Today, the New York Times published a lengthy magazine piece on the Voting Rights Act. Called “A Dream Undone,” the piece covers the history leading up the passage of the VRA and the political moves and laws that have effectively reversed it. While the Koch brothers manage to avoid even one mention in the story, their fingerprints are all over the nationwide campaign to disenfranchise voters.
Two think tanks where the Kochs are top funders, the Mercatus Center and the Institute for Justice, have led the charge to repeal the VRA. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in 1997, the Institute for Justice’s Clint Bolick believed that “the Voting Rights Act has outlived its usefulness and should be repealed.” And in 2011, the Mercatus Center published a policy paper that basically called for voting access to return to the 1800s when only property owners could vote. “Granting the vote to those who do not own property risks oppression of a propertied minority by an unpropertied majority,” the paper reads.
The Cato Institute, the think tank founded by Charles Koch, has also pushed the Kochs’ extreme message on voting rights. One of its senior fellows accused Eric Holder of “playing his racial games” after the then-attorney general filed a lawsuit against laws that suppressed voter turnout in North Carolina.
North Carolina has been subject to some of the harshest voting requirements due in large part to the Kochs and their ally, Art Pope. Pope has served on the board of the Kochs’ political longarm, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), and founded the North Carolina chapter, according to the New Yorker. Pope’s connection to the brothers goes beyond working with them, though. Pope’s own fortune has made him a political force in North Carolina and a huge donor for Koch-backed groups. In 2014, Pope gave $400,000 to Freedom Partners. At AFP North Carolina, Pope coordinated (and funded) the state legislature’s 2010 Tea Party takeover. Several of those lawmakers went on to sponsor stricter voting laws.
According to today’s New York Times piece, Pope also helped found the Civitas Institute, which campaigned for the “provision ending same-day registration and shortening the early-voting period” that Holder would later file suit against along with “the N.A.A.C.P., the A.C.L.U., the League of Women Voters and a group of college students.”
Since then, Pope has left his place on the AFP board and with Civitas to join North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory’s administration as his state budget director.
From the outside, Pope’s family foundation has put more than $55 million into a robust network of conservative think tanks and advocacy groups, building a state version of what his friends Charles and David Koch have helped create on a national level.
On the inside, the budget director and his GOP allies — who took over the legislature in 2010 and the governor’s mansion two years later with the backing of Pope and other big donors — have passed numerous laws overhauling taxes, social services and voting rights.
North Carolina has received national attention for its extreme voting laws, but the Kochs have been at work in many other state legislatures as well.
As the New York Times reports,
In 2011, Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin passed new voter-ID laws. The North Carolina General Assembly passed one that year as well but could not overcome a veto by Gov. Bev Perdue, a Democrat. In 2012, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Virginia followed with their own. The laws were strikingly similar. “It’s really, really unheard-of, or really rare, to have states move en masse all of the sudden to pass photocopied laws all at once without a national crisis,” said Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, which has kept careful track of the new laws. There had not been this many restrictive voting laws in the states, Waldman said, “since the Jim Crow era.”
Those “strikingly similar” laws were underwritten by the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which creates and distributes “model bills” to state policymakers, including the infamous voter-ID laws.
At the beginning of “A Dream Undone,” the New York Times includes a sort-of summary of the events that have led to the reversal of the VRA, looking at the timeline that seemingly started with the 2010 resurgence of Republican power in state legislatures and continued on the 2013 Supreme Court decision. What they don’t include is that the Kochs had a hand in all of it.