Kamala Harris tells Urban League the Voting Rights Act won’t be revived ‘any time soon’

For former Vice President Kamala Harris, figuring out how to restore the hobbled Voting Rights Act (VRA) is not something that voters and lawmakers should be focused on right now. 

“I honestly don’t believe that it will be any time soon that we are going to revive the Voting Rights Act,” said Harris at the National Urban League conference on Friday. “I don’t believe that is going to be the best use of our energy right now, to try to get that done. Because I don’t know that it’s going to get done right now, the way this Congress is composed and the way they have been treating civil rights issues.”

The U.S. Supreme Court’s Callais decision in April gutted what little was left of the VRA’s core protections against racially discriminatory redistricting policies. After that ruling, Republicans immediately moved to gerrymander congressional maps across the South by severely cutting out what were once VRA-protected majority-Black and Latino districts.

In a conversation with Urban League President Marc Morial, Harris said she was still “hopeful” that the VRA could be restored at some point. Tennessee, where the National League conference was held, was the first state to redraw its U.S. House map after Callais to get rid of its only majority-Black district.

Harris had already anticipated that the Supreme Court was going to kill off a key tenet of the VRA weeks before the Callais decision was handed down. Now, given the civil rights legislation’s hobbled state, minority voters will have to get “creative” and “ruthless” to ensure their full participation in democracy, Harris told Morial. 

At the very least, that will mean voters will need to regularly stay on top of their voter registration statuses, to make sure they haven’t been purged. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has been relentlessly hounding states for their unredacted voter registration lists in an effort to create its own federal voter database, to determine who it believes should be eligible to vote. 

This is an unprecedented federal incursion into states’ authority over election administration, and no court has deemed the DOJ’s actions on this lawful. The Justice Department has lost 19 court battles in its crusade to take over states’ voter lists.

To hold the Trump administration accountable, voters should have “an agenda that is about turning out the vote in the greatest numbers we have ever seen, so that in light of and in this environment where they are cheating, we will be too big to rig,” said Harris. 

If voters are able to push Democrats into controlling majorities of the U.S. House and Senate in this year’s midterms, lawmakers should be “uncompromising,” said Harris. This means revisiting policies around Electoral College votes, expanding the U.S. Supreme Court bench, and exploring statehood for Puerto Rico and D.C., she said.

Harris has teased running for president again in several public appearances. And while some recent studies have suggested that a pro-democracy fight is not a winning formula for White House candidates, Harris has continued to make it a priority in her stump speeches. Meanwhile, she leads in current polling among potential Democratic candidates for president.