Now We Get To Work

Well of course they did.

So, we don't get to depend on the Justice Department to protect our voting rights any more.

Because the race to suppress every Democratic voter has already begun.

That means we have to protect our own damn rights.

And that means we can't take state legislative elections for granted any more. Now every single seat counts. Every single vote counts.

We have to make sure that voting rights absolutists run for every single legislative seat and win every single legislative seat.

We have to talk face-to-face to every single Democratic voter out there and say point-blank: there is nothing stopping republicans from taking away your voting rights.  They will block everyone who is not a straight, white, xian male over the age of 40 from voting, and there is not a goddamn thing anybody can do about it.

They are YOUR voting rights: Defend them!

They were given to you by people who literally fought and died for them.

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Civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) urged Congress to enact legislation that would protect the freedom to vote on Tuesday, just hours after the Supreme Court struck down a portion of the Voting Rights Act that stopped discriminatory voting laws from going into effect in areas of the country with histories of disenfranchisement.

In a 5 to 4 opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court ruled that Section 4, which establishes the formula that determines which jurisdictions are subject to federal “preclearance” of changes in election laws, is unconstitutional. Congress will now have to decide which areas of the country still deserve additional federal scrutiny.

 “These men that voted to strip the Voting Rights Act of its power, they never stood in unmovable lines,” Lewis told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “They never had to pass a so-called literacy test. It took us almost 100 years to get where we are today. So will it take another 100 years to fix it, to change it?” he asked.

Congress voted to renew the Voting Rights Act in 1970, 1975, 1982, and 2006, each time with increasingly larger margins. Twenty Republican senators who are still serving in Congress supported re-authorization in 2006 and only 33 members in the House voted against it.

“It is going to be very difficult,” to pass legislation in this Congress, Lewis admitted, “but people said the same thing in 1965.”

 “I think what happened today with the Supreme Court will motivate hundreds and thousands of people, African American, latino, white, Asian American, Native Americans, men, women, students, to come out. The vote is precious.”

SNIP

“I didn’t think that on that day when President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, that I would live to see five members of the United States Supreme Court undoing what President Johnson did with those pens,” Lewis added. “We must not forget our past. We must not forget our history. If we forget it, we will repeat it.”

Defend your right to vote. Even if you have to riot in the streets.