Bruce’s Beat

HR 9, the legislation to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act of 1965, is in trouble. Extremist Republicans, who want to ban the production of election materials in any language but English, and who aim to end federal oversight of voting law changes in the South, have forced Republican leaders to delay bringing the bill to the floor of the House of Representatives. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, invalidated at a stroke, seven or eight decades of southern election law explicitly crafted to deny the franchise to African Americans.

With the Voting Rights Act up for renewal, none of the factors that enabled its passage are around any more. The freedom movement of demonstrations and unruly illegal actions is long dead. The Soviet Union is history too, and the Republicans who rule today are openly disdainful of world public opinion. The only thing that stands between us and the end of the Voting Rights Act is the tepid support of white and black Democrats in Congress.

Cynthia McKinney absolved

The rightist and racist nature of the media’s rush to ridicule and judge the representative from Georgia is clearly revealed by the lack of airtime and ink devoted to her exoneration. Those members of the Congressional Black Caucus who rushed to misjudge McKinney, who convened a special meeting of that body to upbraid her, and who failed to stand with her on the floor of Congress as she declared her innocence of any wrongdoing, stand exposed too. Chief among these derelict and delinquent caucus members, who seem to be working tirelessly to subvert the caucus’s very reason for existence, are CBC chair Mel Watt of North Carolina, and David Scott, the congressperson from west Atlanta.

BC reader Louis Starks, of Iowa, had this to say on the current utility of the caucus:

The CBC lost its usefulness eons ago. No event shows this more powerfully than the woeful, pitiful CBC “voice” post-Katrina. After years of Clinton’s triangulation and soft-peddling of issues of importance to African Americans, the government’s callous, incompetent response in the wake of Katrina finally created an opportunity to talk about, debate, and initiate policies geared towards alleviating the gaps between Black/White, rich/poor. Even the MSM was on board for a while. After decades of dormancy and neglect of African Americans and the inner-cities in particular, the best the CBC could offer is “President Bush, God cannot be pleased.” My comment is, “CBC, God cannot be pleased with you.” CBC, you have watered yourselves down to a state of irrelevancy.

This is but another example of Black Folk continuing to be our own worst enemy.

The Senate is now considering its own version of the telecom bill. Senators were delivered a petition with one million signatures urging them to preserve the free and fair internet. For our part, we urge all our readers to visit www. savetheinternet.com to communicate with their senators, and the members of the relevant committees. If we lose this battle, we can expect to communicate about the next one using mimeograph machines.