Bush Admin Appointees Try to Keep Blacks from Voting – Moves Have Been Deemed Unconstitutional

Political appointees in the Bush Administration are overruling the judgments of Justice Department attorneys who have spent their careers working on protecting the rights of American citizens. In August seasoned Justice Department lawyers expert in voters’ rights ruled that a recent Georgia law that required voters without drivers’ licenses (a larger portion of inner city black Georgians do not have drivers’ licenses because of the cost of owning, parking and maintaining a car in an urban setting) to buy a special voters ID for $20 before they would be allowed to vote was unfair and illegal. Previously a person without a driver’s license could use another form of ID to vote, but under the new Georgia law they would have to buy a costly voter’s ID. This $20 voter’s ID is nothing more than a modern version of the poll tax instituted in the Deep South to keep blacks from voting by charging black people to vote. Under the Poll Tax laws instituted at the end of slavery those whose grandfather was allowed to vote (i.e were white) could vote without paying the tax, but those whose grandfather could not vote (i.e. was a slave) would have to pay in order to vote. That was illegal. The new Georgia voter ID tax for anyone who doesn’t have a driver’s license which was approved by Georgia’s Republican legislature and signed into law by Georgia’s Republican Governor was deemed as targeting reducing black voting by these experienced Justice Department lawyers expert in voters rights laws. The political appointees that Bush put in to oversee them overruled their decision and said that the new Poll Tax could go into law.

Since the Voters’ Rights Act of 1965 passed political appointees in the Justice Department have accepted the analysis of the legal experts and not overruled their expertise. The Bush Administration is the first administration in 40 years to overrule the experts. Since then the both Republican and Democrat judges at two levels of the courts have ruled the Georgia law as unconstitutional violations of black voters’ rights and the Bush appointee’s overruling has been overruled. Nice try Bush! Read the article here.