'Lily-white' party's last ditch effort to stymie vote

By Frank Rich, New York Magazine

27 June 13

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Every week, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich talks with contributor Eric Benson about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: the Voting Rights Act suffers a mortal wound.

So how big a setback is yesterday's Court decision - the striking down of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act - for civil rights in this country? And how will it play out politically?

In the short - even the immediate - term, it is a real setback. To take just one example: The Texas voter photo-I.D. law, blocked by a federal court last year, will now go immediately into effect, potentially disenfranchising 800,000 voters, according to the best-versed analyst on voting-rights issues, Ari Berman of The Nation. But the long-term effect of the Court's action, largely because of its political fallout, could be an anti-Republican backlash at the polls. As Chief Justice Roberts himself wrote in yesterday's decision, in the 2012 election, "African-American voter turnout exceeded white voter turnout in five of the six states originally covered" by the law.

Why? Because the GOP was engaged in a nationwide voter-suppression effort last year, and outraged black voters were highly motivated to vote no matter how long the lines or other hoops they had to jump through. Now that the Court has given state and local jurisdictions a green light to pursue even more egregious voter-suppression efforts, it has also given the right a gun with which to shoot itself. Outraged Hispanic and Asian voters may well join black voters in both political activism and stepped-up Election Day turnout to counter a lily-white party's last-ditch efforts to use anti-democratic stunts to thwart the tidal wave of demographic change that threatens it.