Consider This from NPR - Democrats Assail 'Jim Crow' Assault On Voting Rights. So What's Their Plan?

Episode Date: July 14, 2021

In a speech this week, President Biden said Democrats must 'vigorously challenge' what he described as the '21st Century Jim Crow assault' on voting rights, attacking Republican-led state efforts to pass new voting restrictions. Democrats, Vice President Kamala Harris told NPR, must respond on multiple levels: "It will be litigation, legislation, it will be activating the people." Harris spoke to NPR political correspondent Asma Khalid. Hear more on the NPR Politics Podcast via Apple, Google, or Spotify.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Last year, a man in Harris County, Texas, waited more than six hours to vote. I want to get my vote in, and I'm not going to let nothing stop me. Hervis Rogers was the very last voter in line. Hervis Rogers was one of the last people to vote in the Democratic primary on Super Tuesday in Houston. I've been here for like five hours, but I got to finish the job, though. And it made him the subject of a lot of national news coverage, including on NPR. Rogers was the last to vote at the polling site at 1 a.m. That was last year. This week, in a story that says a lot about the fight over voting rights in

this country, Hervis Rogers was arrested for voting in that election. Waiting six hours to vote could end up costing this Houston man years in prison. His attorney says it was an honest mistake. Rogers didn't know that under Texas election law, which is among the most restrictive in the country, he was not eligible to vote. And that's because he was on parole stemming from burglary charges decades before. His parole status, well, it was due to expire just three months after he voted. He was arrested just a day before the Texas legislature began a special session that would have considered a new law that would make it even harder to vote. The Texas bill would mandate new ID requirements for voting by mail

and ban drive-thru voting sites and 24-hour voting. Similar laws that opponents say disproportionately affect people of color have already been passed in more than a dozen Republican-controlled states. They've come, of course, in the wake of the 2020 election and former President Trump's false claims of widespread fraud. In Texas, state Democrats are blocking the latest bill the only way they can, by not being in Texas. They've fled to Washington, D.C., making it procedurally impossible for Republicans to move forward.

And they met with Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday. Defending the right of the American people to vote is as American as apple pie. Harris told those Texas Democrats that they made her think of other milestones for American voting rights, like the March for Women's Suffrage in 1913 or the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. In 2021, the Texas legislature came to Washington, D.C. But just how high are the stakes for voting rights now compared to other points in history? And if they are as high as Democrats say, what's their plan? NPR put that question to the vice president. We'll have her answer coming up.

It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Adi Cornish. It's Wednesday, from NPR. I'm Adi Kornish. It's Wednesday, July 14th. about 50% less than retail. Visit s-double-a-t-v-a-dot-com-slash-npr-today, where NPR listeners save an additional $200. Satva, the comfort company. The economy is changing so fast right now, and sometimes it seems like there's something new to worry about every day. On the indicator from Planet Money, we bring you human stories and easy to understand explanations to help you make sense of these crazy times. All in just 10 minutes a day. That's The Indicator from Planet Money.

It's Consider This from NPR. Hervis Rogers, that Texas man arrested on voter fraud charges, he's out on bond awaiting trial. He faces decades in prison if he's convicted for knowingly voting when he wasn't supposed to. Prosecuting people like him has been a crusade of the Texas State Attorney General, Republican Ken Paxton. In Texas, we are going to fight election fraud. Paxton spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference this week. He also led the state of Texas in its failed attempt to challenge the 2020 presidential election at the Supreme Court. And we were told by a Supreme Court that we had no standing.

Amazing. But our fight is not done. And when people tell you there is no election fraud, let me just tell you, my office right now has 511 counts in court because of COVID waiting to be heard. Setting aside the fact that some 11 million people voted in Texas, a say President Trump won by several hundred thousand votes, saying 511 voter fraud counts are, quote, waiting to be heard. Well, it isn't the whole story because those counts often do not translate into convictions. According to a report from the Houston Chronicle, in 2020, Paxton's office spent nearly twice as much time working on fraud cases as it did in 2018, logging more than 22,000 staff hours. Yet the office resolved just 16 cases, and all involved Harris County residents who gave false addresses on their voter registration forms. None received any jail time. And according to an analysis by the Chronicle, since 2015, 72 percent of Paxton's voter fraud prosecutions have targeted people of color. The proposed Texas law would open even more up to prosecution, creating a slew of new criminal penalties and requirements

for people who assist voters at the polls or assist others planning to vote by mail. Republicans in Texas say the law is preventative, that it would stop voter fraud from becoming a bigger problem and help maintain confidence in the election process. The 21st century Jim Crow assault is real. It's unrelenting. And we're going to challenge it vigorously. In a speech on Tuesday at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, President Biden once again called on Congress to pass the For the People Act. That's the sweeping voting and elections bill that Democrats see as a counterweight to restrictive new voting measures in red states

and to a conservative Supreme Court, which recently gutted key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Now, the For the People Act is stalled in Congress. Republicans are blocking it. Legislation is one tool, but not the only tool. And it's not the only measure of our obligation to defend democracy today. For example... Now, Biden pointed to recent Justice Department action to challenge a restrictive new voting law in Georgia. But what he didn't say in that speech was something many progressive Democrats want to hear,

that laws to expand voting rights must be passed even if it means a change to the Senate filibuster rules. Well, here's what I'll say. I believe that of all of the issues that the United States Congress can take up, the right to vote is the right that unlocks all the other rights. And for that reason, it should be one of its highest priorities. In an interview with NPR this week,

Vice President Kamala Harris also pushed Congress to take up voting rights. But she was noncommittal about filibuster reform and said only that conversations about it are happening behind closed doors. I'm certainly having conversations with folks. Notably, Harris seemed to acknowledge that the best option the administration has is just the raw political tool to try and get more Democrats to show up and vote. We have to address this issue on many levels, and it will be litigation, legislation. It will be activating the people.

It will be about informing the people about their rights, organizing, registering folks to vote so that they can understand how these laws will impact their lives. You can hear more of the vice president's interview with NPR's Asma Khalid in a recent episode of the NPR Politics podcast. Here's a link to that in our episode notes. As you heard earlier, Democrats have repeatedly compared today's fight over voting rights to historic milestones from the eras of women's suffrage and civil rights. And we wanted to ask an expert if those comparisons really hold up. I would not deny that things are better now, but history is not a one-way street. Back in 1964, Bernard Wasso was a junior in college, and he was one of many white volunteers

who joined the Freedom Summer of Activists who went to Mississippi to register Black voters. We were being brought down because the Black civil rights movement was just not in the news. If people were killed, if people were gassed, nobody heard about it. Bernard's son Omar, who identifies as Black, grew up hearing stories about that time. if people were gassed, nobody heard about it.

Bernard's son Omar, who identifies as Black, grew up hearing stories about that time. I'm Omar Wasso. I am a professor at Pomona College in the politics department. And today, Omar uses data and statistics to understand the effectiveness of political movements. My research looked at protests in the 1960s and found nonviolent civil rights protests were significantly more effective than violent protests, and particularly when the state engaged in violent repression of civil rights protesters, and that that worked through the media coverage, which was very much shaped by what was happening on the ground. That is not where things are, at least not yet. When I asked the Wasos about how they see this moment, Bernard brought up the story you heard earlier in this episode

about Hervis Rogers, the parolee arrested for voting in Texas. That's the kind of thing that scares people. They say, you know, I'm not going to go to the doctor because I know how Black people were treated by doctors. I'm not going to go to vote because I know what can happen to you if you vote. That's the kind of atmosphere people are trying to create once again, as it was so effectively in place until finally the Voting Rights Act was passed. Omar, so you say that even as the Voting Rights Act, as you've used the word eviscerated, but you also say that it's not like the U.S. is going to return to the Jim Crow of the 60s as well. So what is it that you see that is happening? And how do you think of that analogy? I think what's useful is to think about what we see in other countries, which is an idea called democratic erosion, right? And that the idea is not that you just drop from being a full multiracial democracy to being, you know, 2% of the Native American vote doesn't count, or 5% of Latino vote doesn't count. And that at the margins, that's going to tip elections. And

those elections are going to mean that the majority is not being represented. And in particular, a majority that's a multiracial coalition is not being represented. And that's going to mean that we have a kind of process of erosion. And it speaks to a weakening of our democracy, but not a complete collapse. It's interesting. You have said that you find this to be a kind of inheritance, a handing off of responsibility, but also in the face of what's going on, that you feel powerless. powerless? I think one of the hardest things for me in this moment is the sense that an earlier generation put their lives on the line for voting rights, for civil rights, to try and make this country live up to its full promise of an equal and full democracy. And what I see happening for my generation is that there's just this process of through kind of death by a thousand cuts of attacks on things like the Voting Rights Act. And I feel like that's happened on my watch.

And that there's been this kind of baton pass from my father's generation to mine to defend multiracial, to defend multiracial democracy in America. And I think what's hard and what the reason I sometimes feel powerless is that you've got a majority of the Supreme Court that says these, you know, commitments to equal rights to voting are, you know, can be ignored, essentially. And that like three of those people on the Supreme Court were appointed by a president who didn't win a majority of the vote. Bernard, I want to let you respond to that. You were 20 years old, and you got on a bus to protest, knowing, quite frankly, that you might be met with violence and knowing in part

that that's kind of why you were called in, right, to be a part of it, to draw attention because your life was valued more as a white person. Now to hear your son biracial as an adult political professor saying that this feels like a dire moment. What goes through your head when you hear this kind of talk? I mean, I certainly don't feel that the young generation is dropping the baton. I guess there's, you know, things like the universal draft, opportunities for people to meet each other, to work together. I think those are declining. I think the universal draft brought black and white people together and might have changed some attitudes. I think there are fewer opportunities now than there used to be.

I think that that residential segregation, school segregation is still so deeply ingrained in the in the United States. I'm not terribly optimistic and I certainly don't feel that the young people have dropped the ball. It's more like rolling the rock of Sisyphus. Omar, for you, given what you know about kind of protest and what works and what has worked in these contexts, what do you see when you look at the current effort by voting rights activists? How is it different? How do you think we should think about it? I think one core lesson for me coming out of my research is that protest movements work a lotization to kind of elevate the issue of voting rights and democracy when, as we saw in November, celebrities get on board, when athletes get on board, when corporations say we are for voting rights. And that that kind of coalition can be a recipe for bolstering democracy. And so that's, I place some hope there.

Omar and Bernard Wasso. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Adi Cornish.