SOMETHING TO CONSIDER WHEN NEXT YOUR HEAR ABOUT EXPORTING AMERICAN DEMOCRACY ABROAD

Ari Berman, Gives Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015) ("The fight over the right to vote sharply intensified after Barack Obama's election, the pinnacle of the VRA's success.[] After Obama's victory, 395 new voting restrictions were introduced in 49 states form 2011 to 2015. Following the Tea Party's triumph in the 2010 elections, half the states in the country,nearly all of them under Republican control--from Texas to Wisconsin to Pennsylvania--passed laws making it harder to vote. The sudden escalation of efforts to curb voting rights most closely resemble the Redemption period that ended Reconstruction, when every southern state adopted devices like literacy tests and poll taxes to disenfranchise African-American voters." Id. at 10. "To Justice Antonin Scalia, the overwhelming congressional support for the VRA [Voting Rights Act], most recently in 2006, when Congress reauthorized the act for another twenty-five years by a vote of 390-33 in the House and 9-0 in the Senate, was proof of its unconstitutionality. 'Even the name of it is wonderful: The Voting Rights Act,' he said facetiously. 'Who is going to vote against that in the future?' The hushed courtroom gasped audibly when Scalia attributed support for the law to 'a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement.'" Id. at 8. "The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice." Lyndon Banes Johnson, August 6, 1965. If one is a small "d" democratic--that is, you truly believe in the democratic process--, then this and Citizens United should be of grave concern to you.).