Keeping White Power at the Polls

Notes from America with Kai Wright

WNYC Studios

News Commentary, Politics, History, News

4.4 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 5 March 2020

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The United States of Anxiety presents: What Next "One person, one vote" has not always been a given in America. After the Civil War, there was some debate over who should be counted in a congressional district: every person, or every person eligible to vote? The 14th Amendment aimed to settle this question forever, but as the demographics of our country have shifted and changed over the course of our nation's history, so too have the politics of how we count the people who live within our borders. This week, our friends at Slate's What Next podcast team up with reporter Ari Berman to tell a story about how the Trump Administration has revived the debate, and the GOP's quiet plan to redefine political representation and maintain white minority rule in America. - Mary Harris is host of What Next. Hear the original version of this story here. - Ari Berman is author of Give Us the Ballot. Read his original reporting on this issue at Mother Jones.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody this is Kai so Super Tuesday has finally come and now a lot more of us are
0:07.0	voting and we are certainly thinking about voting rights here on the show past and
0:11.7	present throughout this season we've been looking back at the voting rights here on the show, past and present.
0:12.6	Throughout this season, we've been looking back
0:14.8	at the decades following the Civil War,
0:16.8	finding unresolved questions and debates
0:20.0	that haunt our politics today. And arguably, nothing haunts us more
0:25.0	than the compromise Congress made when it wrote the rules
0:29.0	that still govern voting in America.
0:31.0	I can't stop thinking about something Thaddeus
0:33.7	Stephen said on the floor of Congress way back in the 1860s. He was one of the
0:38.4	leading congressional abolitionists. He gave this great speech in which he said
0:42.4	you know we have an opportunity here to create the perfect republic and we've blown it.
0:49.0	And maybe he was right. I'll try to figure that out in an upcoming episode.
0:54.5	But in the meantime, we're gonna take a little break this week.
0:57.4	So I wanna introduce you to one of my favorite podcasts
1:01.2	where I have learned a lot about voting and voter suppression
1:05.2	that's happening right now. The show is called What Next and it's hosted by Mary
1:10.0	Harris. Mary is in my feed every single day having these smart conversations that offer so much more
1:16.9	than a digest of today's headlines or a rehash of conventional wisdom. She's constantly looking ahead, telling me what's coming.
1:25.0	I learn stuff and I love that.
1:28.0	So I want to play you an episode of what next that focuses on voting rights. In this episode Mary's talking to my friend
	...

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