Page 18 - Preclearance News Today

Second. sure, you know, on the one hand the elections were overseen by state monitors, they operated under a consent agreement and they produced no evidence really of wrongdoing outside of this -- nick said those few votes that were reversed. but on the other hand, you know, the democrats won. so i think thats their cause to investigate and pass this law, that the democrats won, and they won by 380,000 votes here. they are using that to try and supplant the entire election system. i mean i think...

Hill. there is growing pressure on the biden administration to push congress to get this done. to some, that means eliminating the filibuster. where do you come down on this, congresswoman? >> well, if the senate cannot get the votes, the senate needs to see voting rights as so crucial that the filibuster does not apply. i want to be clear, though, for your viewers. hr-1 passed the house. >> right. >> the house passed hr-1 early in the session. we are waiting on the senate. now, for hr-4, we are...

Option as you see it? is it practical to think that voting rights advocates can fight this out state by state, court by court? >> the history told us that doing it that way is very hard. while litigation and fights in the courts are an important piece of the movement for voting rights and inclusion, theyre only one piece. and a larger remedy that would try and block some of these things before they happen as the preclearance provision did would be a lot better and a lot more effective than havin...

Ultimately gutted the preclearance requirement which said that states with a history of racial discrimination in voting had to get preclearance before they made any changes. talk about what the erosion of the voting rights act means for the whole host of laws that were seeing passed now. >> the supreme court has substantially cut back the major tools in blocking and deterring voting discrimination. it makes it harder for voting activists like vote activists to fight back against the measures tha...

Left. and we agree that something has to be done in the form of even if its something very narrow that just addresses voting rights and what is most important to us is having something in there that gives preclearance. that is very important for states like texas. hes in agreement with that. >> hes in agreement with that. i know weve been hearing that line quite frequently about and we are looking at some pictures there of activists protesting voting rights. it is a growing concern, obviously. y...

Met based on that meeting with senator joe manchin? >> im not sure i understand there are procedural things that still have to get worked out within the senate democratic caucus here in congress. so we dont know the details of that. but we certainly press that we have weeks, a very short window of time and our special session ends on august 8. we know that governor abbott will immediately call another one. >> can you just tell us quickly, you know, in a few seconds if you dont mind specifically ...

Bernovic ruling. >> the landscape for folks, whether theyre justice department lawyers or civil rights litigators in private practice who seek to push back against these new state legislative moves that are an overreach, that cut into folks rights to vote is very bleak because of what the supreme court has done. in 2013 in shelby county versus holder, the supreme court gutted a procedure called preclearance. preclearance was a requirement that the justice department or three judges in the distri...

Easier for folks to exercise their right to vote, as well as hr-4, the john lewis voting rights act which would restore essentially what shelby county took away, restoring preclearance and making it more difficult for people to discriminate against folks who are just trying to exercise their right to vote. >> mike memoli, we learned last hour via a white house official that vice president harris is going to be meeting with that group of texas democrats who left the state to block those republica...

And neither congress nor the courts can be counted on to protect voting rights, especially for communities of color, who often see them infringed. where do we go from here? >> look, rev, i did appreciate your exchange with steny hoyer about this, because what oui seen with roberts is not only this decision where conservative justices have really shown up and shown out for the gop essentially, empowering states to go even further, but we also know in 2013 they took away section 5 with a precleara...

>> well, first of all, the shelby decision based on the voting rights act was back in 2013, chris. we should have been working on this and weve had an awful lot of time for whatever reason and never came up to the point to where people thought they had to do anything. who would do anything as outrageous as what were seeing after the 20120 election? so we could have gotten -- i think the directions from john roberts who wrote the opinion was basically correct how you evaluate and basically how yo...