Now that Trump is one year into his second term, it is clear that Trump is not the problem. The problem — the threat to our democracy — has been 50 years in the making and that threat is the Republican Party.
I have added a new section to my Clear and Present Danger blog: THE PEOPLE WHO ARE KILLING OUR DEMOCRACY.
This new section will feature articles, background, and facts about the individuals who are the real threat to our democracy.
The first person I will focus on is Chief Justice John Roberts whose life’s work has been to destroy the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the firmly establish the rule of wealthy white people.
Here’s a little something about Roberts.
In 2013, when Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. issued the most far-reaching Supreme Court decision on voting rights in the 21st century, he finally succeeded in gutting a civil rights law he has been fighting his entire career. For three decades, Roberts has argued that the United States has become colorblind to the point where aggressive federal intervention on behalf of voters of color is no longer necessary—and this case, Shelby County v. Holder, was the pinnacle of that crusade.
Roberts honed his views on race and voting as a clerk for Justice William Rehnquist, a man who as a court clerk himself had written a memo endorsing Plessy v. Ferguson, the “separate but equal” doctrine upholding segregated schools. On the high court, Rehnquist helped redefine opposition to civil rights laws as a commitment to color blindness, and he used this theory to undermine the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Roberts took a similar outlook in the Reagan Justice Department, where he worked after finishing his Rehnquist clerkship. Gerry Hebert, now executive director of the Campaign Legal Center, was also at the DOJ. He recalls that Roberts “had it in for the Voting Rights Act,” which Roberts thought should cover only intentional discrimination, not discriminatory results or effects of state voting regulations. But proving intentional discrimination is virtually impossible—and besides, Hebert says, judges “don’t want to find that somebody was a racist.” They’d rather focus on the discriminatory impact of a law. “I don’t think John Roberts ever got that.”
My new blog section will be a work in progress; I’ll add to it as time goes on. Bookmark it and come back often.