Republican presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has emerged from the GOP pack as a lawmaker eager to tackle the issues plaguing the country’s criminal justice system. He is currently fighting for legislation to restore voting rights to convicted felons, saying his bill is necessary to remove barriers to voting. But when it comes to larger-scale voting rights reform, Paul has so far refused to support the most significant legislation to restore the gutted Voting Rights Act (VRA).
“I think the biggest impediment to employment and to voting in our country is a criminal record,” the Kentucky senator said at a bipartisan criminal justice event Wednesday in Washington, D.C. “Until we address that, I don’t think we’re serious about either voting rights or getting people back to work and minimizing how many people have to be on assistance. So if we want to help people work and help people vote, we’ve got to fix the overcriminalization problem.”
Paul has sponsored legislation which would restore the voting rights of non-violent felons across the country. Currently, four states — Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, and Virginia — prohibit felons and ex-felons from ever regaining their right to vote without a pardon from the governor. Across the country, one in every 13 black adults is disenfranchised — in Paul’s state of Kentucky, that number rises to one in five African Americans — so his legislation would significantly increase the number of people eligible to vote in federal elections.
“There’s a chance of the right and left coming together on this,” he said. “I think we have ten different bills in the Senate that we proposed for criminal justice reform and every one of them has a Democrat co-sponsor. So I think there really is a chance here.”
But when it comes to those without a criminal record or those who have been disenfranchised or discouraged from voting by state policies, Rand is no longer a supporter of reform.
No Republican members of Congress have signed on to legislation to restore the VRA, which the U.S. Supreme Court gutted in 2013. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) introduced a bill last month which would require states with a history of voting discrimination to clear their voting changes with the federal government. The bill would also require federal approval for voter ID laws and outlaw new efforts to suppress the minority vote.
Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, told ThinkProgress that he doesn’t understand why Republicans have turned against voting rights. The reauthorization of the VRA was passed almost unanimously in 2006 by both Republicans and Democrats and was signed by a Republican president. But since the Supreme Court’s 2013 order in Shelby County v. Holder, Republicans have reneged their support, he said.
“Now, it’s difficult to fix,” Leahy said. “We can get the Democratic support but we’ve got to get Republicans to realize it hurts us all without the Voting Rights Act. I don’t have to worry about it in a state like Vermont, but a lot of other people do have to worry about it and we’re going to be hurt as a country until we fix it.”
For the first time on Tuesday, a Republican, House Majority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), indicated that he might support the House Judiciary Committee taking up voting rights reform, saying it’s time for an “overall review” and that he’d “like to see the debate go forward.” But he hasn’t done anything concrete to support the legislation and it’s unlikely that he’ll find other Republicans in Congress on his side.
When asked how he feels about Paul calling for voting rights reform but not supporting the legislation, Leahy said, “You’ll have to ask Rand.”
Paul’s hypocrisy when it comes to voting rights dates back to the beginning of his Senate career.
After the Supreme Court struck down part of the VRA, Paul said, “I don’t think there is objective evidence that we’re precluding African Americans from voting any longer.”
Then a year later, as part of his criminal justice push, he took aim at his own party for making it harder for minorities to vote. “So many times, Republicans are seen as this party of, ‘We don’t want black people to vote because they’re voting Democrat, we don’t want Hispanic people to vote because they’re voting Democrat,’” he said at a libertarian conference. “We wonder why the Republican Party is so small. Why don’t we be the party that’s for people voting, for voting rights?”
Yet he has not signed on to legislation which would do exactly that. He is also supportive of voter ID laws and other measures that make it harder for people of color to vote.
“I don’t really object to having some rules for how we vote,” he said on Fox News last year. “I show my driver’s license every time I vote in Kentucky … and I don’t feel like it is a great burden.”
A review last year by the independent Government Accountability Office found that states that toughened their voter ID laws saw steeper drops in election turnout than those that did not, with African American and youth voters disproportionately affected. In Texas alone, hundreds of voters were disenfranchised last election by the state’s voter ID law.