By Patrick J. Buchanan
Is the Second Reconstruction over?
The
first ended with the withdrawal of Union troops from the Southern
states as part of a deal that gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency
after the disputed election of 1876.
The second began with the
Voting Rights Act of 1965, a century after Appomattox. Under the VRA, Southern states seeking to make even minor changes in voting laws had to
come to Washington to plead their case before the Justice Department
and such lions of the law as Eric Holder.
Southern states were
required to get this pre-clearance for any alterations in voting laws
because of systematic violations of the 14th and 15th amendment
constitutional rights of black Americans to equal access to polling
places and voting booths.
The South had discriminated by using
poll taxes, gerrymandering and literacy tests, among other tactics.
Dixie was in the penalty box because it had earned a place there.
What
the Supreme Court did Tuesday, in letting the South out of the box, is
to declare that, as this is not 1965, you cannot use abuses that date to
1965, but have long since disappeared, to justify indefinite federal
discrimination against the American South.
You cannot impose
burdens on Southern states, five of which recorded higher voting
percentages among their black populations in 2012 than among their white
populations, based on practices of 50 years ago that were repudiated
and abandoned in another era.
You cannot punish Southern leaders
in 2013 for the sins of their grandfathers. As Chief Justice John
Roberts noted, black turnout in 2012 was higher in Mississippi than in
Massachusetts.
Does this mean the South is now free to discriminate again?
By no means. State action that discriminates against minority voters can still be brought before the Department of Justice.
Even
the “pre-clearance” provision of the VRA remains. All the court has
said is that if Congress wishes to impose a pre-clearance provision on a
state or group of states, Congress must have more evidence to justify
unequal treatment than what “Bull” Connor did in Birmingham back in
1965.
Congress could pass a bill today authorizing Justice
Department intervention in any state where the registration of blacks,
Hispanics or Asians fell below 60 percent of that electorate.
What
Congress can no longer do is impose conditions on Southern states from
which Northern states are exempt. Washington can no longer treat the
states unequally — for that, too, is a violation of the Constitution.
The Roberts court just took a giant stride to restoring the Union.
Yet the hysterical reaction to the decision reveals a great deal.
What do critics say they are afraid of?
While
conceding that immense progress has been made with the huge turnout of
black voters in the South and the re-election of a black president, they
say they fear that without the pre-clearance provision this would never
have happened. And now that the provision no longer applies to the
South, the evil old ways will return.
On several counts this is disheartening.
For
what the critics of the court decision are saying is that, no matter
the progress made over half a century, they do not trust the South to
deal fairly and decently with its black citizens, without a club over
its head. They do not believe the South has changed in its heart from
the days of segregation.
They think the South is lying in wait for
a new opportunity to disfranchise its black voters. And they think
black Southerners are unable to defend their own interests — without
Northern liberal help.
In this belief there are elements of paranoia, condescension and bigotry.
Many
liberals not only do not trust the South, some detest it. And many seem
to think it deserves to be treated differently than the more
progressive precincts of the nation.
Consider Wednesday’s offering
by Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson. The South, he writes, is
the home of “so-called right-to-work laws” and hostility to the union
shop, undergirded by “the virulent racism of the white Southern
establishment,” a place where a “right-wing antipathy toward workers’
rights” is pandemic.
The South is the “the heartland of
cheap-labor America. … When it wants to slum, business still goes to the
South.” Then there are those “reactionary white Republican state
governments.”
Were a conservative to use the term “black” as a
slur the way Meyerson spits out the word “white,” he would be finished
at the Post. Meyerson’s summation:
“If the federal government
wants to build a fence that keeps the United States safe from the danger
of lower wages and poverty and their attendant ills — and the all-round
fruitcakery of the right-wing white South — it should build that fence
from Norfolk to Dallas. There is nothing wrong with a fence as long as
you put it in the right place.”
Harold looks forward to the day that a surging Latino population forces “epochal political change” on a detestable white South.
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