Republican Sensenbrenner vows to repair Voting Rights Act — MSNBC:
Republican Sensenbrenner vows to repair Voting Rights Act
Evan Puschak
9:46 PM on 08/26/2013
Just weeks after Texas and North Carolina passed controversial and restrictive new voter I.D. laws, Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner is vowing to reverse the recent Supreme Court ruling which made them possible.
“The first thing we have to do is take the monkey wrench that the court threw in it, out of the Voting Rights Act, and then use that monkey wrench to be able to fix it so that it is alive, well, constitutional and impervious to another challenge that will be filed by the usual suspects,” Sensenbrenner said Monday at an RNC event held to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington.
Sensenbrenner is a longtime advocate of the Voting Rights Act. As chair of the House Judiciary Committee when the law was reviewed in 2006, the Wisconsin legislator oversaw extensive deliberations which ultimately affirmed the VRA’s continuing necessity–and resulted in a 25-year reauthorization. So when the Supreme Court effectively gutted the VRA in June by voiding the requirement for certain states to get federal “preclearance” before changing their voting laws, Sensenbrenner was displeased.
“Voter discrimination still exists,” he wrote in a June op-ed for USA Today, “and our progress toward equality should not be mistaken for a victory.”
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