Democrats Push for Voting Rights Ahead of 2014
ne front is to take the Supreme Court’s invitation to Congress to devise a constitutionally acceptable formula for picking states or communities where voting rules should get extra federal scrutiny. President Barack Obama has suggested that Congress legislate, and civil rights veteran Rep. John Lewis (D., Ga.) predicted over the weekend that Congress will act. Even though such a measure is highly unlikely to get through the House and Senate, introducing a bill would give Democrats a new offensive weapon against Republicans to court votes in the 2014 midterm election, one that it surely will use as the GOP hammers them on recent controversies over the Obama health law, the Internal Revenue Service and Benghazi.
The other is to use the issue to boost turnout by Democratic-friendly minority voters in 2014, a midterm election in which turnout tends to be lower than in presidential election years. In 33 Republican-dominated states in 2012, exit polls found minority voters accounted for 28% of the electorate, up from 26% in 2008. Democrats are hoping that resistance by some Republicans to an immigration bill will help energize the growing Latino vote. Organizers of a demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial to mark the 50th anniversary of the August 1963 March on Washington (the one where Martin Luther King delivered his “I have a dream…” oration) are hoping the Supreme Court decision will increase attendance.
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