My new VDARE.com column on voting rights

Voting Rights For Everyone—Whether or Not They Speak English
By Steve Sailer

"[S]ome Congressmen probably would vote for a declaration of war against Canada if it were contained in a bill with the words `civil rights' in its title." ['Civil Rights' That Can Lead to Civil War, By Thomas Sowell, New York Daily News, April 24, 1990), p. 30, quoted in Paved With Good Intentions, p. 151]

President Bush's speech to the NAACP on Thursday was strikingly lacking in any sort of "Sister Souljah moment"—chiding that venerable but now notoriously corrupt and ineffectual black organization for even one of its numerous faults.

Instead, Bush made the climax of his speech a demand that the Senate pass a 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act without amendment.

The Senate instantly complied by a vote of 98-0 (following the House's passage by the margin of 390-33).

As a substantive bill, the VRA extension was notable for insisting that foreign language ballots be provided to voters who need them.

Yet, to become a U.S. citizen, immigrants are legally required to prove that they are literate in English. So the need for a non-English ballot would appear to be prima facie proof that an immigrant either fraudulently became a citizen or that he is a noncitizen attempting to vote fraudulently.

But President Bush and the solons of the Senate aren't concerned about mere logic when they can revel in one of the more popular rituals of 21st century political theatre: pretending that Southern white racism is omnipresent, a pervasive threat to blacks' right to vote.

Apparently, the only thing that can divert this tidal wave of Southern white bigotry from washing away the gains of the 1960s is a unanimous vote of the Senate, including all the Southern white Senators, in favor of the new VRA.

This 25-year VRA extension , which President Bush swore to the NAACP that he would sign, requires nine states, seven of them Southern, to get the Justice Department's approval for any change in voting rules to make sure that "the change did not have a discriminatory purpose and would not have a discriminatory effect."

Thus, the mark of Cain will officially be upon the South into the 2030s for evils that disappeared by the 1970s.

In reality, as Thomas Sowell pointed out back in the pre-Internet days, the 1965 Voting Rights Act was the most quickly successful of the civil rights era landmarks. [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer