'BradCast' 1/13/2023 (Guest: ACLU's Jonathan Topaz on new Voting Rights Act Sec. 2 challenge)
b"On today's 'BradCast':\\xa0 What a way to 'celebrate' Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Nearly 60 years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act and ten years after the far-right majority on the U.S. Supreme Court gutted some of its central provisions, rightwing courts are gunning for the rest of the landmark civil rights voting law. JONATHAN TOPAZ, a staff attorney at the ACLU's Voting Rights Project, explains a disturbing case in Arkansas in which a district court judge dismissed a lawsuit challenging a racially gerrymandered Republican state district map by declaring that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act does not allow private groups like the ACLU or NAACP to sue to stop such laws. This week, GOP-appointed judges on the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals appeared open to the idea. Topaz explains how the text and legislative record of the Voting Rights Act and decades of precedent expose the absurdity of this new assault on the VRA, and the widespread, devastating practical impacts on all voting rights laws if Sec. 2 is struck down. Also today:\\xa0 Ohio's 'moderate' Republican governor signed new voter suppression legislation making it more difficult for (certain) voters to vote. A new report finds that Republicans launched a record number of anti-voting lawsuits in 2022 to prevent (certain) voters from voting under the pretext of preventing fraud. Another batch of Republicans have been charged with committing mass voter fraud with absentee ballots by the Justice Department."