Trump Court Pick Once Called For Literacy Tests For Voters | EUROtoday

WASHINGTON — One of President Donald Trump’s nominees to a federal judgeship, Josh Divine, argued in a university opinion piece that individuals needs to be required to take literacy exams to be able to vote — regardless of such exams being outlawed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as a result of they had been routinely used to maintain Black individuals 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 University of Northern Colorado. At 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 stated, “but literacy tests themselves are not a bad thing.”

Here’s a duplicate of Divine’s column:

Literacy exams in elections have an extended and ugly historical past within the U.S. They had been used from the late 1800s to the mid-Sixties to forestall voting by immigrants and lower-income individuals, who had been thought-about not educated sufficient to vote. In explicit, within the Sixties, Southern states pressured Black residents to clarify sophisticated constitutional provisions to be able to vote. The landmark Voting Rights Act finally banned literacy exams, together with ballot taxes, and the consequence was a surge in registered Black voters.

The intent behind literacy exams was by no means to make sure that individuals turned extra knowledgeable in elections; they had been a sequence of trick questions designed to maintain non-white individuals from voting and having political energy. Voting clerks, who had been at all times white, might usually resolve at will who handed or failed these exams. White individuals often didn’t must take literacy exams, as a result of their voting rights had been tied to their grandfathers’ rights from earlier than the Civil War.

Divine additionally wrote within the column that he’s glad the United States isn’t “a true democracy,” which is often understood to imply direct democracy, through which voters weigh in immediately on insurance policies slightly than voting to nominate representatives who then vote to signify 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 stated.

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 carry again literacy exams as a requirement for voting.

The White House didn’t return a HuffPost request for remark.

Divine is Trump’s choose for a lifetime federal judgeship on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern and Western Districts of Missouri. (It’s uncommon, however one judgeship serves each courts.)

He is at present the solicitor basic of Missouri and director of particular litigation within the state lawyer basic’s workplace. He beforehand clerked for conservative Supreme Court 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 total Senate for affirmation.

Trump has up to now 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, stated 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,” stated 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.”