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Donald Trump’s administration isn’t being subtle in the steps it’s taking to recreate the conditions of the segregated Jim Crow era. And one of his judicial nominees for a lifetime appointment once wrote in favor of one of the era’s main tools for voter suppression.
In March, the Trump administration lifted an express ban on the funding of federal contractors that support segregated facilities. Earlier this month, the administration ended a decadeslong school desegregation order issued to a Louisiana parish notorious for its history of educational discrimination. Taken together with his efforts to purge diversity, equity and inclusion programs from public and private institutions, the moves make a credible argument for Trump being the most pro-segregation president in living memory.
Now HuffPost reports that one of his recent judicial nominees, Missouri’s Solicitor General Joshua Divine, appears to favor one of the hallmarks of the Jim Crow era, with the outlet noting his past support for requiring prospective voters to pass a literacy test.
According to HuffPost:
One of President Donald Trump’s nominees to a federal judgeship, Josh Divine, argued in a college opinion piece that people should be required to take literacy tests in order to vote — despite such tests being outlawed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 because they were routinely used to keep Black people 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 at the university. ‘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 said, ‘but literacy tests themselves are not a bad thing.’
Some people might argue it’s unfair to judge a man on views he expressed as a college junior, but there’s a long tradition of scrutinizing judicial nominees’ past writings that I don’t think Divine should be excused from. After all, 2010 wasn’t even that long ago! As HuffPost notes, it’s not clear whether Divine still stands by his support for literacy tests for voting, and the Missouri Attorney General’s Office did not immediately return MSNBC’s request for comment. But that Divine ever expressed support for literacy tests — let alone in an op-ed that acknowledges their use as a racist tool to undermine civil rights — seems like it should give pause to the senators considering his nomination.
Divine’s nomination reminded me of the far-right Federalist Society director Leonard Leo, who’s helped steer the conservative movement’s judicial appointments for years. Leo’s infatuation with returning America to pre-New Deal jurisprudence, a period when legalized racism was rampant, is well-documented; Joshua Divine, who is himself a contributor to the Federalist Society, seems suited to help Leo pursue that goal.