (@mydoggigi) March 3, 2013
Marchers chanted 'Section 5 must stay alive' as they crossed Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on 48th anniversary of Bloody Sunday
— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) March 3, 2013
Here’s the New York Times reading from the same liberal playbook:
This week’s events in Alabama should remind [the Supreme Court] of the enormous cost many Americans have paid to win the right to vote, and why that remains under persistent threat and must be defended.
As the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky notes, the South has changed since Rep. John Lewis marched from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. Voter-registration and turnout rates there are now similar for whites and blacks. In fact, “in some [states covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act], black voters’ registration and turnout often exceed those of white voters.”
Von Spakovsky concludes:
[T]he barriers that prevented registration and turnout in the covered jurisdictions were eliminated long ago. There is nothing that prevents anyone, black or white, from registering and voting.
He’s right. Yet the Left fights on against imagined enemies, as if nothing has changed during the past half century.
Related:
Justice Scalia speaks truth about the politics of the Voting Rights Act; Liberals freak out
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