WASHINGTON — Considered one of President Donald Trump’s nominees to a federal judgeship, Josh Divine, argued in a university opinion piece that individuals must be required to take literacy checks with the intention to vote — regardless of such checks being outlawed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as a result of they have been routinely used to maintain Black folks from voting.
“People who aren’t informed about issues or platforms — especially when it is so easy to become informed these days — have no business voting, which is why I propose state-administered literacy tests,” Divine wrote in October 2010 in The Mirror, a publication of the College of Northern Colorado. On the time, he was a junior on the college.
“In the Civil Rights Act, literacy tests were banned because they were used as a form of discrimination in that they were only administered to certain groups of people,” he mentioned, “but literacy tests themselves are not a bad thing.”
Right here’s a duplicate of Divine’s column:
Literacy checks in elections have a protracted and ugly historical past within the U.S. They have been used from the late 1800s to the mid-Sixties to stop voting by immigrants and lower-income folks, who have been thought of not educated sufficient to vote. Specifically, within the Sixties, Southern states compelled Black residents to elucidate sophisticated constitutional provisions with the intention to vote. The landmark Voting Rights Act finally banned literacy checks, together with ballot taxes, and the outcome was a surge in registered Black voters.
The intent behind literacy checks was by no means to make sure that folks grew to become extra knowledgeable in elections; they have been a sequence of trick questions designed to maintain non-white folks from voting and having political energy. Voting clerks, who have been all the time white, might usually resolve at will who handed or failed these checks. White folks often didn’t need to take literacy checks, as a result of their voting rights have been tied to their grandfathers’ rights from earlier than the Civil Warfare.
Divine additionally wrote within the column that he’s glad america isn’t “a true democracy,” which is often understood to imply direct democracy, during which voters weigh in immediately on insurance policies reasonably than voting to nominate representatives who then vote to symbolize their constituents.
“I am very thankful we do not live in a true democracy, for if that were the case, America would not just be dying, its gravestone would already have weathered away,” he mentioned.
It’s not clear whether or not Divine, who’s now in his mid-30s, nonetheless thinks it could be a good suggestion to let states convey again literacy checks as a requirement for voting.
The White Home didn’t return a HuffPost request for remark.
Divine is Trump’s decide for a lifetime federal judgeship on the U.S. District Court docket for the Jap and Western Districts of Missouri. (It’s uncommon, however one judgeship serves each courts.)
He’s at the moment the solicitor basic of Missouri and director of particular litigation within the state legal professional basic’s workplace. He beforehand clerked for conservative Supreme Court docket Justice Clarence Thomas and served as chief counsel to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.).
Divine will profit not simply from Hawley’s enthusiastic help for his nomination but in addition from the lawmaker’s seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which hears from and approves judicial nominees earlier than they advance to the complete Senate for affirmation.
Trump has thus far nominated a handful of individuals to lifetime federal judgeships in his second time period, however none has had a listening to but.
Some progressive judicial advocacy teams are already accusing Divine of being unfit to be a federal choose.
“Josh Divine’s op-ed advocating for literacy tests at the polls and arguing against the idea of democracy itself is one of the most disturbing writings we’ve ever seen in a judicial nominee’s record,” Jake Faleschini, the justice program director at Alliance for Justice, mentioned in an announcement.
“It should be unquestionable that a voter suppression tool rooted in the racism of the Jim Crow south has no place in our democracy,” mentioned Faleschini. “He may have written some of them in college, but college wasn’t very long ago for Divine. He’s a radically young nominee to be a lifetime judge and doesn’t have even close to the minimal legal experience expected of federal judges.”
