The New York Times - USA (2020-07-22)

THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALWEDNESDAY, JULY 22, 2020 N A

WASHINGTON — Senator Mitch McConnell took to the Sen- ate floor Monday to lament the death of Representative John Lewis, a civil rights icon whom the Republican leader called a “monu- mental figure” who made “huge personal sacrifices to help our nation move past the sin of racism.” While many Democrats wel- comed the tribute, they immedi- ately pressed for more than just reverent words: If Mr. McConnell and Republicans really wanted to honor Mr. Lewis, they argued, they should agree to restore the voting rights protections that were the cause of his life, which were stripped away by the Su- preme Court seven years ago. The death of Mr. Lewis, who was brutally beaten in 1965 while demonstrating for voting rights in Selma, Ala., has renewed a push by Democrats and civil rights ac- tivists to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act, a move that Republi- cans have steadfastly opposed, and name it in his honor. “The law he nearly died for has been gutted by the Supreme Court,” Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said Monday on the Senate floor. “Congress has the power to restore it. But only one party seems interested in doing so.” Ever since the Supreme Court in 2013 invalidated key aspects of the Voting Rights Act — allowing states, mostly in the South, to change their election laws without advance federal approval — Dem- ocrats and voting rights advocates have been trying to persuade Con- gress to pass legislation to restore the protections for Black voters. “Mitch McConnell just spoke on the Senate floor about John Lewis (and quoted Dr. King) but said nothing about restoring the Voting Rights Act or taking any action to honor his legacy,” Vanita Gupta, the chief executive of the Leader- ship Conference on Civil and Hu- man Rights, wrote on Twitter. At the heart of the dispute is the question of whether Black voters continue to face barriers to voting in states with a history of discrimination. Most Republicans including Mr. McConnell argue that such obstacles no longer exist. But Democrats and civil rights advocates contend that while most overt discrimination — such as poll taxes and literacy tests — are gone, it has been replaced by stricter voting laws and other tac- tics that have the effect of disen- franchising Black voters. Ms. Gupta’s organization says it identified 1,688 polling place closures between 2012 and 2018, and that such closures are most likely to make ballot access more difficult for Black voters. A full-scale voting meltdown last month in Georgia’s statewide primary election, in which predominantly Black areas experienced some of the worst problems, raised new concerns about racially discrimi- natory voter suppression. The Voting Rights Act had ap- plied to nine states — Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisi- ana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia — and other counties and towns including Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx. It required federal approval before local jurisdictions could institute changes to voting pro- cedures, such as voter identifica- tion laws, drawing new district maps and restricting early voting. But in a 2013 decision that re- flected its ideological split, the Su- preme Court said that key sections of the statute were unconstitutional and based on antiquated data. If Congress wanted to continue to impose federal oversight on states where voting rights were at risk, the court said, it must pass legislation that would do so based on con- temporary data. Last year, the Democratic-led House did just that. In December, the House voted to reinstate federal oversight of state election law, moving to bol- ster protections against racial discrimination enshrined in the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Mr. Lewis pre- sided over the passage of that bill. That followed passage in March 2019 of the Democrats’ showcase anti-corruption legislation, which also included measures that aimed to dismantle barriers to the

ballot box. “You know that our work is far from finished,” Mr. Lewis said in arguing for the bill’s passage at the time. “It makes me sad. It makes me feel like crying when people are denied the right to vote.” Both bills have run into a brick wall in the Senate. Mr. McConnell has said he does not believe Black voters still face voter suppression efforts, and therefore there is no longer a need for Congress to impose federal oversight on local election deci- sions. He has argued other aspects of the Voting Rights Act remain in effect, and noted that turnout among Black voters has been up in some recent elections. “There’s very little tangible evi- dence of this whole voter-suppression nonsense that the Democrats are promoting,” Mr. McConnell told The Wall Street Journal in a recent interview. “My prediction is African-American voters will turn out in as large a percentage as whites, if not more so, all across the country.” Nevertheless, Democrats plan to push ahead with calls for addi- tional voting rights protections, under legislation now bearing Mr. Lewis’ name. Senator Patrick Leahy, Demo- crat of Vermont, said he planned to reintroduce the Voting Rights Amendment Act this week. “As author and chief sponsor of the Senate bill I will be reintro- ducing #VRAA this week, naming it for John Lewis, my longtime partner on this,” Mr. Leahy wrote on Twitter.

Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland and the majority leader, told reporters on Tuesday that House leaders hoped to have a bill together by the end of the week combining a fix to the Voting Rights Act with funds to support local election officials and make balloting more accessible. The House has already passed similar provisions individually, but the idea would be to unite them in a measure named for Mr. Lewis. Mr. Lewis, who was known as the “conscience of the Congress” for his moral authority acquired through years of protest for racial equality, died on Friday. He an- nounced late last year that he had Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in television interviews on Monday that the Senate should pass a bill bearing Mr. Lewis’ name. “The appropriate way to honor John Lewis is for the Senate to take up the Voting Rights Act and name it for John Lewis,” Ms. Pelosi said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “That it should be so difficult for them to take up the Voting Rights Act is really hard to comprehend, but maybe now they see a path. I certainly hope so.” On the floor of the House, Repre- sentative Al Green, Democrat of Texas, who was twice arrested while protesting alongside Mr. Lewis, called on the Senate to take up the legislation. “It seems to me it would be proper, appropriate and befitting of this body and all of Congress to now pass the reformation of the Voting Rights Act so that we could show the world that voting is still important to all people in this country,” Mr. Green said. Ms. Pelosi said she would be waiting until after the funeral of a fellow civil rights legend to announce plans for how Congress would honor Mr. Lewis. Support- ers of Mr. Lewis have urged for him to receive the honor of lying in state, while respecting pandemic restrictions. “When our beloved John Lewis left us on Friday evening, he did so with the respect and gratitude of our entire country,” Ms. Pelosi wrote in a letter to colleagues on Monday. “That same day, Rev. C.T. Vivian, another giant of the civil rights movement, made his passage. Rev. Vivian’s services will be held on Thursday. Out of respect for Rev. Vivian, the Lewis family wants to wait until after his services to announce their plans for John’s farewell.”

Nicholas Fandos contributed re- porting.

Representative John Lewis pushed for legislation last year to restore voting protections that had been removed in 2013.

MICHAEL A. MCCOY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Democrats Renew Push

For a Voting Rights Law

By LUKE BROADWATER

Asking to honor a

deceased colleague by

restoring protections.

WASHINGTON — President
Trump directed the federal gov-
ernment on Tuesday not to count
undocumented immigrants when
allocating the nation’s House dis-
tricts, a move that critics called a
transparent political ploy to help
Republicans in violation of the
Constitution.
The president’s directive would
exclude millions of people when
determining how many House
seats each state should have
based on the once-a-decade cen-
sus, reversing the longstanding
policy of counting everyone re-
gardless of citizenship or legal sta-
tus. The effect would most likely
shift several seats from Demo-
cratic states to Republican states.
“There used to be a time when
you could proudly declare, ‘I am a
citizen of the United States,’ ” Mr.
Trump said in a written statement
after signing a memorandum to
the Commerce Department,
which oversees the Census Bu-
reau. “But now, the radical left is
trying to erase the existence of
this concept and conceal the num-
ber of illegal aliens in our country.
This is all part of a broader left-
wing effort to erode the rights of
Americans citizens, and I will not
stand for it.”
The action directly conflicts
with the traditional consensus in-
terpretation of the Constitution
and will almost surely be chal-
lenged in court, potentially delay-
ing its effect if not blocking its en-
actment altogether. But it fit into
Mr. Trump’s efforts to curb both
legal and illegal immigration at a
time when he is anxiously trying
to galvanize his political base
heading into a fall election season
trailing his Democratic opponent.
“I think the Donald Trump view
is: ‘I can look like I’m trying to do
something by stoking anti-immi-
grant fervor, and if I lose in court

then, I just stoke anti-court fervor too,’ ” Joshua A. Geltzer, the director of the Institute for Constitu- tional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown, said in an interview. “It should be legally impossible as well as factually difficult to do.” As a practical matter, Mr. Trump’s order could not be car- ried out even were it legal, because no official tally of undocumented immigrants exists, and federal law bars the use of popula- tion estimates for reappor- tionment purposes. The move comes a year after Mr. Trump was blocked by the Su- preme Court from adding a citizenship question to the census on the grounds that its ostensible reasoning “seems to have been contrived.” The administration has been trying ever since to col- lect information on undocumented immigrants through separate means like driver’s license files. A study last year by the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that supports limits on immigration, found that excluding immigrants from the count for purposes of drawing congressional districts would take away seats from some states while giving more to others. Excluding unauthorized immigrants in 2020 would redistribute three seats, the study found, with California, New York and Texas all losing a seat that they would have had otherwise, while Ohio, Ala- bama and Minnesota would each gain one. The study found even more sweeping effects if the U.S.- born children of undocumented immigrants were excluded, but the president’s directive made no mention of them. Steven Camarota, the research director for the center, said the administration’s effort would be difficult administratively and likely tied up in court. “Nevertheless,” he said, “the president has done the country an important service by reminding us that tolerating large-scale illegal immigration

creates a number of unavoidable consequences, including diluting the political representation of American citizens in Congress and the Electoral College.” The president’s directive on Tuesday amounted to his latest election-year effort to restrict immigration and immigration rights in the United States, lately predi- cated on the need to stem the spread of the coronavirus. The administration decided last month to suspend new work visas and bar hundreds of thousands of foreigners from seeking employ- ment in the United States, drawing immediate opposition from business leaders and several states. But last week administration officials backed away from a separate plan to strip international col-

lege students of their visas if they did not attend at least some classes in person. Earlier this month, Mr. Trump told Telemundo that he would sign a “much bigger bill on immigration” through an executive order, although that has not come to fruition. The president’s move to exclude unauthorized immigrants from congressional apportionment upends a long history. Even as he signed his memorandum on Tuesday, the Census Bureau’s own website continued to say in a question-and-answer section that undocumented residents are to be counted: “Yes, all people (citizens and noncitizens) with a usual resi- dence in the 50 states are to be included in the census and thus in the apportionment counts.” The president’s policy ap- peared at odds with the Constitu-

tion, which requires the government to conduct an “actual enu- meration” of all people living in the United States without distin- guishing whether they are citizens. But the memorandum signed by Mr. Trump argued that the government has always made distinctions like not counting for- eign diplomats or temporary vis- itors even though they are in the United States physically. There- fore, the memorandum argued, the government can make the fur- ther distinction of not counting people who have no legal right to be in the country in the first place. The argument that immigrants can be excluded from reappor- tionment counts also runs counter to legal opinions that the Depart- ment of Justice issued during the administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clin- ton, when some in Congress sought to put that exclusion into law. Critics said the administration’s efforts first to include a citizenship question and now to disre- gard undocumented immigrants from apportionment would lead to undercounts of even legal noncitizens and minority residents, re- sulting in less representation and federal funding in areas where they live, which tend to vote Dem- ocratic. Marielena Hincapié, the executive director of the National Immi- gration Law Center Immigrant Justice Fund, said that regardless of whether Mr. Trump’s latest action was legal, it would discourage compliance with the census among Latinos, who already com- plete the survey at lower rates than people of other races. “This is his go-to play every time that he’s feeling cornered or he’s feeling like he’s losing,” Ms. Hincapié said. “He uses immigrants and immigration to divide and distract, and at the same time he sends that chilling effect through all immigrant communities who have already been living in fear under his administration.”

Trump Aims to Exclude Immigrants in House Count

By KATIE ROGERS and PETER BAKER

Michael Wines contributed report-
ing.

Unfeasible in practice,

but also most likely

unconstitutional.

Planned Parenthood of Greater
New York will remove the name of
Margaret Sanger, a founder of the
national organization, from its
Manhattan health clinic because
of her “harmful connections to the
eugenics movement,” the group
said on Tuesday.
Ms. Sanger, a public health
nurse who opened the first birth
control clinic in the United States
in Brooklyn in 1916, has long been
lauded as a feminist icon and re-
productive-rights pioneer.
But her legacy also includes
supporting eugenics, a discredited
belief in improving the human
race through selective breeding,
often targeted at poor people,
those with disabilities, immi-
grants and people of color.
“The removal of Margaret
Sanger’s name from our building
is both a necessary and overdue
step to reckon with our legacy and
acknowledge Planned Parent-
hood’s contributions to historical
reproductive harm within commu-
nities of color,” Karen Seltzer, the
chair of the New York affiliate’s
board, said in a statement.
The group is also talking to city
leaders about replacing Ms. Sang-
er’s name on a street sign that has
hung near its offices on Bleecker
Street for more than two decades.
The actions thrust Ms. Sanger
onto a growing list of historical fig-
ures whose legacies are being re-
evaluated amid both widespread
protests against systemic racism
and a pandemic that has exposed
racial and economic inequalities in
health care services.
Princeton University said last
month that it would remove Presi-
dent Woodrow Wilson’s name
from its public policy school and a
residential college because of his
segregationist views. Just four
years ago, Princeton trustees
voted against such a move.
Planned Parenthood Federation
of America, the national organiza-
tion, has defended Ms. Sanger in
the past, citing her work with
Black leaders in the 1930s and
1940s. As recently as 2016, the
group issued a fact sheet saying
that while it condemned some of
her beliefs, she had mostly been
well intentioned in trying to make
birth control accessible for poor
and immigrant communities.
The national organization said
in the fact sheet that it disagreed
with Ms. Sanger’s decision to
speak to members of the Ku Klux
Klan in 1926 as she tried to spread
her message about birth control.
It also condemned her support
for policies to sterilize people who
had disabilities that could not be
treated; for banning immigrants
with disabilities; and for “placing
so-called illiterates, paupers, un-

employables, criminals, prosti- tutes, and dope fiends on farms and in open spaces as long as necessary for the strengthening and development of moral conduct.” In a statement, the national organization said it supported the New York chapter’s decision to strike Ms. Sanger’s name from the clinic. There is no sign on the facili- ty, but it had been identified both internally and publicly by Ms. Sanger’s name. It will now be known as the Manhattan Health Center. “Planned Parenthood, like many other organizations that have existed for a century or more, is reckoning with our history, and working to address historical ineq- uities to better serve patients and our mission,” Melanie Roussell Newman, a spokeswoman for the group, said in the statement. Ms. Sanger still has defenders who say the decision to repudiate her lacks historical nuance. Ellen Chesler, a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, a think tank, and the author of a biogra- phy of Ms. Sanger and the birth control movement, said that while the country is undergoing vast social change and reconsidering prominent figures from the past, Ms. Sanger’s views have been mis- interpreted. The eugenics movement had wide support at the time in both conservative and liberal circles, Ms. Chesler said, and Ms. Sanger was squarely in the latter camp. She rejected some eugenicists’ belief that white middle-class families should have more children than others, Ms. Chesler said. Instead, Ms. Sanger believed that the quality of all children’s lives could be improved if their parents had smaller families, Ms. Chesler said, adding that Ms. Sanger believed Black people and immigrants had a right to that better life. “Her motives were the opposite of racism,” Ms. Chesler said, citing

Ms. Sanger’s relationships with prominent Black leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois, a founder of the N.A.A.C.P. Planned Parenthood of Greater New York, which was formed when five area chapters merged in January, is now the national group’s largest affiliate and wants to recognize the Black women and others who also championed the reproductive justice movement, said Merle McGee, the New York chapter’s chief equity and engage- ment officer. The decision to drop Ms. Sanger’s name from the clinic creates an un- usual align- ment between the New York group and anti- abortion con- servatives like Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, and Ben Carson, the federal housing secretary, who have pointed to Ms. Sanger’s belief in eugenics to criticize Planned Par- enthood and its mission. Ms. McGee said the group could not worry about how conservative figures might react to the move, which she described as a response to the concerns of patients and people of color. “We’re not going to obliterate her,” Ms. McGee said. “If we obliterate her, we cannot reckon with her.” The New York affiliate’s effort to disavow Ms. Sanger comes as it wrestles with internal turmoil, including the recent ouster of its executive director, Laura McQuade, in part because of complaints that she had mistreated Black employ- ees. Ms. McGee said there was no connection between Ms. Mc- Quade’s departure and the decision to remove Ms. Sanger’s name. The move, she said, arose out of a three-year effort to tackle racism

internally and to improve relationships with groups led by Black women who have been wary of Planned Parenthood’s origins. Of the New York affiliate’s 22 board members, one is Black, two are Asian and two are Hispanic. “The biggest concern with Mar- garet Sanger is her public support for the eugenics medical philoso- phy which was rooted in racism, ableism and classism,” Ms. McGee said. Ms. Sanger based her movement in New York and has been honored in several places around the city. Her former clinic, on West 16th Street, was designated a Na- tional Historic Landmark in 1993. The same year, the City Council voted to name the corner of Mott and Bleecker Streets Margaret Sanger Square. Planned Parent- hood of Greater New York helped push for the designation after moving its offices there. The group’s announcement on Tuesday focused on its current building and the street sign. A representative of the group, recounting an often repeated but uncorroborated story, told city leaders in 1993 that it was fitting to honor Ms. Sanger in the area given that she had helped start the birth control movement nearby on the Lower East Side. As the story goes, Ms. Sanger treated a woman named “Sadie Sachs,” who had given herself an abortion. Sadie asked a doctor how she could avoid having another baby, and the doctor recom- mended abstinence. A few months later, Ms. Sanger was called to treat Sadie again after she had given herself another abortion, and she died in Ms. Sanger’s arms. Ms. Sanger went on to start clin- ics, including one in Harlem. She pushed for reproductive rights, even after she was arrested and sent to jail for opening her first clinic, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.

Planned Parenthood in New York Disavows a Founder

Margaret Sanger opened the country’s first birth control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in 1916.

SOCIAL PRESS ASSOCIATION/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Susan C. Beachy contributed re-
search.

Sanger’s Name Is

Removed Over Her

Ties to Eugenics

By NIKITA STEWART

Sanger

The New York Times - USA (2020-07-22)

Get our desktop app

Company

Features

Documentation

Resources