Texas GOP Celebrates MLK By Crying Discrimination While Gutting The Voting Rights Act

Oh Texas.. Can't You Do Any Better?
Republished From Addicting Info Website
Leave it to those insane right-wing Republicans in Texas to celebrate Martin Luther King Day and the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act in the most offensive way possible.
The Nonprofit Quarterly reports that five white Republicans from Dallas County, TX sued their county for discriminating against white people and violating their voting rights.
In what seems an odd way to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day, five white residents of Dallas County, Texas, sued the county for violating the voting rights of white people. The suit was filed on the plaintiffs’ behalf by the Dallas-based Equal Voting Rights Institute, charging that, “Like something out of the bad old days, a southern electoral body [is] playing naked racial politics, intentionally using its power to minimize a dissenting race’s political sway.”
These people have a lot of nerve, considering that (a) President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act into law because Southern States systematically and violently denied black people their right to vote; (b) a recent wave of discriminatory voter ID laws in Republican-led states are once again denying blacks — along with seniors, others of color, college students, and low-income people — their right to vote; and (c) the Republican-led Supreme Court upheld these voter ID laws and gutted Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act that so many fought for.
Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act is crucial to the law that Martin Luther King pushed to get passed, and which he ultimately paid for with his assassination. Others got beaten, killed, and murdered so all Americans would have the right to vote, as shown in the movie Selma. But without requiring a review process for all election law changes by states with records of past voting rights violations, the law is toothless. Although voter ID laws aren’t as blatantly discriminatory as the kinds of tests and intimidation blacks were once subjected to, they still prevent people from voting.
The Atlantic dug into the Supreme Court ruling and dug up a chart that they found “astonishing.” The chart — shown below — reveals the Voting Rights Act’s dramatic success. Once the barriers to voting were removed, the gap between white and black election turnout shrunk to between 0.9 and 4 percent in six southern states.
chart voter participation in 1965  -- before the voting rights act -- and in 2004 inthe wake of the Supreme Court Decision in June 2013.
Despite the Voter Rights Act’s obvious success, the Republican-led Supreme Court gutted it anyway.
That chart makes you wonder how anyone could actually look at these numbers and still gut the Voting Rights Act.

Featured image: Composite with Selma march and Martin Luther King photos via Stanford University’s King Web; Ferguson Police photo by Alex Wroblewski via the Sun Times; and Ferguson protesters image via NBC video screen grab.