“Move along. Noth­ing to see here…”

This is how bad it’s got­ten. This is how far Repub­li­cans will go to sup­press the voices of minori­ties in America.

In the dead of night — at 10 pm last Wednes­day — in the mid­dle of a week in which the media was dis­tracted by talk about same-​​sex mar­riage — Paul Broun (R-​​Athens, GA) attempted to neuter a vital part of the 1965 Vot­ing Rights Act via an amend­ment that would deny the Jus­tice Depart­ment any fund­ing to review and super­vise election-​​law changes in 16 states with a his­tory of dis­crim­i­na­tory vot­ing laws and vot­ing rights abuses.

Broun wasn’t propos­ing changes to the law, or alter­ations to the rules and reg­u­la­tions that gov­ern vot­ing rights. He sim­ply pro­posed that the Jus­tice Depart­ment be stripped of funds that would allow vio­la­tions of vot­ing rights to be exam­ined and pros­e­cuted. It’s akin to main­tain­ing the ille­gal­ity of mur­der, while elim­i­nat­ing the police depart­ment nec­es­sary to arrest murderers.

That’s how des­per­ate Repub­li­cans are today.

Civil rights icon John Lewis (D-​​Atlanta, GA) rose to make an impas­sioned plea against Broun’s amend­ment. Go lis­ten and watch. The mov­ing and pow­er­ful speech is like some­thing from the 1960s. For a United States Rep­re­sen­ta­tive to have to make a speech like that, on the floor of Con­gress in 2012, is noth­ing short of shameful.

Lewis has the chops to make this plea. He was a chair­man of the Stu­dent Non­vi­o­lent Coör­di­nat­ing Com­mit­tee (SNCC) and played a key role in the strug­gle for civil rights. His skull was frac­tured dur­ing a civil rights demon­stra­tion in Geor­gia in 1965. He has been a Rep­re­sen­ta­tive for the state of Geor­gia since 1987.

His words on Wednes­day night were sim­ple and pow­er­ful:

It is shame­ful that you would come here tonight and say to the Depart­ment of Jus­tice that you must not use one penny, one cent, one dime, one dol­lar to carry out the man­date of Sec­tion 5 of the Vot­ing Rights Act,” he said, his voice loud and trem­bling. “Peo­ple died for the right to vote! Friends of mine, col­leagues of mine! Speak out against this amend­ment — it doesn’t have a place.

He appar­ently shamed Broun into with­draw­ing his pro­posed amend­ment:

I have the same dream that Mar­tin Luther King had where peo­ple are accepted for their char­ac­ter and not any dis­crim­i­na­tion against their skin or their fore­fa­thers or any­thing else, and any insin­u­a­tion that I would ever believe in any kind of dis­crim­i­na­tion or try­ing to sup­press any­one from hav­ing their con­sti­tu­tion­ally given rights, I would con­test that accu­sa­tion, frankly. … I apol­o­gize to any hurt feel­ings that any­one has, because I cer­tainly wasn’t mean­ing to hurt anyone’s feelings.

“Hurt feel­ings”? Really? This is not about “hurt feel­ings”. Broun’s protes­ta­tions notwith­stand­ing, it is about con­sti­tu­tional rights and the sup­pres­sion of votes. That’s the pur­pose of the law — to pre­vent states with a his­tory of dis­crim­i­na­tion from con­tin­u­ing their efforts to dis­crim­i­nate. And that was, incon­testably, the tar­get of his amendment.

It sim­ply is not cred­i­ble to pre­tend that Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Broun didn’t intend to encour­age vio­la­tions of minor­ity vot­ing rights. One could argue that he was try­ing to save money, that the 1965 Vot­ing Rights Act is no longer needed. If that’s the case, then he could have been upfront about it, and intro­duced a bill to elim­i­nate the Vot­ing Rights Act pro­vi­sions. The only rea­son to cut the fund­ing for enforce­ment of this law is to qui­etly allow dis­crim­i­na­tion and vote sup­pres­sion to occur unhindered.

Why would a Repub­li­can want that to hap­pen in 2012? There is a pat­tern of attempts at vote sup­pres­sion through­out the coun­try, new voter ID laws, changes in absen­tee vot­ing and the hours and num­bers of vot­ing places. These changes amount to new forms of poll tax, designed to reduce the num­bers of minori­ties, younger peo­ple, poor peo­ple, and the elderly who are able to vote. Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Broun wanted to make it impos­si­ble for the Jus­tice Depart­ment to con­test these attempts at vote suppression.

If there has been a threat to democ­racy in our life­times, we’re wit­ness­ing it now. We’re for­tu­nate to have peo­ple like John Lewis with the courage to stand up for America.

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