Republicans: Vote Protections Trample States' Rights. Uh-Oh.

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Jonathan Chait
@jonathanchait
"States' rights" as a rationale to give the South a free hand to restrict voting, what could go wrong?

Republicans: Vote Protections Trample States’ Rights. Uh-Oh.
The chilling future implications of a very old argument.
nymag.com
8:57 AM · Jun 23, 2021

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/06/republican-senate-debate-vote-suppression-mcconnell-states-rights-democracy.html

The brief Senate debate over voting rights was treated as an anticlimax, chiefly because its bottom-line result — fewer than ten Republican senators, and as it turned out zero, voting to break a filibuster — was never in doubt. But the preordained outcome may have hidden a surprising and even shocking message contained in the rhetoric used by Republican opponents. The entire party grounded its opposition in the principle of states’ rights.

The Senate bill, insisted Mitch McConnell, is “an assault on the fundamental idea that states, not the federal government, should decide how to run their own elections.” Importantly, his entire caucus, including the handful of moderates, repeated the same message in the same terms. The bill “would take away the rights of people in each of the 50 states to determine which election rules work best for their citizens,” complained Susan Collins. “I am not going to detail state-by-state where they may have overstepped or not have overstepped or actually improved in terms of access to voting rights,” said Lisa Murkowski. “I’m a federal senator. I’m not going to tell a state what they should do,” echoed Mitt Romney.

“The fundamental idea that states, not the federal government, should decide how to run their own elections” is indeed a very old idea, but it is not one enshrined in the Constitution. Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution grants Congress authority to regulate elections. That authority was the basis for the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Department of Justice’s decades-long role enforcing voting rights in the states.

States’ rights, of course, has been the chief principled basis for the white South to repress its Black population since the 19th century. States’ rights may not be an inherently racist idea — one can certainly come up with arguments to privilege state authority in a given situation that don’t contain racist arguments or compel racist outcomes — but it lends itself conveniently to such purposes. States’ rights was the most common rationale for maintaining slavery, for rejecting any federal protection for formerly enslaved people after the Civil War, and to reject civil-rights bills in the 20th century.

*snip*