Source: https://southernspaces.org/2013/states-rights-resurgent-attack-voting-rights-act
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 08:43:06+00:00

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Steve Suitts examines the states' rights rhetoric in Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, in which the US Supreme Court invalidated the application of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. He revisits the tragic history, and takes note of the current resurgence, of southern white politicians' use of state sovereignty arguments.
Voting Rights, June 30, 2013. Cartoon by Mike Luckovich. Republished by permission of Mike Luckovich.
In the US Constitution, the words "state sovereignty" invoke the notion of the United States government as a federal system of fifty state governments, each possessing powers that the national government cannot abridge without a compelling reason. This constitutional concept arises from the Tenth Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
The claims of state sovereignty have a long history in the US South, originating largely around questions regarding black people and their rights as persons, especially their right to cast an equal vote to elect representative government. In the constitutional debates of 1787 when the founding convention considered what to do about slavery in their corner of the new world, most southern delegates claimed their states should have a sovereign right to govern their internal affairs without interference from a national government­—largely to protect slavery. The primary compromise from these debates led to the adoption of a provision in the Constitution that prevented the federal government from interfering with slavery where it existed and by allowing states to treat enslaved blacks as non-persons or chattel property—while counting them as three-fifths of a person for purposes of apportioning voting power among the states in electing the nation's president and the House of Representatives.
Calhoun developed a theory of state sovereignty called "nullification" as the South faced mounting opposition to slavery every time Congress considered acquiring new territory or adopting a new state, which had to be declared "free" or "slave." Calhoun held that any state had the sovereign power to nullify any law that the federal government passed. This paramount power of southern states would allow the South to remain a separate section of the nation with slavery.
Much of the Lincoln-Douglas debates developed around Stephen Douglas' theory of "popular sovereignty"—a doctrine that would have affirmed Calhoun's notion of states' rights and permitted states to decide for themselves about the legality of slavery.
As Lincoln became president, South Carolina declared that his election foretold that "the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy."5 South Carolina proclaimed its secession and less than four months later fired on Fort Sumter.
The Civil War, the nation's bloodiest conflict, ensued in the South as a "War Between the States"—language that sustained the claim that southern states were not rebelling against the nation but were defending their sovereign states' rights.
The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments adopted after the Civil War declared the abolition of slavery, equal rights and privileges of all persons born or naturalized throughout the United States, due process and equal protection of the laws, House apportionment based on "the whole number of persons," and citizens' right to vote without regard to "race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
Compromise, Indeed!, Harper's Weekly, January 27, 1877, 64. Cartoon by Thomas Nast.
These national principles were upended in barely more than a decade with the presidential election of 1876 and the Tilden-Hayes Compromise, a political agreement that gave Republican Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency in return for withdrawing federal enforcement of the Civil War Amendments in the South, including the new constitutional right to vote regardless of race. There was no proclamation about the restoration of "state sovereignty" in the Congress, but the compromise restored the principle of states' rights as the political framework by which the states of the former Confederacy would handle the legal, social, and political status of African Americans.
White political leaders in the South resurrected the theories of state sovereignty that Calhoun and Douglas advanced before the Civil War as the constitutional ground for maintaining racial segregation and disfranchisement built in the era of Jim Crow. Their arguments failed to stop the Court from outlawing the all-white primaries and from issuing Brown v. Board of Education, which declared that segregation—separate and unequal—was unconstitutional.
We regard the decision of the Supreme Court in the school cases as clear abuse of judicial power. It climaxes a trend in the Federal judiciary undertaking . . . to encroach upon the reserved rights of the states.
Within a few weeks of his inauguration, Governor Wallace created and funded the Alabama State Sovereignty Commission, which became a major agency in fighting civil rights activities, spying on activists and advocates, distributing racist propaganda, making grants to the Citizens Councils of America (a private group that opposed desegregation), and advising voter registrars on how to block or frustrate black voting after the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
Alabama's spy commission was patterned after the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, established by the legislature in 1956, two years after Brown. Its objective was to "do and perform any and all acts deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi, and her sister states."11 As in Alabama, Mississippi's Sovereignty Commission operated as a secret police force that aided and used the White Citizens' Council and others to spy on activists, oppose passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, help local registrars block blacks from registering, and build a publicity campaign to discredit civil rights activists as "subversives."
Now, under Chief Justice Roberts' leadership, the Court has reversed the direction of its constitutional interpretation by holding that the equal rights of states prevail over the equal right of citizens in the field of voting. The decision jeopardizes the fundamental notion that Congress has powerful means to assure individual rights cannot be abridged anywhere by federal, state, or local governments.
Tea Party tax day protest, St. Paul, Minnesota, April 15, 2010. Photograph by Fibonacci Blue. Courtesy of Fibonacci Blue.
Outside of courtrooms state sovereignty has been gaining new momentum in recent years as a part of the battle cry of the Tea Party whose leaders have condemned a wide range of national concerns, including health care and education standards, on the ground that they violate the rightful sovereignty of the states.
The defenders of today's movement for state sovereignty claim that "modern Americans who decry the erosion of federalism are not pining for a return to segregation or some pre-Civil War version of states' rights."17 But, the Supreme Court's decision to allow states' rights to trump black citizens' rights in voting is a profoundly disturbing setback. In the wake of Shelby County, many of the southern states' white political leaders have loudly rejoiced, and some have announced renewed plans to use this new-found state sovereignty to further restrict voter registration and redistricting.
In the future, southern states will no longer have the burden of proof in showing that voting changes do not have a racially discriminatory effect. By invoking the constitutional principle of state sovereignty, Chief Justice Roberts' opinion maintains a long, consistent pattern in which state sovereignty has primarily been used in government and politics in the South to permit and justify belittling the humanity, citizenship, or constitutional rights of black people. Still unfulfilled, the Civil War Amendments offer democratic ideals that hold an enduring promise to make our future better than our past, especially in an increasingly diverse United States.
A native of Winston County, Alabama, Steve Suitts is an adjunct faculty member of the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University and vice president of the Southern Education Foundation.
1. Shelby County v. Holder, 570 US ____, 3, 18 (2013).
2. Coyle v. Smith, 221 US 559, 580 (1911), quoted in Shelby, 570 US at 10–11.
3. Shelby, 570 US at 10. This "fundamental principle of equal sovereignty" was articulated by the Supreme Court in Northwest Austin Municipal Util. Dist. No. One v. Holder, 557 US 193, 203 (2009), emphasis added by Roberts in the Shelby County v. Holder decision.
4. John C. Calhoun, "Slavery a Positive Good," TeachingAmericanHistory.org, February 6, 1837, accessed, August 22, 2013, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/slavery-a-positive-good/.
5. "Confederate States of America—Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union," Avalon Project of Yale Law School, accessed August 22, 2013, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp.
6. United States v. Cruikshank, 92 US 542, 553 (1876).
7. Williams v. Mississippi, 170 US 213, 225 (1898).
8. "Southern Manifesto on Integration," Congressional Record, 84th Congress Second Session, Vol. 102, part 4 (Washington, DC: Governmental Printing Office, 1956), 4459–4460, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/rights/sources_document2.html.
9. George Wallace, "Inaugural address of Governor George Wallace, which was delivered at the Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama," January 14, 1963, Alabama Department of Archives and History Digital Collections, http://digital.archives.alabama.gov/cdm/singleitem/collection/voices/id/2952/rec/.
12. City of Rome v. United States, 446 US 156, 178, 179 (1980).
13. "Attorney General Alan Wilson Issues statement on Shelby County v. Holder," Alan Wilson: South Carolina Attorney General, accessed August 22, 2013, http://www.scag.gov/archives/9396.
14. Gary Martin, "Redistricting Debate Hears New Argument," My SA, July 9, 2013, accessed August 22, 2013, http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/article/Redistricting-debate-hears-new-argument-4655908.php.
15. "AG Strange Praises the US Supreme Court for Declaring Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act Unconstitutional," State of Alabama Office of the Attorney General, June 25, 2013, accessed August 22, 2013, http://www.ago.state.al.us/News-340.
16. Elizabeth Price Foley, "Sovereignty, Rebalanced: The Tea Party & Constitutional Amendments," Tennessee Law Review 78 (2011): 751–764, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1904656.
18. Charlie Savage, "US Is Suing in Texas Cases Over Voting by Minorities," The New York Times, August 22, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/23/us/politics/justice-dept-moves-to-protect-minority-voters-in-texas.html.
Denniston, Lyle. "Constitution Check: Do the States Have a Right to Be Treated Equally?" Constitution Daily, July 8, 2013, http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/2013/07/constitution-check-do-the-states-have-a-right-to-be-treated-equally/.
Formisano, Ronald. The Tea Party: A Brief History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.
Lewis, George. Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Valelly, Richard, ed. The Voting Rights Act: Securing the Ballot. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2006.
Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, Attorney General, et al., No. 12-96. http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/717250-supreme-courts-voting-rights-act-decision.html.

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