August 5, 2005: NORTON CELEBRATES 1965 VOTING RIGHTS ACT BREAKTHROUGH AND ASKS SAME FOR D.C.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 5, 2005
NORTON CELEBRATES 1965 VOTING RIGHTS ACT BREAKTHROUGH
AND ASKS SAME FOR D.C.
Washington, DC — Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) today said that the best way for Congress to celebrate “the truly historic accomplishments of the 1965 Voting Rights Acts on the 40th anniversary” on Saturday, August 7th, is to reauthorize the Act, key provisions of which expire in 2007. However, Norton said, “Even if the 1965 Act is reauthorized without difficulty, there will be serious, unfinished civil rights business for our country until the No Taxation Without Representation Act for the District of Columbia is enacted. Equal rights means equal representation for everyone, including Americans who live in the nation’s capital.” Norton’s D.C. voting rights bill, sponsored in the Senate by Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), “does for D.C. residents what the Voting Rights Act did for disenfranchised Blacks and Hispanics,” she said. Like other Washingtonians who went South to work for voting rights, Norton said that she has taken from that experience the lesson that “bottom-up grass roots determination is necessary to break through injustices with which the country has grown comfortable.”
Norton said that the Act’s abolition of practices such as literacy tests and violent intimidation made it one of the most important statutes in American history because of its “transforming effects on American democracy.” Maryland and Virginia are among the southern states covered by the Act, but D.C., which was also a Southern segregationist jurisdiction, escaped coverage Norton said, sardonically, “because nobody could vote here anyway.”
The Congresswoman said that despite 1965 Act’s breakthrough in bringing black and white Southerners to near registration and voting parity, reauthorization is not certain. Some parts of the Act are permanent, but the special provisions, among them clearance of any local changes in voting procedures by the Justice Department and the requirement of bilingual provisions, expire unless they are reauthorized by 2007. Norton said, “The Act has had tough sledding, especially from Republican administrations and the Supreme Court. Its original strength has been maintained largely because of the insistence of a Democratic controlled Congress. “It will take hard work to keep the Act from being weakened,” she said.
Norton, who heads federal judicial nominations for the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), said that she was “deeply concerned that unexpectedly, equality issues and civil rights for people of color and women are emerging as the most controversial issues in the upcoming nomination hearings of Justice John Roberts for the Supreme Court. “As we embark upon another tough battle for the 1965 Voting Rights Act, we are faced with a nominee who has advised narrowing the Act,” she said. “I believe we will succeed in renewing the Act, but we are guaranteed help neither in Congress nor in the Supreme Court.” Norton said that she was preparing questions on civil rights for the CBC to submit to the Judiciary Committee.
The tough remedial sections of the Act that restrict states and local jurisdictions with a history of discrimination are not permanent but “they are there to accomplish a purpose and that purpose has not been adequately met yet, as the 2000 and 2004 elections make especially clear,” Norton said. “The country spent almost 200 years engaged in deliberate, official actions to keep black people from voting. No one should be surprised that 40 years have not been long enough to sufficiently overcome such deep-seated injustice. In the District, we will be first in line to support reauthorization. We know better than most that no right is more basic in a democracy than the vote, whether for blacks living in Southern states or Americans of every background living in their own capital.”