Senator Kevin Parker on the Supreme Court’s Invalidation of the Core of the Voting Rights Act

(Brooklyn, NY) “The decision made by the Supreme Court on Tuesday struck a blow against forty-eight years of progress away from the naked discrimination and voter suppression of the 1950s and ‘60s, when we struggled to end segregation and move toward equality.

The simple and overwhelming truth that the Court’s decision gets wrong, which even conservative Chief Justice Roberts admitted in the Court’s opinion, is that discrimination against racial, linguistic, religious and other minorities in the United States has not ended, no matter how much we might wish otherwise. In choosing however to “put a dagger through the heart of the Voting Rights Act,” to quote Congressman John Lewis, the Supreme Court has shown yet again how out of step it is with the values of our nation.

Now that the protection of section 4(b) is gone, voters facing disenfranchisement will have to file expensive lawsuits after their vote is suppressed, to try and restore their access to America’s most fundamental right, the right to vote. That is wrong, and violates our most basic values of fairness and equality, and reopens that dark era when racial and linguistic minorities could be deprived of their vote with impunity.

For as long as America has existed, there have been those who seek to limit the right of other Americans to vote. Sadly, the Supreme Court gave aid and comfort to those who fight to restrict the ability of millions of Americans to vote for the candidates of their choice.

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About Senator Kevin Parker

Senator Kevin S. Parker is intimately familiar with the needs of his ethnically diverse Brooklyn community that consists of 318,000 constituents in Flatbush, East Flatbush, Midwood, Ditmas Park, Kensington, Windsor Terrace, and Park Slope. He is the Ranking Member of the Senate Energy and Telecommunications and the Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Committees, Assistant Democratic Leader for Intergovernmental Affairs, and Chair of the Democratic Task Force on New Americans.