The Supreme Court is for the Birds

Racism is over in the US, said our Supreme Court last week.  (Well, five of the six men voted that way.  The women weren’t buying it.)  

Gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act, they ruled that historically exclusionary states like Texas and Georgia, with their systemic history of keeping minorities away from the polls, no longer needed federal oversight of voting procedures.  States could go ahead and enact restrictive voting laws all they want.  Bring on the literacy requirements, ID laws, moving polling places and limiting hours, and redistricting, all to confound minority voters.

But it wasn’t only those racist Southerner legislatures who are now freed from the annoying attention of the feds on behalf of African- Americans. 

The justices had their eyes also right on my own hip Monterey County, Central California.  For the past 40 years we too have had to check with the Justice Department before every election.  Some isolated counties, such as ours, alongside the Southern states, have been found to have patterns of voting irregularities so egregious that the feds have been keeping an eye on us.

Our Back Road Café Summer Road Trip travels back north this week.  With the stark images of the San Diego-Tijuana border vivid in our minds, we came home to see more clearly the Latino-Anglo tensions in our own back yard.  Consider the coastal agricultural town of Pajaro.

Monterey Country’s two major industries are agriculture and hospitality/tourism.  Is it any surprise that our county is 56% Latino and only 32% Anglo? (California is 37% Latino, the nation is 16%. By far most Latino folks are citizens, but our county has the state’s highest percentage of undocumented workers, 13.5%).  Who else wants to pick those strawberries and make those beds?

Pajaro, CaliforniaPajaro is a small underserved community of 3000, one mile square, 94% Latino.  Adjacent to larger Watsonville, it’s not such a drastically visible shanty town as parts of Tijuana we visited last week, but its citizens do have to buy bottled water because of nitrates in the well water from agricultural fertilizers.  The community was badly flooded in the 90s before any decent drainage and culverts were put on the adjacent Pajaro River, which has nice fancy levees on the Watsonville side.

I don’t see any big electrified wall, but I sure am reminded of my border trip last week.

Back to voting.  Before the 2004 election, county voting officials abruptly closed the only Pajaro polling place and required voters to go to Aromas, 10 miles away.  No public transportation available.  Last minute notice.  Many seniors and non-English speakers in Pajaro.  Notices not always in Spanish, as required by California law (after more nudging from those obnoxious voting rights feds.) Pajaro residents notified the Justice Department, who had the authority, (gracias a la Voting Rights Act) to order a change, and last minute, back to voting in Pajaro.

Pajaro means “bird” in Spanish.  This kind of treatment of anyone, let alone US citizens, is for the birds.

But thanks to the old birds on the Supreme Court, voting officials can do what they want now.  Even here is enlightened California.

Supreme CourtThe day after they ruled against the Voting Rights Act, the Court ruled in favor of Marriage Equality.  As we predicted last March, when the case was argued, they found (by 5-4 margins again) that the Defense of Marriage Act, violated the due process clause of the 5^th Amendment.  The court, as predicted, punted on a legal technicality on California’s Prop. 8, which nontheless did restore marriage equality to the state.  Justice Kennedy, whom I (and many others) knew would hold the deciding vote, did indeed vote for, and wrote the decision on marriage equality.  Curiously, he also voted against the Voting Act.  He was consistent on granting states more power to make laws than the federal government.

I saw our friend Ed Kilgore in church the Sunday before the rulings.  It was the Court’s last week in session so we knew we were in for a lot of news.  I offered prayers, in our sort of conservative church, for our nation and for the court as we awaited these decisions.  Afterwards Ed said he was not so anxious about the marriage equality rulings, since the tide has turned so dramatically on that issue in our nation’s public opinion; even the courts can’t change that.  But, Georgia native that he is, he was very concerned about the Voting Rights Law, and with good reason.  Californians were thrilled (mostly) with the marriage equality rulings, but less aware of the implications right here of the Voting Rights action.  We’ll need to do not just a lot of praying, but hard working on that one, in the south, and here in California.

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter