Quote of note:

"Why should Georgia be singled out under this?" Westmoreland said.

Because your stupid ass just got caught trying to reimpose a poll tax, you idiot. And thank you for proving the law is still needed.

Voting Rights Act under scrutiny
Georgians in D.C. oppose provision
By BOB KEMPER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 10/28/05

WASHINGTON — Georgia's Republican congressional representatives are pushing to abolish part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that forces the state to keep proving to the Justice Department that the state no longer discriminates against minority voters.

Led by freshman Rep. Lynn Westmoreland of Sharpsburg, they are urging Congress not to renew an expiring provision in the act that requires Georgia and all or part of 15 other states to get federal approval when they change their voting procedures, whether by drawing new congressional districts or moving a polling station.

If the provision, known as Section 5, is renewed, it should be expanded to include all 50 states, Westmoreland said.

"Why should Georgia be singled out under this?" Westmoreland said. "Georgia has more than gotten their act together" since 1965.

"We're talking 40 years since the Voting Rights Act was enacted," said Rep. Phil Gingrey of Marietta, "and in Georgia the numbers are really fantastic with regard to minority voters, voter participation, registration, the number of African-Americans in the [congressional] delegation."

Georgia Republicans agreed Wednesday night to back Westmoreland's initiative. They are seeking the support of 65 House colleagues with districts covered by the act.

But on Thursday — the same day a federal court blocked a Georgia voter identification law from taking effect because it may be discriminatory — Voting Rights Act supporters said Georgia would be hard-pressed to prove it has rid itself of discriminatory voting practices.

"The record of violations in Georgia since the last reauthorization [in 1982] is extensive, extensive," said Daniel Levitas, of the American Civil Liberties Union's Atlanta-based Voting Rights Project.

Rep. John Lewis, an Atlanta Democrat and civil rights pioneer whose beating in a 1965 voting rights march in Selma, Ala., helped precipitate the passage of the Voting Rights Act, said Georgia had made progress but still needed federal oversight.

"We've become the laughingstock of the rest of the country, of the rest of the South, because of what people are trying to do to weaken the Voting Rights Act," Lewis said.

Republicans cited the success of African-American lawmakers like Rep. Sanford Bishop of Albany, who won election in a majority white district, as evidence of Georgia's improvement. But Bishop said Georgia would regress without the act.

"It would be Reconstruction revisited," Bishop said.

Several provisions of the Voting Rights Act are up for reauthorization in 2007. Republican leaders, who have been reaching out to black voters, want to renew them before the 2006 congressional elections. Given that, the odds are against the Georgians' success, Democrats and advocates said.

"The notion that they are going to get it abolished is far-fetched," said Laughlin McDonald, director of the Voting Rights Project. "There is strong sentiment [on Capitol Hill] to extend Section 5."