In August 1965, law student Mitch McConnell was in his twenties and a veteran of the Washington March for Employment and Freedom, where he heard Martin Luther King Jr. deliver the “I have a dream” speech.
McConnell stopped by the office of a popular and respected Republican senator from his home state, Kentucky, John Sherman Cooper, to say hello. McConnell had interned there. McConnell followed Cooper toward the Capitol Rotunda when Cooper explained that President Lyndon Johnson was about to sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
It was, for young McConnell, such an important moment that he would describe it in the first 40 pages of his 2016 memoir, “Long Game”. But for critics of McConnell, a group that sparked more open disapproval after the death of Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., Last week, the story also highlights the ideological distance McConnell has traveled over voting rights. For his critics, McConnell is the most critical and powerful opponent of protecting American voting rights. As the Senate Majority Leader, McConnell, 78, has declined to hold hearings or present an amendment to the Voting Rights Act that the House passed in December for a Senate vote.
“There are few people in our nation’s history like John Lewis,” said Kristen Clarke, president and CEO of the National Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, a civil rights organization. “Voting rights were the project of his life. He put his body on the line. Mitch McConnell has issued this statement in which he appears to express remorse for the death of John Lewis, but continues, personally, to put his hand in the path of restore the nation – the most important civil rights law. “
McConnell and his staff did not respond to requests for comment on the record, but did provide background information. The Lawyers Committee joined six other inherited civil rights organizations on Thursday to send a letter to McConnell and three other senior senators demanding action on the House amendment.
The amendment includes a new formula that states should be subject to prior federal authorization before making any changes to voting, and would renew the authority for enforcement and oversight of federal voting rights. It is a response to the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby v. Holder.
The decision invalidated sections of the Voting Rights Act, which allowed the federal government to block voting policies and procedures that undermine voters of color. And, voting rights advocates say, it triggered an almost immediate wave of voter suppression efforts.
“Within a few hours of that decision,” the organizations wrote, “jurisdictions previously covered by the law, such as Texas and North Carolina, took steps to pass and implement laws that later proved discriminatory, only after costly and slow litigation. “
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In many ways, McConnell’s position on voting rights has always mirrored that of his party, said Charles Bullock, Richard B. Russell professor of political science at the University of Georgia.
In the mid-1960s, men like Johnson and King lobbied hard for the Voting Rights Act. But perhaps it never would have happened if it weren’t for what happened to activists like Lewis, then 25, at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, Bullock said.
In March 1965, Alabama police and others beat, arrested and tormented a group of voting rights activists trying to march on the bridge. Lewis, who was in the group, suffered a skull fracture. The main networks broadcast images of the bloody interaction, disrupting Sunday night’s primetime schedule.
“Monday morning, up north, people flooded the Capitol PBX,” Bullock said. “They had just seen the most disturbing thing. All these people want is to vote, and they were brutally beaten … That really got Congress going to make this happen.”
Most Republicans and Democrats in Congress passed the Voting Rights Act.
After law school, McConnell, the great-great-grandson of slavers, joined the staff of a moderate Republican in Congress, practiced law in Kentucky, and then returned to Washington to work in the Justice Department of the Ford administration. Among his coworkers: the future Supreme Court judge Antonin Scalia.
In the late 1970s, McConnell won a nomination for the Jefferson County executive. Jefferson County includes Louisville, one of the state’s largest population centers, with many Democrats. This was still a time in the nation when large numbers of white Southerners split their tickets, voting for Republican and Democratic presidential candidates elsewhere, Bullock said. Therefore, it is not surprising that McConnell once favored labor rights and expanded access to health care and civil rights protection, said Kentucky State Representative Charles Booker. In his 2016 memoirs, McConnell denounced those problems.
Booker, who was born two weeks before McConnell was elected to the Senate in 1984, is the state’s youngest black lawmaker. He does not recall a time when McConnell did not have a heavy hand in Kentucky and national politics.
“You know, the reason I decided to go into politics in the first place is because it’s really out of survival,” said Booker, who narrowly lost a Democratic primary bet to replace McConnell in June. Instead, Booker will head a nonprofit civic engagement organization called Hood to the Holler, a reference to his work trying to politically unite underserved urban and rural areas.
McConnell joined the Senate during the Reagan era, when Republicans like President Ronald Reagan and Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina publicly opposed renewing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a law that had always included suspension provisions. Bullock said. But in 1986, Lewis, the activist-turned-politician, had become a member of Congress. In the House, Lewis defended and won the Voting Rights Act renewals in 1986 and 2006. McConnell voted in favor of the bill both times.
Although the latest renewal was approved, most Republicans by then, including McConnell, argued that the provisions that allowed the federal government to eliminate voting changes in certain places were unfair and unnecessary, Bullock said. In 1987, Abigail Thernstrom described the law enforcement provisions as “an instrument for affirmative action in the electoral sphere.” President George W. Bush, a Republican, later named Thernstrom Vice President of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.
Party logic: So much had changed in the South since 1965. Black voter turnout had grown steadily. The Congressional Black Caucus included dozens of members, and hundreds of blacks and other members of racial and ethnic minority groups held state and local public office.
What was long considered “sacred law,” a central element of the American civil rights law, a Voting Rights Act with federal enforcement provisions, had become an issue shrouded in “hyperpartisanship” and spiteful debate. and open, Clarke said. Booker sees McConnell as the center of that.
“For McConnell, I think, there is no plan, no idea to honor the legacy of someone like Congressman John Lewis, who fought for everything Mitch McConnell is actively trying to block now,” Booker said. “So to say you’re mourning the loss of Congressman Lewis is really a slap in the face. It’s the height of hypocrisy.”
In 2016, McConnell’s decision to block a vote on President Barack Obama’s candidate to replace Scalia in the Supreme Court after Scalia’s unexpected death ensured that the small government favored by Republicans, anti-Republican policies and efforts Right to rights to hinder access to voting, such as gerrymandering and voter identification laws – would resist a legal challenge, said Christopher Browning, professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During the Trump years, McConnell has lobbied the Senate to approve a record number of young and conservative federal judges, people with lifetime appointments. McConnell has said he has achieved everything he wants.
“In addition to what it has done to the judiciary, its role in voting rights has been absolutely terrible,” Browning said. “But this is how your party deals with the nightmare of demographics moving in the wrong direction for the Republican Party … How does it block that? It creates systems and elections that don’t include everyone. So, I have described Mitch McConnell as the gravedigger of American democracy. “
CORRECTION (July 27, 2020, 9:40 p.m. ET): An earlier version of this article misidentified political science professor Richard B. Russell at the University of Georgia. He is Charles Bullock, not Richard B. Russell.
