Civil Rights Act -- 50 years later, its' still a fight

President Obama and the four living former presidents, Carter, Clinton, GHW Bush, and GW Bush, are all in Austin, Texas at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library for a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the landmark passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

So just how well are those protections holding up?    Pretty well in some ways.   Public accommodation denials are gone, for one thing.   But Republicans in the senate just blocked an equal pay for women bill.   And what about voting rights?   We're fast going backwards on that.

Take a look at Ohio, as just one example of some dozen or so states that are busy restricting easy access to voting.    The Republican-controlled Ohio legislature has recently passed legislation that will:   (1)  cut back on the number of early voting days, (2)  eliminate Sunday and weekday evening early voting, (3) reduce the number of voting machines at precincts, and (4) make it more difficult to get a provisional ballot counted.

If that's not enough, they introduced a bill that would forbid counties from sending out absentee ballots.  Henceforth, absentee ballots would have to be sent out only by the Secretary of State's office, and only if the legislature voted to fund it, and only if the SoS wanted to do it.    How outrageous -- and how blatant and obvious can they get in their base motives?  

At this point the Democratic candidate for governor, Ed Fitzgerald, who is the county executive in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), had enough.   First, the county council voted to sent out ballots anyway, in defiance of the law.  The legislature retaliated by introducing a bill that imposes a loss of 10% of state money going to the county if they send out ballots.

Then Fitzgerald filed a lawsuit against the state and asked the U. S. Attorney General to investigate Ohio's attempts to interfere with the voting rights of citizens.

At this point the governor and Republican leadership decided they had gone too far.  They withdrew the bill.    But, at least for now, the other restrictions stand.   Seems to me to be presumptive evidence enough for the Depatrment of Justice to investigate.

The problem is that the DoJ already has Texas, Alabama, North Carolina -- and I don't know how many other states -- to investigate for these restrictive laws.   It's not going to happen in time for the November election, I fear.   And if the Republicans take the senate, then it's too late to reverse this any time soon.

Ralph