Attorney General Merrick Garland is calling on Congress to act swiftly on voting rights legislation as the nation marks the 56th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act.
“Our society is shaped not only by the rights it declares but also by its willingness to protect and enforce those rights. Nowhere is this clearer than in the area of voting rights,” Garland said in a Thursday op-ed published in The Washington Post.
He emphasized the fact that the Voting Rights Act helped stop states and localities from trying to adopt thousands of discriminatory rules that could have stripped millions of Americans of their rights.
He pointed in particular to the legislation’s “preclearance” clause, which forced areas that had a history of implementing discriminatory policies with regards to voting rights to prove that new proposed legislation was not racially discriminatory. The clause was severely undercut by a 2013 Supreme Court decision.
“Without that authority, the Justice Department has been unable to stop discriminatory practices before they occur. Instead, the Justice Department has been left with costly, time-consuming tools that have many of the shortcomings that plagued federal law prior to 1965,” Garland said.
"Notwithstanding these setbacks, the Justice Department is using all its current legal authorities to combat a new wave of restrictive voting laws. But if the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance provision were still operative, many of those laws would likely not have taken...
Read Full Story: https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/566731-garland-calls-on-congress-to-act-on-voting-rights-in-op-ed
Your content is great. However, if any of the content contained herein violates any rights of yours, including those of copyright, please contact us immediately by e-mail at media[@]kissrpr.com.