“How Jimmy Carter championed civil rights — and Ronald Reagan didn’t”

Ari Berman in the LAT:

When we look back on Reagan’s victory over Carter, we think of the end of the Iran hostage crisis and the beginning of “Morning in America.” Less well known is that Reagan’s triumph also ushered in a counterrevolution against the country’s civil rights laws.

Whereas Carter had appointed Drew Days III, a former lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, to run the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Reagan installed the conservative lawyer William Bradford Reynolds, who believed that “government-imposed discrimination” had created “a kind of racial spoils system in America,” favoring historically disadvantaged minorities over whites. The future leaders of the contemporary conservative legal movement, including Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., came of age in the Reagan Justice Department, where they aggressively tried to weaken the civil rights laws of the 1960s.
Now we live in the world Reagan created. The five conservative justices on the Supreme Court who gutted the Voting Rights Act in the 2013 decision Shelby County vs. Holder were all appointed by Reagan or served in his administration. Reagan’s ideological descendants, post-Shelby, have imposed strict voter-ID laws, cut early voting and eliminated same-day voter registration.

I was surprised this piece did not mention the Carter-Baker commission’s support for voter id laws (though Carter later pulled back from that support).

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