GOP facing tough choices over Voting Rights Act

ATLANTA??? When the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights act last week, it handed Republicans tough questions with no easy answers over how, and where, to attract voters even GOP leaders say the party needs to stay nationally competitive. ' The decision caught Republicans between newfound state autonomy that conservatives covet and the law?s popularity among minority, young and poor voters who tend to align with Democrats. It?s those voters that Republicans are eyeing to expand and invigorate the GOP?s core of older, white Americans.

National GOP Chairman Reince Priebus began that effort well before the court?s decision by promising, among other initiatives, to hire non-white party activists to engage directly with black and Latino voters. Yet state and national Republicans reacted to the Voting Rights Act decision with a flurry of activity and comments that may not fit neatly into the national party?s vision.

Congressional leaders must decide whether to try to rewrite the provision the court struck, but it?s not clear how such an effort would fare in the Democratic-led Senate and the GOP-controlled House. And at the state level, elected Republicans are enacting tighter voting restrictions that Democrats blast as harmful to their traditional base of supporters and groups the Republicans say they want to attract.

States like North Carolina and Virginia provide apt examples of the potential fallout. An influx of non-whites have turned those Republican strongholds into battlegrounds in the last two presidential elections, and minority voters helped President Barack Obama win both states in 2008 and Virginia again in 2012. Nationally, Republican Mitt Romney lost among African-Americans by about 85 percentage points and Latinos by about 44 percentage points, margins that virtually ensure a Democratic victory.

Yet presidential math doesn?t necessarily motivate Republicans who control statehouses and congressional districts in states most affected by the Voting Rights Act. Core GOP supporters in the region react favorably to voter identification laws and broad-based critiques of federal authority.

Against that backdrop, Southern Republicans celebrated Chief Justice John Roberts? opinion that effectively frees all or parts of 15 states with a history of racial discrimination from having to get advanced federal approval for any election procedure.

The so-called ?preclearance? provision anchored the law that Congress renewed four times since its 1965 passage as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement for black Americans. The law contains an ?opt-out? provision that allowed a jurisdiction to ask a federal court for release from preclearance if it has established a record of non-discrimination. Roberts said that process ? never used successfully by an entire state ? wasn?t enough.

?The court recognized that states can fairly design our own (district) maps and run our own elections without the federal government,? Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said in a statement.

Citizens can still sue to overturn state laws, but they?ll likely have to prove discrimination after the fact, rather than local authorities having to convince federal officials in advance that a law wouldn?t discriminate.

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, a Republican running for governor, said: ?I do not believe we have the institutional bigotry like we had before.?

GOP officials in Texas and Mississippi promised within hours of the decision to enforce new laws requiring voters to show identification at polls. The U.S. Justice Department?s civil rights lawyers had frozen the Mississippi law while they considered effects on minority voters, while a panel of federal judges in Washington blocked the Texas law because of its potential to harm low-income and minority voters. North Carolina Republicans said they?d enact their own voter identification law. Texas Gov. Rick Perry signed new congressional district maps ? tilted to Republican advantage ? that federal authorities would have had to review.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., who helped lead the law?s latest reauthorization when the GOP ran Congress in 2006, said the court ?disappointed? him. Lingering discrimination, he said, compels Congress to update the act, ?especially for minorities.?

Source: http://www.telegram.com/article/20130705/NEWS/107059790/1160/SPECIALSECTIONS04&source=rss

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