NC AFL-CIO Hails Death – For Now – Of State ‘Voter ID’ Law
The North Carolina AFL-CIO is hailing the death – for now – of the state’s notoriously discriminatory Republican-passed so-called “voter ID” law.
“North Carolina’s ‘monster voting’ law is dead, but lawmakers determined to suppress the vote say they’ll try again,” the state fed warned in a tweet on May 15.
Earlier that day, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a lower court ruling tossing out the law. Federal District Judge Diana Motz, who originally threw out the law, found that the state’s Republican-dominated legislature wrote it “with almost surgical precision” to disenfranchise African-Americans in the Tar Heel State.
Still pending before the High Court: Legal challenges to the GOP-approved racially based gerrymandering of both the state legislature and North Carolina’s U.S. House districts.
The state fed was one of many groups that protested state lawmakers’ actions. The legal cases against voter ID and redistricting were filed by the Obama administration Justice Department, North Carolina’s NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union.
The voter ID law was one of the top causes that led the Rev. William Barber to launch the Moral Mondays movement, which has brought tens of thousands of people into the streets of Raleigh, the state capital, for more than a year. On May 15, Barber announced he would step down as head of the state NAACP to take the Moral Mondays movement nationwide, by reviving Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967-68 Poor People’s Campaign.
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