Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

by Jason L. Riley

Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act requires states with a history of racially motivated voter intimidation to have any changes in voting procedures cleared by a federal court or the Justice Department. This so-called preclearance provision, always intended to be temporary, was slated to sunset after five years, but Congress renewed the provision repeatedly well after it became obvious that ballot access was no longer a problem for blacks. In 1982 a permanent part of the law, Section 2, was amended to allow for racial gerrymandering, or the drawing of voting districts to ensure that a candidate of a particular race is elected. The measure of success was no longer whether blacks had ballot access. Instead, it was whether enough black officials were being elected to office, and liberals became hell-bent on using Sections 2 and 5 to achieve proportional racial representation. “In 1965, the Voting Rights Act had been simple, transparent and elegant. Its aim was to secure basic Fifteenth Amendment rights in a region where they had been egregiously denied,” wrote Thernstrom. “But the cumulative effect of these amendments was to turn the law into a constitutionally problematic, unprecedented attempt to impose what voting rights activists, along with their allies in Congress, the Justice Department, and the judiciary, viewed as a racially fair distribution of political power.”28 In 2006, Congress renewed Section 5 for another twenty-five years.