Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita declared his opposition to proposed federal voting rights legislation in a testimony before the U.S. Senate Oct. 6. He argued that such legislation violates the U.S. Constitution because it gives states, and not the federal government, the authority to organize elections.
We are teachers of political science at Indiana University-Bloomington and we think Rokita ought to take a refresher course on the Constitution.
He might start by rereading Section 4 of Article 1, which reads, in full: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of choosing Senators.”
Freshman at IU learn that it is wrong to quote statements out of context. Rokita does precisely this. What he says is a lie. The Constitution clearly gives Congress the power to legislate on election administration — and Congress has often exercised this power, most notably in the Voting Rights Act, first passed in 1965, and reauthorized five times since.
Rokita might also be reminded that the Constitution has been amended 27 times, and many of these amendments — especially the 15th, 19th and 26th Amendments — were explicitly intended to constitutionalize voting rights in the country as a whole.
The Voting Rights Act was explicitly intended to buttress the 15th Amendment, and most of the current arguments for strengthening the act also draw on this Amendment, which outlawed the denial of voting rights based on race, and then declared, in Section 2, that “The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
But the demands for voting rights legislation also draw strength from the 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War in order to enforce civil rights for Black people in the former Confederate states.
Section 1 of this amendment is clear: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Since before the Civil War, those who have opposed racial equality and equal citizenship have based their opposition on the principle of “states’ rights.” Confederate President Jefferson Davis was a proponent of states’ rights. Segregationist Governor of Alabama George Wallace was a proponent of states’ rights. And now Rokita has explicitly joined their ranks.
“States’ rights” arguments were constitutionally settled by Abraham Lincoln in 1865, when the Confederate effort to destroy the Union was defeated. They were subsequently repudiated by numerous Constitutional amendments, by 1960s-era civil rights and voting rights legislation and by a substantial body of case law and legal practice.
Yet Rokita, our state’s highest legal official, claims otherwise.
Either he knows his rhetoric is the rhetoric of Davis and Wallace or he does not. Either he knows both the Constitution and federal law explicitly authorize the federal voting laws he claims are unconstitutional, or he does not.
Either way, Rokita is an embarrassment to all Hoosiers who care about the rule of law and expect their attorney general to at least know the law.
Jeffrey C. Isaac, Professor of Political Science
William Scheuerman, Professor of Political Science
Hussein Banai, Assistant Professor of International Studies
