November 25, 2015
Page 7
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O PINION
Cynical Attempts to Blunt Our Political Power
Turing back the
clock on voting
rights
by m arian
W right e delman
Barbara Arn-
wine has long been
sounding the alarm
about 21st century
efforts to turn back
the clock on voting rights. She re-
cently founded the Transformative
Justice Coalition after serving for
many years as executive director
of the Lawyers’ Committee for
Civil Rights Under Law and head
of its Election Protection efforts,
the nation’s largest non-partisan
voter protection coalition.
Under her leadership the Law-
yers’ Committee created a “Map
of Shame” highlighting states
where new or pending legislation
threatens to suppress the right to
vote—which, as she says, remains
under attack in 2015 by forces
who still believe the right to vote
should stay in the hands of a pre-
cious few.
Many of the new laws making
it more difficult to vote appear to
be cynical attempts to blunt the
political power of rapidly growing
populations of people of color as
our nation confronts the changing
reality of who is a “minority” and
who is a “majority.” Others spe-
cifically appear to target younger
voters, the poor, and the elderly.
Alabama made some of the
latest headlines for its decision to
close a wave of driver’s license of-
fices in disproportionately black,
rural areas in October, leaving
eight out of the 10 counties
with the highest percentage
of non-white registered voters
without a Department of Mo-
tor Vehicles—making it much
more difficult for residents in
those counties to get their li-
paying fees, or going through oth-
er hoops.
Not even voiceless children are
exempted from assault. The Chil-
dren’s Defense Fund has filed a
friend of the court brief in the U.S.
Supreme Court case, Evenwel v.
Abbott, in which some citizens are
suing the state of Texas seeking to
change the answer to a fundamen-
tal democratic question: Who gets
counted as a person when states
determine proportional represen-
But the Evenwel case is chal-
lenging the state of Texas’s current
traditional use of total population
measure for redistricting in its
state Senate, and seeks instead to
count only citizens of voting age
when drawing districts. Attacking
that long-standing practice is part
of a broader effort to diminish the
rights of certain—especially non-
white—groups and powerless
groups, including children, remi-
niscent of other efforts to suppress
There is a constitutional principle that elected
officials represent every individual in their district,
including non-voters, and the majority of states
currently count all people who live in a district
when drawing district boundaries.
censes and fulfill the state’s strict
photo ID voter requirement. Voter
ID laws are just one of the danger-
ous new kinds of laws threaten-
ing to disenfranchise voters. The
problem they allegedly address,
voter identity fraud, has been doc-
umented to be nearly nonexistent.
But people of color, immigrants,
poor people, and old and young
voters, including students attend-
ing college away from home, are
less likely to have the forms of
identifications required by states’
laws and more likely to have trou-
ble obtaining birth certificates,
tation?
There is a constitutional princi-
ple that elected officials represent
every individual in their district,
including non-voters, and the
majority of states currently count
all people who live in a district
when drawing district boundaries.
Most people are represented di-
rectly because they are voters, but
those who can’t vote—children,
non-citizens, formerly incarcerat-
ed people who have not had their
voting rights restored, and others
who are disenfranchised—are all
represented indirectly.
voting rights. Children’s health, ed-
ucation, and economic security de-
pend on healthy state budgets and
good public policies. Our nation
has a vital stake in the well-being
of its children. But all these efforts
to subvert the democratic process
continue and we must fight to stop
them in every form.
There has never been a safe time
in America to drop vigilance about
attempts to deny people the vote or
fair legislative representation. As
Frederick Douglass taught us more
than 150 years ago, “Power con-
cedes nothing without a demand. It
never did and it never will.”
Barbara Arnwine adds: “All
of us have to be involved in this
fight, because we are in an en-
trenched battle. The United States
can’t do anything about the fact
that demographic change is com-
ing. It’s a reality, and it’s one that
we shouldn’t run from. Whoever
heard of a nation being ashamed
of its demographics? . . . What’s
more beautiful than having people
of many multiracial populations
and ethnic cultures? What’s more
beautiful than having the mash-up
of all that, and the creativity that
flows from it when we work to-
gether as one? . . . This notion that
it’s ‘our’ country, a ‘white coun-
try,’ that notion is dead. It’s rail-
ing against the wind to think you
can stop it, but people think they
can do a South Africa and have
a minority rule a majority. That’s
just ridiculous. It’s not going to
happen in the 21st century. It’s not
going to be tolerated. So we have
a real fight for those of us who are
justice-loving people. Our fight
is to help our nation to transition
from this really racially unjust
nation that’s been for years into a
much more just, equal, inclusive,
and celebratory society.”
Find out where your state
stands—and stay vigilant, educat-
ed, and ready to fight for that just,
equal nation for all.
Marian Wright Edelman is
president of the Children’s De-
fense Fund.
Intervention Is the Problem, Not the Solution
With military
force, war begets
war
p eter C erto
A café. A stadium.
A concert hall. One
of the most horrify-
ing things about the
murderous attacks in
Paris was the terrorists’ choice of
targets.
They chose gathering places
where people’s minds wander fur-
thest from unhappy thoughts like
war. And they struck on a Friday
night, when many westerners take
psychic refuge from the troubles
of the working week.
The message was simple:
Wherever you are, this war will
find you.
The same could be said for
the 43 Lebanese civilians mur-
dered only the day before, when
a bomb exploded in a crowded
by
marketplace in Beirut. Or for the
224 vacationers who died when
their Russian airliner blew up over
Egypt a few weeks earlier.
The Islamic State, or ISIS,
claimed responsibility for
each of these atrocities. But
that’s not the only thing they
have in common. In fact, all
of them occurred in coun-
tries
Russia started bombing
ISIS targets and other Syrian rebels
last month. Hundreds of Lebanese
Hezbollah fighters have fought and
died defending the Syrian regime.
And France was the first country
to join the Obama administration’s
war on ISIS last year.
Indeed, scarcely a month before
ISIS attacked the French capital,
French planes were bombing the Is-
lamic State’s capital in Raqqa, Syr-
ia — dropping bombs that “did not
help them at all in the streets of Par-
is,” as a grim communiqué from the
terrorist group gloated afterward.
These horrific attacks on civil-
ians are part of a calculated effort
to bring the war in Syria home to
the other countries participating
in it. And our bill could come due
next.
Washington’s funneling mil-
lions of dollars’ worth of weapons
to its proxies in Syria. It’s dis-
patching special forces to “advise”
an array of the Islamic State’s ene-
mies. And in an air war totally un-
authorized by Congress, U.S. war-
planes have launched thousands
of strikes on alleged ISIS targets
in Iraq and Syria since 2014.
But you can’t simply bomb
extremism out of existence. And
as governments from Moscow to
Paris to Beirut are learning, you
put your own people’s lives on the
line when you try.
Military intervention has suc-
ceeded mightily in breaking
things and killing people, but it’s
done nothing to wind down the
greatest factor fueling the rise of
ISIS: Syria’s wider civil war. An
international arms embargo and
a deal between the Syrian regime
and other rebel groups — jobs for
diplomats, not drones — would go
much further toward curtailing the
threat of ISIS.
Yet France has responded to
the carnage in Paris by pounding
Raqqa with yet more air strikes —
reportedly bombing medical clin-
ics, a museum, and a stadium of its
own, among other targets.
Leading U.S. presidential can-
didates aren’t proposing anything
smarter.
Hillary Clinton declared that
ISIS “must be destroyed” with
“all of the tools at our disposal.”
Ted Cruz called for “overwhelm-
ing air power” and condemned the
Obama administration for having
insufficient “tolerance for civil-
ian casualties.” Ben Carson called
for “boots on the ground,” while
Donald Trump swore he’d “bomb
the s— out of” ISIS-controlled oil
fields and hand them over to Exx-
onMobil.
Virtually all GOP contenders,
along with a gaggle of Republi-
can governors, agreed that they’d
close the door to Syrian refugees,
too — as though they can evade
the consequences of war by mak-
ing life more miserable for the in-
nocent people fleeing it.
None of this bravado makes
me feel safer here in Wash-
ington, where ISIS threatened
more Paris-style bloodshed in
a recent video. When I imagine
those cold-blooded killers run-
ning roughshod through the bars,
restaurants, and concert halls
my neighbors and I frequent, my
stomach drops.
But that’s the lesson, isn’t it:
When your government answers
every problem in the world with
military force, war begets war.
And eventually there’s nowhere
left to hide from it.
Peter Certo is the editor of
Foreign Policy In Focus and the
deputy editor of OtherWords, a
non-profit editorial service run by
the Institute for Policy Studies.