(The Root) -- In states from Florida to Pennsylvania, Republican Party efforts to diminish minority voting strength for this year's presidential election are a sobering reminder that the struggle for full civil rights is not over. But it's not only black voters who should be concerned about Republican voter-suppression tactics. The GOP's war on voting is a serious attack on the fundamental workings of our democracy. It is, at its core, an attempt to negate the important victories of the early 1960s that laid the foundation of our modern representative democracy.
To understand the breadth of the threat represented by voter-ID laws and other new practices designed to suppress votes in Democratic districts, it's important to realize that the effort to dismantle obstacles to voting rights for black voters in the South during the early 1960s did more than just enfranchise African Americans.
It exposed the myriad ways in which key aspects of the American electoral system were fundamentally unfair for all voters. In particular, the disproportionate power afforded to underpopulated rural jurisdictions over the more populous cities was corrected by the Supreme Court in a series of cases that dismantled the framework of unequal voting power that had existed in the South since the turn of the 20th century.
growing ethnic population all but assures the right wing of obscurity, their desperate fight to maintain status quo is the driving factor behind the enormous amount of lies being bandied about by the republicans.
they are not above usurping the law to accommodate their agenda, but constitutional rights? the same one's they claim to be hawkish about, wanting to return to those rights that they are dispensing with to steal elections.
"take back our country", battle cry of the right, all indicators point to their interpretation of back is way back to those ways of yesteryear's that they are busy trying to re-implement today.
a world of domination and subjugation and their God complex, that only looks appealing to those of that perverted mindset.
In the most important and influential of these decisions, Reynolds v. Sims, the court announced the now internationally recognized bedrock principle of voting equality: one person, one vote. These cases rooted out practices advanced principally in the South that, by weighting votes in favor of rural areas, gave land and cattle greater voting strength than people.
The principles announced in those cases are now such a part of our understanding of fairness in representative democracy that it's hard sometimes to remember that they are only 50 years old. In short, the fight to remove obstacles designed to keep blacks and the undereducated from voting -- like the poll tax, the literacy test and the understanding clause (in which a registrant would be asked to "interpret" a section of the state constitution) -- should be understood within the context of the larger effort to bring equity to a voting system that had been fixed in favor of Southern, rural land-owning elites.
By 1966, after the last of these and other barriers had been removed by the Supreme Court and by the passage of the Voting Rights Act, we'd begun the decades-long battle -- still under way -- to ensure that state and federal officials would enforce the laws that the Supreme Court had upheld. Once these structural barriers to voting were removed, those Southern white Dixiecrats (who formed the base of the modern post-civil rights Republican Party) committed to maintaining their political power and shifted their tactics to adjust to the new normal.
politics have never favored "we the people" money and property dictated who was the leader, the one with the most marbles got to be HMDIC (head MF directly in charge), applicable to "take the country back" rant, more personal to the rich, politics just a catalysis to that end.
