Block, Siteadmin, SkipCaptcha, Upload, Automoderated users, delete, edit, move, nsTeam2RO, nsTeam2RW, nsTeam2_talkRO, nsTeam2_talkRW, protect, rollback, Administrators, template
295,039
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Line 19:
Line 19: − + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
→-Clinton era=
The Mikulski Commission did away with the secret ballot and required a public declaration in front of the election judges or on registration forms and a party-specific ballot given to the voter to cast.<ref>[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_elections_in_the_United_States#Types_of_primaries]</ref> Now in most states a non-partisan primary voter who wishes to vote for a Democrat for President and a Republican for Senate experiences voter suppression and denial.
The Mikulski Commission did away with the secret ballot and required a public declaration in front of the election judges or on registration forms and a party-specific ballot given to the voter to cast.<ref>[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_elections_in_the_United_States#Types_of_primaries]</ref> Now in most states a non-partisan primary voter who wishes to vote for a Democrat for President and a Republican for Senate experiences voter suppression and denial.
==-Clinton era===
===Clinton era===
In [[Arkansas]], the Clinton administration was sued several times by blacks and [[Hispanic]]s for violations of the 1965 [[Voting Rights Act]] and lost every case. 10 years into their grip on Arkansas the [[United States Supreme Court]] ruled
{{Quotebox|violations of the [[Fourteenth amendment|fourteenth]] or [[fifteenth amendment]] justifying equitable relief have occurred in Arkansas.
In May 1990, the district court turned to those claims, holding that "the State of Arkansas has committed a number of constitutional violations of the voting rights of black citizens." In particular, the court determined that the "State has systematically and deliberately enacted new majority-vote requirements for municipal offices, in an effort to frustrate black political success in elections traditionally requiring only a plurality to win." In 1990...Devotion to majority rule for local offices lay dormant as long as the [[plurality]] system produced white office-holders. But whenever black candidates used this system successfully -- and victory by a plurality has been virtually their only chance of success in at-large elections in majority-white cities – the response was swift and certain. Laws were passed in an attempt to close off this avenue of black political victory...
This series of laws represents a systematic and deliberate attempt to reduce black political opportunity. Such an attempt is plainly unconstitutional. It replaces a system in which blacks could and did succeed, with one in which they almost certainly cannot. The inference of [[bigotry|racial motivation]] is inescapable.<ref>Findings of the Supreme Court of the United States in [http://www.usdoj.gov/osg/briefs/1990/sg900402.txt Clinton vs Jeffers] No. 90-394 (1990) on appeal 730 F. Supp. 196, 198-201 (ED Ark. 1989) (three-judge court), aff'd, No. 89-2008 (Jan. 7, 1991).</ref><ref>http://commonsensewonder.blogspot.com/2016/09/bill-clintons-comment-about-trumps-make.html</ref>}}
In more than one thousand legislative elections, the Arkansas delta region sent not one black to the legislature. In 1988 the federal district court forced a change to the system in Crittenden County that watered down the presence of a large number of black voters.
The case began when blacks in Crittenden County filed a voting rights lawsuit attacking the county's ''at-large'' system for electing two members to the Arkansas House. The suit contended that the system deprived black voters of a chance to elect a black to the state assembly.
The evidence at trial was indeed overwhelming that the Voting Rights Act had been violated. Plaintiffs offered plenty of proof of monolithic voting along racial lines, intimidation of black voters and candidates, other official acts that made voting harder for blacks. A panel of 3 judges ordered Clinton, the Attorney General, and Secretary of State to redraw the boundaries to give maximum strength to black voters.
'''Lani Guinier'''
Local press reports in Arkansas from the late 1980s paint an ugly picture of the [[Clinton administration]]'s attempts to intimidate black voters.<ref>http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readreplies.aspx?subjectid=28880&msgid=18476315</ref> In her 1998 memoir ''Lift Every Voice'', former [[U.S Justice Department]] Civil Rights Division nominee Lani Guinier revealed that Clinton's record on [[race]] in Arkansas was so bad she was forced to take legal action. "As a staff lawyer for the [[NAACP]] Legal Defense and Education Fund [LDF], I had sued Gov. Clinton over Arkansas's deputy voter registration statute." A deputy voter registrar is someone authorized to register voters.
Guinier wrote, "In the late 1980s, in a particularly tense meeting in southeastern Arkansas - a section of the Mississippi Delta region where antebellum social relations are still in many respects the order of the day," Dayna Cunningham, a civil rights lawyer, was "one of a handful of black people there to discuss remedies for a highly contentious LDF voting rights suit. The meeting turned sour when one of the local whites demanded to know why, in his view, the whites were always made to pay for others' problems. Other whites in the group began to echo his charge...Bill Clinton, the lead defendant in the case, took to the podium to respond. In a tone of resignation, Clinton said, 'We have to pay because we lost,'" the inference being the loss of the [[Civil War]] as well as the Clintons' loss in the Supreme Court.
"Clinton had irresponsibly pandered to the backwards feeling of the white constituency," said Cunningham.
No good deed goes unpunished of course, so Guinier was not without her own problems for having unfortunately crossed paths with the Clintons, beginning at Yale. Three years after the ruckus in Arkansas President Clinton nominated her as Deputy Attorney General for Civil Rights. But the Clinton surrogates were lying in wait for her. A media smear campaign not only distorted her views, but in many cases presented them as the exact opposite. The ''New York Times'', which ordinarily presents the Clintons as the wonders of an age, ran an op-ed highly critical of Clinton's appointment, alleging Guinier was in favor of “[[segregation|segregating]] black voters in black-majority districts.” The ''Washington Post'', again no friend of conservatives, twisted Guinier's advocacy of proportional representation into a vision of “a society in which a minority can impose its will on the majority.”
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting says of the ambush and firestorm that surrounded Guinier's nomination:
{{Quotebox|there was also an ideological agenda at work: promoting Clinton’s media-celebrated shift “back to the center.” ... To make her a proper sacrificial offering, however, the establishment media had to reinvent Guinier — transforming a sophisticated advocate of racial reconciliation and participatory democracy into a sinister, [[race baiting|race-baiting]] enemy of the American Way.<ref>http://fair.org/extra/lani-guinier/</ref>}}
The Democrats held both Houses of Congress and the presidency. Guinier's nomination, if the Clintons were serious about it should have been easy. She had been Hillary snd Bill's classmate at Yale. It was classic ''Clintonism'': destroying the life of a friend who was an advocate of racial reconciliation, painting the American people as racist, and promoting themselves. [[George Will]], it has been said, was too stupid and too lazy to actually read her writings. As [[Mike Klonsky]] noted, when the liberal lions of the Democratically controlled Senate, such as [[Ted Kennedy]] and even [[Carole Moseley Braun]] stepped away, now the Clintons could turn a message of reconciliation into repudiation in front of the whole nation.
What's a little misunderstanding among friends? Guinier said she felt betrayed by Clinton, whom she considered a friend since their days together at Yale Law School, and was angered when he called her "anti-democratic," - the person who protected voting rights of African-Americans despite Clinton's fight against it - in a nationally televised address announcing he was scuttling her nomination.<ref>https://www.c-span.org/video/?42098-1/assistant-attorney-general-nomination</ref>
Robert 'Say' MacIntosh is a civil rights activist whom the ''Arkansas Democrat'' newspaper named Arkansan of the Year in the late 1970s for his charitable work with children in Little Rock's housing projects.<ref>[https://web.archive.org/web/20080926012344/http://www.cals.lib.ar.us/butlercenter/manuscripts/collection/mss97-43.html]</ref> MacIntosh unsuccessfully ran for public office under Arkansas's racial gerrymandering and minority [[voter suppression]] laws of the Clinton era, including running as Lieutenant Governor in 1980. He considered challenging Bill Clinton in the 1986 Democratic gubernatorial primary but backed out when another African-American candidate, former anti-poverty agency head W. Dean Goldsby, filed on the last day.
Robert 'Say' MacIntosh is a civil rights activist whom the ''Arkansas Democrat'' newspaper named Arkansan of the Year in the late 1970s for his charitable work with children in Little Rock's housing projects.<ref>[https://web.archive.org/web/20080926012344/http://www.cals.lib.ar.us/butlercenter/manuscripts/collection/mss97-43.html]</ref> MacIntosh unsuccessfully ran for public office under Arkansas's racial gerrymandering and minority [[voter suppression]] laws of the Clinton era, including running as Lieutenant Governor in 1980. He considered challenging Bill Clinton in the 1986 Democratic gubernatorial primary but backed out when another African-American candidate, former anti-poverty agency head W. Dean Goldsby, filed on the last day.