Ari Berman has a great piece on the voting rights hearing yesterday in North Carolina:
Nearly fifty years after marching for voting rights in Alabama, Coleman testified in federal court today in Winston-Salem against North Carolina’s new voting restrictions, which have been described as the most onerous in the nation. The law mandates strict voter ID, cuts early voting by a week and eliminates same-day registration, among many other things. After the bill’s passage, “I was devastated,” Coleman testified. “I felt like I was living life over again. Everything that I worked for for the last fifty years was being lost.”
The federal government and civil rights groups, including the ACLU and the North Carolina NAACP, asked Judge Thomas Schroeder, a George W. Bush appointee for the Middle District of North Carolina, to enjoin key provisions of the law before the 2014 midterms under Section 2 of the VRA.
After the hearing, eight hundred North Carolinians gathered in downtown Winston-Salem for a “Moral March to the Polls” event protesting the law. “I know it’s hot out here,” Barber told the crowd. “But it’s going to be hotter if you let them take our vote away.”
The Rev. William Barber, president of the state NAACP, was among the first at the court house this morning.
In other news, True the Vote had to dismiss their Mississippi lawsuit. Despite this headline:
Tea Party surrogates True the Vote have voluntarily given up a lawsuit in North MS Federal District Court after Judge Michael Mills read them the riot act on Monday.
I don’t think the judge “read them the riot act”. He thinks they’re in the wrong court so ordered them to “show cause” why they filed where they did and they then dismissed. It’s not like he told them to STFU.
Have to get up pretty early in the morning to beat Rev. BarberPost + Comments (32)