The Fight Continues

On Saturday, in Selma, Alabama, a violently repressed march to demand voting rights for all citizens was remembered. Fifty years later, the 1965 Voting Rights Act ? which came to be thanks to that civil rights movement, ? is under attack, threatening to revert much of what was achieved.

In 2013, the conservative faction of the Supreme Court annulled a section of the law which required states and regions with a history of voter suppression to obtain authorization from the Department of Justice to make changes to their electoral laws. A 5-4 decision left Congress to create a new formula to determine which regions in the country deserved this special scrutiny.

Congress has done nothing about this. At the House of Representatives, members Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and John Conyers (D-MI) introduced a bill that went nowhere for lack of support among the Republican majority. In the Senate, not even one Republican would have wanted to support a bipartisan measure of this sort.

Unfortunately, some states with a Republican legislature and governor have taken this moment to impose identification and other requirements at voting sites, stating that they are trying to combat a nonexistent electoral fraud.

Their purpose is to discourage minorities from voting, as well as the poor, the young and the elderly. Fraud exists, but it happens in ballots sent by mail, an occurrence Republicans do not seem interested in investigating.

In the last century, several barriers impeding social and political integration were broken. Still, many of these gains are threatened when, for instance, Texas allows voters to use a gun license as identification but reject student ID cards.

Today, the Voting Rights Act, renewed by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush in their time, lacks Republican support. Half a century has gone by, and voter suppression has been re-emerged. We are going to have to put on the marching shoes left off in Selma, because the struggle is not over