As Rick posted yesterday, our colleague Lani Guinier has passed.

Lani was a voting rights scholar.  She was the first Black woman to serve as a tenured faculty member at Harvard Law School.  Her commitment to truth and ideas made her a political target in Washington, DC.  The significance of her visionary work has stood the test of time, particularly in this moment when the future of American multiracial democracy seems so tenuous.

When Bill Clinton nominated Lani to lead the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department in 1993, some Republicans dubbed her a “quota queen” due to her scholarship. This was an untrue, unfair, racialized, and gendered label, and illustrated the worst in elected officials practicing “politricks” rather than seriously engaging with ideas. Indeed, Lani’s proposal of cumulative voting was race-neutral and more inclusive of voters from communities of all political backgrounds (including conservative and rural voters) than the status quo (here’s a short essay from Lani explaining that “cumulative voting is more inclusive than winner-take-all-race conscious districting”). Cumulative voting has been used in various localities in several states (e.g., AL, IL, SD, TX) and in shareholder elections at companies like Hewlett-Packard, Sears, and Walgreens.

Rather than defend Lani and use the moment to educate the public about democracy, moderate Democrats backed away and President Clinton withdrew her nomination. It would be another 28 years before the first Black woman would be nominated and confirmed to lead the Civil Rights Division at DOJ-Kristen Clarke.

Lani, however, was so much more than this deliberative failure of our republic, and represented an amazing combination of traits. She was super smart, prolific, creative, and substantive. She was respectful and engaging while also strong and principled. She was committed to empowering community voices and listening to and lifting up others rather than self-promotion.

You can find Lani’s life chronicled in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, CNN, and many other outlets, and statements honoring her life from LDF’s Sherrilyn Ifill, NAACP’s Derrick Johnson, FairVote’s Rob Richie, and many others.

Personally, I benefited from Lani’s generosity when I was a fellow working to become a law professor. She allowed me to teach sessions of her voting rights class at Harvard Law School, and she read drafts of my scholarship and provided insightful feedback. She also consistently told me to smile more! 

Throughout my career as a professor and in leading the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, Lani was always available, supportive, honest, and wonderful. 

We were both fortunate to have served as clerks for Judge Damon J. Keith, and I know that there’s great sadness throughout our entire family of Keith clerks and administrators.

Lani was an outstanding mentor and model to me and to many others, and her guidance shapes my work and life to this day.

We will miss her.

My latest in The Hill:

“Last year’s assault on the U.S. Capitol is not over. While our nation grows more diverse each day, the attack on multiracial democracy continues today through schemes to suppress votes across the nation. . . .Right now, the most urgent priority is for the U.S. Senate to pass federal legislation protecting the freedom to vote. . . .” 

As Rick Hasen noted, Paul Blumenthal reports for HuffPo that some in the U.S. Senate are attempting to completely eliminate the limits on coordinated spending by political parties on candidate campaigns.

This is a problem because it would give political parties, federal elected officials, and federal candidates even greater incentives to focus on the few megadonors who can afford to give a single contribution of over $33,000 to a political party committee, and to pay less attention to millions of average Americans.

Instead, the law should be revised to allow unlimited coordinated spending by a party on candidate elections, but only with money that comes from the first $200 an individual contributes to the party per year.  

This proposal would allow parties to get more money to swing, contested elections, which party leaders would say are being decided by money from SuperPACs and other outside forces.  In 2008, the six federal party committees raised four times the amount from small donors than they spent on coordinated expenditures.  A relaxed coordination rule for the first $200 contributed would increase the party’s ability to target this money most effectively to support particular candidates in key races.

At the same time, the proposal would increase the importance of average Americans in the political process.  Both Republican and Democratic party committees would have much greater incentives to focus on obtaining contributions from working and middle-class Americans, since this money could be targeted in a coordinated fashion with contested races.

The proposal would not be limited to contributions of $200 or less, but would apply to the first $200 contributed by each individual.  Thus, megadonors would be less likely to successfully claim the law “discriminates” against them (a possibility with the current Supreme Court after an Arizona public financing case).  Recognizing, however, that there are many more people who can afford to give $200 (which could be a recurring monthly gift of just over $16) or less, parties and federal officials would have greater incentives to reach out and engage the smaller donors.  In other words, it is much easier to raise $2 million in coordinated funds for a contested race from 10,000 smaller donors than from 10,000 megadonors.  Further, because only the first $200 of an individual’s contributions could be coordinated, the proposal would not allow megadonors to funnel money through the party to circumvent the lower candidate contribution limits.

I talk about this idea in my Georgetown Law Journal article “The Participation Interest,” and Michael Malbin develops a version of it here.

Today, J. Christian Adams @ElectionLawCtr tweeted the following:  “‘If there was justice in the world they’d be suppressing white people’ says @jointcenter staffer.  What says @donnabrazile @SpencerOverton?”  He elaborated on the tweet in a blog post.

The Daily Beast attributed that statement to David Bositis, who is not a Joint Center staffer, and has not worked at the Joint Center for over a year.

Voter suppression against any racial group is a serious matter, and it is wrong.  Our democracy should work to facilitate participation by Americans of all backgrounds.

For the most recent report published by the Joint Center on race in politics, please read 50 Years of the Voting Rights Act:  The State of Race in Politics.  The report is critical to understanding the impact of the Act and the future of voting rights.  The report provides data on minority voter turnout, racially polarized voting, policy outcomes by race, and the number of minority elected officials from 1965 until the present.  Click here to read the 2-page summary and the full 46-page report.

Right now, the Commission is here at GW Law, discussing their report in detail for the first time.  Watch live video of event on C-Span 2 by clicking here!