President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965. Considered one of the most monumental pieces of civil rights legislation in American history, the Act secured the right to vote for racial minorities across the nation. Yesterday, it was struck down by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, led by chief justice John Roberts. Esquire political columnist Charles P. Pierce has seen this coming for a long time now. At the link below, Pierce reckons with the Act’s demise. Be warned. It’s grim.
—Chris Hatler, deputy editor
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Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr. and Viola Liuzzo did not die just for the conservative majority to commit this heartless act of political vandalism.
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The Voting Rights Act of 1965, the signature achievement of the Civil Rights Movement, is now as dead as Medgar Evers. It is as dead as Viola Liuzzo. It is as dead as James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. It is as dead as Rev. James Reeb. It is as dead as Vernon Dahmer. And it is as dead as Martin Luther King Jr.
Here's all it took. Two paragraphs from a retrograde vandal named Justice Samuel Alito, and the VRA finally dies. Chief Justice John Roberts’s lifelong ambition is fulfilled. The Day of Jubilee is complete.
The three embattled liberals provided the usual eloquent dissents, which may become relevant some day in the dim future when Leonard Leo’s money, and his dreams of a Caucasian wonderland, have faded and the restorative benefits of the law ... well, restore the nation’s promises. Until then, we’re all back to counting the jelly beans in a jar again.
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When I started reporting on the lives of linemen late last year, I quickly discovered that although linemen are on the front lines of maintaining the power grid—our connection to medical care, drinking water, cell phones, the Internet, emergency services, lights, heat, you name it—no one knows much about them. Most people assumed I was writing about football. But the people who did know what a lineman was kept telling me to talk to the same person: Pack Power’s owner, Jerry Pack. Colleagues told me that he was the quintessential lineman—an Army vet and a biker; rough around the edges, sure, but loyal to a fault. But he was also more than an archetype. Jerry had helped revolutionize the trade and ridden its ups and downs for years.
When I got in touch, Jerry, who looks a bit like the actor Brendan Gleeson if Brendan Gleeson had a graying ZZ Top beard and tattoos down his forearms, invited me to come visit on a Thursday—“That’s when we drink,” he said—and greeted me at the warehouse door with a lit Marlboro Red between his fingers. He had also invited a few other linemen with stories to tell, including Nick Mansfield, from East Texas, who quickly pulled me aside and asked if I wanted to see the “real shit” about being a lineman. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and hit play on a copy of the Seminole video. I lasted only a few seconds before I had to look away.
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On the fourth day of our first trip to a clothing-optional resort in Costa Rica, my wife and I had sex in the small private pool attached to our suite. It was the middle of the afternoon. The sun was directly overhead. Our suite was set into the side of the resort in such a way that we couldn’t see anyone, but anyone on the walkway above might have seen us. We knew that. We did it anyway.
It was 2019. We had been married for 22 years, but it was the first time we had ever had sex outdoors. Afterward, lying half in the pool and half out of it—the water moving gently against my chest, Mayuri’s wet hair on my shoulder—I had a thought I have not been able to shake since: We almost didn’t make it here. We almost walked away from this.
At the resort, Mayuri wasn’t ready to play with anyone else, and I wasn’t asking her to. We expected to find it tacky, decide it wasn’t for us, and come home with a story.
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