House passes John Lewis bill to bolster voting rights

By Alex Rogers | CNN

The House passed a measure Tuesday expanding the powerfulness of the national authorities and radical minorities to artifact oregon situation predetermination rules they find discriminatory.

Democrats named the authorities the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancements Act aft the civilian rights icon and longtime Georgia congressman who died past year.

“John knew that the combat for justness ne'er genuinely ends,” tweeted Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama. “Each procreation indispensable combat & combat again to sphere the advancement of the past and beforehand it. Now it’s our turn.”

The measure would reconstruct an facet of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that allowed the Justice Department to artifact definite jurisdictions with a past of elector favoritism from changing their voting rules, aft blimpish justices connected the Supreme Court ruled successful 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder that the look utilized was outdated. Attorney General Merrick Garland precocious wrote successful The Washington Post that the Voting Rights Act’s “preclearance” proviso was “enormously effective” and led to “thousands of discriminatory voting changes that would person curtailed the voting rights of millions of citizens successful jurisdictions ample and small.”

The measure besides responds to the Supreme Court’s 6-3 determination this twelvemonth successful Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, which constricted the quality of minorities to situation authorities laws that they accidental are discriminatory nether a antithetic conception of the Voting Rights Act.

The measure faces a steep ascent successful the Senate, wherever the immense bulk of Republicans reason it, calling the authorities a monolithic national overreach into the states’ relation successful elections. At this point, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski is the lone Senate Republican expected to enactment the bill.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said successful June that the measure is “unnecessary” since “it’s against the instrumentality to discriminate successful voting connected the ground of contention already,” though the authorities would let the Justice Department to artifact a instrumentality earlier it comes into effect.

McConnell said the measure would “grant to the Justice Department astir full quality to find the voting systems of each authorities successful America.”