Moyers & Company; 227; Distracted from Democracy

You You This week go mortars and company the truth is that we can make a difference

But because we have been taught that we will be ineffective and fail It seems like the gesture of a room to be hopeful and To simply blank would be saved we don't need the Boarding Rights Act anymore Is so out of touch with what is happening in the country Funding is provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York celebrating 100 years of philanthropy and committed to doing real and permanent good in the world The Colbert Foundation independent production fund with support from the Partridge Foundation A John and Pauli Guth charitable fund the Clements Foundation Park Foundation dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues The Herbalpert Foundation supporting organizations whose mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society The Bernard and Audrey Rapaport Foundation The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world More information at macfound.org and gummerwits

The Betsy and Jesse Fink Foundation The HKH Foundation Barbara G. Flashman and by our sole corporate sponsor Mutual of America designing customized individual and group retirement products That's why we're your retirement company Welcome, time again to talk with Marty Kaplan Loyal members of Mortensen Company know him as one of the keenest and most sensible observers of politics, depress and culture He runs the Norman Learston Earth University of Southern California An independent promontory from which he lets his mind range wherever his insatiable curiosity takes him Most recently, Brazil For several weeks, the largest country in Latin America has been shaken by a massive citizen uprising protesting political corruption, economic injustice, poor health care, inadequate schools, lousy mass transit, a crumbling infrastructure and get this, billions blown on sports That's right, vast numbers of citizens in this soccer crazy nation are outraged that their government is spending billions of dollars to host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics

This in the land of Pale They're even up in arms over the $74 million deal signed by the young soccer star Neymar De Silva Crowds have been shouting, Brazil wake up, a teacher is worth more than Neymar Being no one's food, Neymar has cited with the protesters and written on Facebook that their mobilization inspires him on the playing field Surveying this tumult, Marty Kaplan recently expressed wonder at this people's uprising and challenged us, his fellow Americans, let's be Brazil That's when I called him and asked him to join me on the show By the way, his work has just won two awards from the Los Angeles Press Club including Best Columnist Marty Kaplan, welcome Thanks very much And congratulations on those awards Thank you

You recently confessed to outrage in V What's that about? It's my feeling that what happened in Brazil, which is so encouraging about citizens taking their destiny in their own hands, is not happening here We have unemployment and hunger and crumbling infrastructure and a tax system out of whack and a corrupt political system Why are we not also taking to the streets is the question and I want us to, you wrote, if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention So are we not paying attention? We are paying attention to the wrong things, we are paying attention to infotainment, which is being spoon-fed to us And sadly, frankly, we are enabling because we love the stuff The infotainment narrative of life in America you call Yes, the tragedy of journalism now is that it is demand-driven and when you ask people what they want We're like one of those rats that have a lever to push and cocaine comes out and once that happens one time

They'll stay there till they die until more of the drug appears We can't help loving lurid stories and suspense and the kind of sex and violence which the news is now made up of But you go on beyond the infotainment story, you say our spirits have been sickened by the toxins baked into our political system The control of our democracy by money is shocking and deserves the same kind of response to corruption that it got in Brazil And instead we have become used to it, we don't see a way around it There are voices, there are people like Larry Lessig that are trying to change the campaign finance system The media plays into that but they are voices in the wilderness and we the public have wised up and decided Either not to pay attention at all or the media have decided not to force us to pay attention

And if we do pay attention you can't live with the knowledge that our democracy is now so corrupt that it is unchangeable If it is true, as you say, that our tax code is the least progressive in the industrial world That we witnessed the most massive transfer of wealth in history which is destroying our middle class That tuition is increasingly unaffordable and retirement increasingly unavailable That the banks that sold trillions of dollars of Americans worth have not only gone unpunished, they're still at it Why are we not at the barricades? I suspect among your viewers there were people who are outraged and want to be at the barricades The problem is we have been taught to be helpless and jaded rather than to feel that we are empowered and can make a difference Talked by whom? By those of us who report the news of bad things happening? Well, the stuff that is being reported on the news tends not to be the kind of stuff that we need to know about in order to be outraged Climate change is one of the great tests of journalism

There was the New York Times headline about the first time that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 400 parts per million Which the time said that carbon dioxide had reached a level not seen in millions of years By Jofel, you would think that that would cause a worldwide stir And instead, it was a one-day story onto the next thing As you know, President Obama recently made a major speech in which he announced a new plan to tackle climate change All three cable networks turned to the President's speech but then they cut away from it Well before it was intended to end Fox News cut away saying their remarks could be streamed online and then they turned to a guest critical of the President The planet is warming and human activity is contributing to it But that is not the full story We're going to stream the remainder of the President's remarks live on Fox News.com and in the meantime, we're joined now with some reaction Chris Horner is the senior fellow at the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute

And the author of the book, Red Hot Lies Fox's host, Megan Kelly, wondered and allowed about whether the country even needed to tackle the problem CNN's wolf blitzer cut in soon after All right, so the President is making a major, major address on climate change I want to bring Jim Acosta and the President's got some important news he's about to release And then wolf continued to talk over the President's remarks What do you make of that? The meta-message is more interesting to journalism than the message itself The meta-message is here's grist for combat between different factions How is it going to play out rather than the message, which is, here's what's happening to our climate Here's what we have to do to prevent it That stuff risks being boring, but combat is never boring What they don't know how to do is to talk about, well, what are our options here, America? How do we mitigate the effects of climate change? Instead, they're refiding all these old battles

And that kind of combat is what they can do The Sunday talk shows did something else, which is to completely ignore it I mean, they probably had John McCain and Lindsey Graham on for the 27th time each Instead of dealing with what was the most important speech about climate change ever given by a sitting president And think progress, the progressive website published an infographic Which pointed out that, as you say, Sunday's news shows ignored Obama's climate plan Late night comedy shows picked up the slack The Daily Show gave three minutes and 29 seconds to the president Late show gave one minute, 33 seconds The Tonight Show gave one minute and two seconds Meet the press, zero seconds Fox News, zero seconds ABC this week, zero seconds Face the nation, zero seconds State of the Union, CNN, zero seconds Yeah, but I bet they kept us informed about the phony IRS scandal They have stuff which they think pushes the buttons that makes people emotional and angry

And they just find climate change as snooze They find guns as snooze Look at what happened with Sandy Hook Look at what happened with Hurricane Sandy in climate change We are capable of turning away because we get bored with one thing and need the next One time of the Sandy Hook shootings, you wrote about the learned helplessness That seemed to permeate that situation Talk about that moment We have had the unfortunate experience of being outraged, being Brazilians Trying to get something done and watching as the dysfunctional system that we are forced to live under Destroyes momentum and creates stasis or ads power to the already powerful rather than enabling reform We have, for example, on Capitol Hill a system which is built on the need to create ads, narratives Phony reality about members who are running for office

And they need to finance that because our television stations make a killing on that, especially in the swing states And so the only way they can finance it is by doing quid pro quo deals with special interests So when the new town tragedy happened, my instinct was, yes, I know Obama is going to make a great speech And the polls are going to be 99% but it's going to be business as usual. Our hearts will be broken Because the system is simply unresponsive and incapable of reform You watch that happen enough times and you decide why bother? You have to be someone who just fell off the turn up truck to think that popular outrage can make a difference The truth is that we can make a difference, we can change the way campaigns are financed We can change the electoral color, if you name it, we can do things but because we have been taught that we will be ineffective and fail It seems like the gesture of a rub to be hopeful

This takes us back to the Brazilians because as you know, the Brazilians were protesting millions of them They were protesting against the $31-$33 billion they are going to be spending on the World Cup and the Summer Olympics They were carrying signs about that 21-year-old soccer star who have just signed a deal for $74 million Dollars and they were saying a good teacher is worth more than this soccer star Now somehow their learned helplessness was overwhelmed or overcome or penetrated by some other consciousness Well, I think the key difference is that their democracy is new They still believe in holding it accountable They want to have a system that works and as long as their promise is out there of making a difference They want to hold the politician's feet to the fire In our case, we have an old democracy which has ossified the narrative should be the system is broken, lex, fix it The founders were not Moses or God and what they put in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence was not written in stone

It is meant to deal with things they could never imagine They could not imagine swing states and the amount of money you have to spend and what you have to do with special interests In order to get elected, there is a pathology in our system that we as a country refuse to acknowledge Because it's a way of saying that we're not heaven's blessed child, we are humans What intrigued me was that the Brazilians first sparked over an increase in the bus fare in Sao Paulo And then it just spread the bus fare, yet when recently the Metropolitan Transit Authority here in New York raised the transit fare It just wasn't even a ripple on the surface Because the class that produces news has the kind of incomes that can absorb those kinds of changes The news industry is now part of the privileged elite, they are not the scrappy adversaries that one would hope they would be fighting for the little guy

They are the man, and if public transportation costs a little more, the studio is going to send a car from them anyway The problem is that corporate self-interest plays itself out in the content of news As you know, there's a debate going on over journalism in America, the Pew Research Center recently wrote bleakly about the future of journalism The other side of it, Marty, is that some people are saying these are the glory days of journalism Because there's so much information out there online if you have access And you yourself recently wrote, and I'm quoting the best journalism in the world from plenty of sources is available online Often for no sense of day, and we can access it in video and audio as well and from anywhere at any time So where do you come down? And as long as you are a critical thinker, as long as you could sort the stuff that's reliable from the crowd As long as you understand that people who propagate information have interests

And so you can understand that this incredibly popular website is also the mouthpiece for this party To be able to do that requires exposure to enough quality journalism So that you learn to tell the difference between the stuff that's being hawked in the bizarre that is intriguing And probably only partly accurate between that and stuff which where the facts are verified We have had instance after instance in the last several months of stories in which it's the pressure to be first To say something before anyone else has completely overridden the pressure to check is it accurate and valid And this is happening to the prestige outlets They are not taking the time because they have this bizarre notion that being first in the world of journalism when microseconds counts Like being a microtrader on Wall Street that you're going to make or lose zillions by having those bragging rights And in fact the next day they buy full-page ads in the New York Times saying we were first to get this

They don't buy an ad when they say we were first and wrong Come back to cable for a moment because as you know the three major cable outlets in B.C. Fox News And CNN have been giving a lot of attention to the Trayvon Martin So we're in a huge day the George Zimmerman trial Coming up a crucial day in the George Zimmerman trial George Zimmerman trial is eating up a lot of time on cable television The trial that's got American and American trends We are watching with great interest The jury is not yet seated as soon as this trial begins in earnest we will take you there Good story by the way, would they be doing this if people weren't watching? No, they are both creating and responding to demand But what they're not doing is exercising journalism What they're doing is they're part of the entertainment industry They're providing content journalism in principle is set apart because it has a notion of what's important Not just interesting and in a dream world

Journalists would make important stuff interesting that they would use the same kind of techniques They use in covering the Trayvon Martin case to make stuff like climate change just as compelling You've been following the debate between Glenn Greenwall who broke the Edward Snowden story and NBC's David Gregory Who asked, well, let's listen to what David Gregory asked Glenn Greenwall only to press To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden even in his current movements Why shouldn't you Mr. Greenwall be charged with a crime? I think it's pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themselves a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalists Should be charged with felonies the assumption in your question David is completely without evidence The idea that I've aided and abetted him in any way The scandal that arose in Washington before our stories began was about the fact that the Obama administration is trying to criminalize investigative journalism By going through the emails and phone records of AP reporters accusing a Fox News journalist of the theory that you just embraced

Being a co-conspirator with felonies and felonies for working with sources If you want to embrace that theory it means that every investigative journalist in the United States who works with their sources Who receives classified information is a criminal And it's precisely those theories and precisely that climate that has become so menacing in the United States It's why the New Yorker's Jane Mayer said investigative reporting has come to a standstill, her word, as a result of the theories that you just referenced Well, the question of who's a journalist may be up to a debate with regard to what you are doing And, of course, anybody who's watching this understands I was asking a question, that question has been raised by lawmakers as well I'm not embracing anything, but obviously I take your point The assumption of the question is that there's some dictionary somewhere that says what journalism is The truth is that journalism, like a number of other things, is socially constructed We enter into a contract through history and based on class and evidence of what journalism is or is not Things get ruled in or ruled out all the time and the reasons they're ruled in or out is not because some school of journalism

Some professor says, well, here's the yardstick and it is or it isn't The way in which things get ruled in or not is practice what actually happens So if David Gregory can ask a question and justified by say, some in Congress are asking that question That rules out nothing, some in Congress are morons And those people will say anything and as long as you have the ability to do the some say game Call yourself a journalist and be in a mainstream marquee platform Then you are tugging at what the definition of journalism is And I think it's entirely appropriate for Glenn Greenwald or anyone else to tug right back and say no What you have done changes the terms of the debate, here's where I stand and let's fight it out Let's not let the imprimature of some corporate trademark say that this defines what journalism is

So when Glenn Greenwald says, top officials are lying to our faces about government spying Is that journalism or is it prosecution? Is he a journalist or is he an activist? And I think there is a credible case that journalism is activism, that if you as a journalist cover climate change by saying Well, some say this and some say that, you're not being a journalist, you're being a tool of the people who want to intimidate journalism from covering evidence and the truth So when Glenn Greenwald says that lying is going on, I don't think you can rule that out because of the activist nature of journalism It either is true or not true, let's settle it on those merits, not on the question of does he have the credential to be able to do that? It does seem to me that the first amendment guarantees us the right to draw a conclusion from the evidence that we have gathered

Yeah, and unfortunately the especially the right has learned to gain the system and to say no, no journalism is not that Journalism is we report you decide the phony slogan of Fox News So giving people alleged evidence and letting them draw alleged conclusions is in the interests of people who want to throw sand in your face and work the ref so that they are softened up and afraid to say here is the conclusion So you're put about the Trayvon Martin trial about Paul Adin who we haven't even discussed about what you call the race, crime, and porn, access in tabloid news, cable news Your point is that it distracts us from and drives out attention to the problems that will take us down if we don't tackle them Watch the birdie over here, not the corruption over there, that's what circuses are about is to distract us and make us happy while we're being distracted The challenge is not only to give us the information that we should be paying attention to and to do it in a way which keeps our attention, the challenge is also what do we as citizens do with that

And I think there's an aspect of journalism which is afraid of taking that extra step and empowering citizens or covering the citizens who have empowered themselves to try to make a difference So when we do that Marty, we run into what you wrote about recently, informed citizen disorder, I see D Now for the benefit of my viewers who haven't read this, tell me what you mean by informed citizen disorder Ever since I was in junior high school, I was taught that to be a good citizen meant you needed to know what was going on in your country and in your world You should read the paper, you should pay attention to the news, that's part of your responsibility of being an American And the problem, especially in recent years, is the more informed I am, the more despondent I am because day after day there is news which drives me crazy And I want to see the public rise up in our wage and say no, you can't do that banks, you can't do that corporations, you can't do that polluters

You have to stop and pay attention to the laws or we're going to change the laws Every time that doesn't happen and I keep learning each day the same thing, something bad happened and nothing was done about it That's the news, the more that that's the case, the sadder one is when you consume all that news So all the incentives are perverse, the way to be happy to avoid this despondency is to be oblivious to it all, to live in all this Huxley's brave new world So given all that we've talked about and all you're writing about, where do you come at, are you an optimist or a pessimist about what's happening to it I have children, I have to be an optimist, the globe has children, we have to be optimists, there's no choice What is the alternative? If you are a pessimist, well the most you can do I suppose is medicate yourself with the latest blockbuster

And some sugar salt and fat that's being marketed to you The only responsible thing that you can do is say that individuals can make a difference and I will try, we will try to make that They have to do it collectively, right now in North Carolina there's a growing demonstration against the coup by the right wing that's been taken But don't we have to do that collectively as they did in Brazil? Yes, we do, but moral Mondays in North Carolina is a great example, what happened in Wisconsin was a great example when people see one another, they join one another If the TV is covering these demonstrations, it draws other people into it The internet has been, in principle, a way in which people can gauge the growth of a community of discontent, it is not as important so far as actually physically getting off your duff and going into the street I'm under no illusion that I can ignite some national wave of protest but as more and more cities become more and more unhappy with what their corrupt government is doing, maybe a critical mass build

Marty Kaplan, thank you again for joining me, thank you Bless you, Marty, but do we have to take our cue from Brazil? We've seen collective action work before to make this a better country, some of us have even been around long enough to remember the fight for voting rights 50 years ago We remember the protests by courageous men and women who put their lives on the line and the political skills of President Lyndon Johnson and the Congress that passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 I worked for LBJ and I was there, we're not long after peaceful protesters in Selma, Alabama had been ruthlessly beaten by white thugs in official uniforms The President went before a joint session of Congress and turned the anthem of the civil rights movement into a hymn of freedom for all

What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life Their cause must be our cause too because it's not just Negroes but really it's all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice and we shall overcome The Voting Rights Act passed a Senate by a bipartisan vote of 77 to 19, yes 77 to 19 But even so, many conservatives opposed it then and have tried ever since to nullify it

Late last month, they succeeded The Supreme Court's five conservative justices declared the key provision of the act outdated Nine states, with a pattern of denying minorities the right to vote, most of them former members of the Confederacy no longer have to get federal approval to change their voting procedures in any way Several of those states immediately set out to implement restrictive new voting laws that before the ruling would have been found discriminatory By coincidence, the very weekend before the Supreme Court's decision disemboweled that historic legislation, I had finished reading a masterful new account of the events leading up to its passage This is it, vending toward justice, the Voting Rights Act and the transformation of American democracy You will not find in one volume a more compelling story of the heroic men and women who struggle for the right to vote are a more cinematic rendering of the political battle to enact the law, or a more succinct telling of the long campaign to subvert it The author is with me now Gary May as a professor of history at the University of Delaware and winner of the Alan Nevin Prize from the Society of American Historians

Welcome. Thank you very much. What were you thinking as the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act? I thought first of the people you mentioned, the people who have been forgotten by history who for decades had been risking everything there Their homes, their jobs, and their lives. And I thought, here are these five men, men of privilege, men who served as U.S. attorneys, judges, Thomas, administrator How could they possibly understand the world of those men and women who fought and died for the Voting Rights Act? They don't seem to understand it at all. They think it's all passed By coincidence, I had just recently seen CT Vivian. He was one of Martin Luther King's top age leading those demonstrators trying to vote in Selma when the infamous Sheriff Jim Clark wouldn't let them pass. Here's the scene

You are breaking the injunction by not allowing these people to come inside this courthouse and wait. This courthouse does not belong to Sheriff Clark, this courthouse belongs to the people of Dallas County And these are the people of Dallas County and they have come to register and you know this within your own heart Sheriff Clark. You're not as evil as you ask, you know in your heart what is right But you're really trying to do is intimidate these people and by making them stand in the raid, keep them from registering to vote. And this is the kind of violation of the Constitution, the violation of the court order, the violation of decent citizenship You can turn your back on me that you cannot turn your back upon the idea of justice. You can turn your back now and you can keep the club in your hand that you cannot beat down justice. And we will register to vote because as citizens of the United States we have the right to do it.

I'm looking down the line seeing all the people who've been in jail for film is that's what I'm looking at. Precisely right. And if they and if they're not fit to vote you'll be able to find that out. But you'll not know it until they're until they're on the register. And me of those have a felony action because Sheriff Clark made them a felony action. Not because they were rightfully arrested. That was an extraordinarily important moment. A few nights later Reverend Vivian was asked to preach at a church in Marion, Alabama not too far from Selma. And he did that and the parishioners were going to march on the jail afterwards where one of their colleagues had been unfairly imprisoned. Reverend Vivian left. He didn't join that march. And what happened was that the parishioners came outside, the demonstrators came outside to face almost a mob of Alabama police local police Jim Clark was there as well.

And in the melee that followed young civil rights leader named Jimmie Lee Jackson was killed by an Alabama state trooper while he was trying to protect his mother and grandfather from a beating. And it's thought that Clark and the others were there to get Vivian for that encounter that they had. And of course the Marion people were so distraught over Jimmie Lee Jackson's death that one of them said, let's take his coffin and to George Wallace in Montgomery put it on the capital steps. And from that came the idea of this march from Selma to Montgomery. And so there was a debate in King's circle. Should they go forward they might encounter again what had been encountered in Marion. And King's devices were divided. Some said yes, let's go forward. King himself was uncertain.

As you know and right about President Johnson didn't want that march to happen either. Now of course he changed his mind later and when London Johnson changed his mind he came out the cross of a charging bear and a crafty fox. But at the moment he was doing what he could to prevent that march from happening. Which is another irony isn't it because here is the event that almost never took place. And the event of Lyndon Johnson wanted stopped. The event that Martin Luther King initially had opposed. And of course it turns everything around. And as you know it came to be called bloody Sunday. Here's that scene. It's hard to disperse. Go home or go to your church. That march will not continue.

Let's take this bird. It was so terrible. One person we heard a person calling for. Someone called for an ambulance to sheriff Clark and sheriff Clark replied let the buzzards eat them. And again what was so extraordinary was that it was captured on film.

And that proved to be absolutely critical. Journalists, print journalists and photographers were there. They got their camera and they got the film back to New York very quickly. And ABC was the first to break the news by interrupting the movie of the week which again an amazing coincidence was judgment Nuremberg in the 1961 film about the Nazi war trials. And people were stunned. They just watched the footage. There was no narration. And was this America? I mean they couldn't believe it. They dropped everything to join King's campaign. And others, besieged Lyndon Johnson in the White House, sat in a group of them in the White House. What do you, what do these unanticipated, unexpected, unintended consequences of the convergence of such forces? What do they tell you about history? How it gets made?

It's primarily an accident. Sometimes we see this story as one of Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson they get together and we have the Voting Rights Act. But of course it's a much larger story. And it's a perfect example of the value of collective change to bring about progress in this country. People getting together and being committed and willing to risk their very lives to bring something that the country desperately needs. But it's clear to me that if there hadn't been this steady witness and martyrdom of these young men and women in the South. And a progressive president, the result would have been the same. If you'd not had the pressure from below and if you'd had a conservative president, history wouldn't have come the way it has come to us. Yes. And once Johnson decided that that bill was going to go to the Congress, he was going to give that great address. He felt liberated.

I was standing off to the right below the present on the floor of the House. And I could look right into the eyes of senators and representatives as clearly as I can look in this closely as I can look into your eyes. I mean, they had never heard a president of the United States say that anywhere. And to say it on the Dias and the Rostrum there in the House Chamber before the Assembly Congress, I mean at first they could not believe what they had heard. Every device of which human ingenuity is capable has been used to deny this right. The Negro citizen may go to register only to be told that today is wrong or the hour is late or the official in charge is absent. And if he persists and if he manages to present himself to the registrar, he may be disqualified because he did not spell out his middle name or because he abbreviated a word on the application.

And if he manages to fill out an application, he is given a test. The registrar is the sole judge of whether he passes this test. He may be asked to recite the entire Constitution or explain the most complex provisions of state law. And even a college degree cannot be used to prove that he can read and write. For the fact is that the only way to pass these barriers is to show a white skin. No law that we now have on the books and I have helped to put three of them back. Can't... can ensure the right to vote when local officials are determined to deny it.

The speech written by my colleague gifted young man 33 at the time I believe Richard Goodwin. Goodwin and Johnson created a magnificent moment there. And it was almost an accident also. The first draft of that speech had gone to another Johnson aid. And Johnson said, you gave it to a public relations guy. I wanted Goodwin to do this. I wanted a Jew to write this speech. Someone who had experienced anti-Semitism. And while Goodwin was working on the speech, Johnson telephoned him and said, you remember the story about how I was a teacher at that Mexican American school. And of course Goodwin had heard it a thousand times. And Johnson said, I want that in the speech. My first job after college was as a teacher in Coutula, Texas in a small Mexican American school. A few of them could speak English and I couldn't speak much Spanish.

My students were poor and they often came to class without breakfast hungry. And they knew even in their youth the pain of prejudice. They never seemed to know why people dislike them. But they knew it was so. Because I saw it in their eyes. I never thought then in 1928 that I would be standing here in 1965. It never even occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and to help people like them all over this country. You say that the voting rights I never would have existed without the help of two generations of courageous Republican legislators. I agree with that because I worked with many of them.

When I was a young man working on policy for President Johnson, one of them was Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, the Wizard of Oos, as you remind us. They had a very interesting relationship. Very often, Dirksen would attack the president on the floor of the Senate in the morning and in the afternoon they'd be drinking bourbon and branch water together. The voting rights act was literally written in Everett Dirksen's office with the Attorney General, the Acting Attorney General, in Catson back there. And some called the Bill Dirksen Bach. And Johnson, of course, was quite content to give the credit for some of this to Everett Dirksen because he feared that the southerners might mount a filibuster as they had with the 1964 Civil Rights Act long filibuster. And in order to get the votes to invoke cloture, which would stop the filibuster, you needed Republican votes.

We talked about cloture very briefly, and then I said thank you, and I got up to leave, and I got to the door, and he said in that deep voice of Mr. Moyers, what about that great American I recommended to the president who belongs by destiny on the Interstate Commerce Commission. I said, I didn't know you'd done that. He said, you just check it out. He's a great American. And he got on the Interstate Commerce Commission. I have to tell you that. I mean, that's the way they both understood politics. Unfortunately, we don't have that today. So Justice Roberts, when he writes his opinion on the recent gutting of the voting rights act, says, we don't need it anymore. He said the country has changed. This is the age of Obama. We've got our first black president. And Justice Roberts even mentioned Bloody Sunday in Selma, and the murder of those three young people, James Cheney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner near Philadelphia, Mississippi. And Roberts wrote today, both of those towns, Selma and Philadelphia, Mississippi, are governed by African American mayors. Problems are made in those states, the Justice said, but there's no denying that due to the Voting Rights Act, our nation has made great strides.

We have made great strides. What's your reaction? We certainly have made great strides. But all we have to do is look at the voter suppression movement that arose from many of the covered states, incidentally, in 2011 and 2012. States covered by the Voting Rights Act. Correct. Voter IDs that are very difficult for many African Americans and whites as well who are elderly and don't have those documents, it costs money to acquire these necessary documents. It's really a kind of poll tax now. Voter IDs make it more difficult for people to vote, prohibiting voting on Sunday, which was so important to the African American community, they go to church, they go to the polls, just taking your soul to the polls. And all of those indicate a continuing need for the Voting Rights Act.

What did the Supreme Court decision actually do? Well, by striking down Section 4, which contains the formula that allows Section 5 to cover certain states in the South and actually nine states and parts of other states requiring them before changing any voting practice to submit those changes to Federal Court in Washington, D.C. or the Justice Department to receive what is called preclearance. And the reason the Voting Rights Act single out those states is because for decades the voting rights of black people have been denied by one technique after another as President Johnson said in his speech. Within hours of the Supreme Court's decision, the Attorney General of Texas announced that they were going to resurrect their voting ID bill, which had been disallowed last year. And there's an outfit, Lewis Manand mentions in the New York magazine, there's a white group in Beaumont, Texas just waiting for the Supreme Court decision because they want to overthrow the black majority that runs a school board.

So you're saying, I think you're saying, a lot of mischief can be done now that would have been disqualified by the Voting Rights provision. Absolutely. Chief Justice Warren, when he first, when the Court first ruled on the Constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act in 1966, said that the bill had been designed to eliminate the most egregious of difficulties. But it was also written to cover subtle devices. And here I think is an example of subtle and quite harmful devices. We're still very polarized racially. Sometimes it's wrong just to focus on the fact that we have so many African Americans in office, including a President. In the oral arguments, Justice Robert said, you know, well as you're saying that Alabama is more prejudiced than Massachusetts. And the evidence indicates that yes, it still is.

The majority on the court struck down the provision that requires the states to get federal approval before making changes. Is there a historical record to suggest that this decision in no small part was motivated by a political goal? It's hard to say to be fair should we accept that maybe those five justices have their own set of political principles. And we just don't agree with them. You know, as a historian, you want to be fair. But it seems to me that they are on the wrong side of history that there was so much evidence to indicate continuing difficulties that to simply blankly say, we don't need the Voting Rights Act anymore. Post-racial society now, we have a black president, it is so out of touch with what is happening in the country.

Pardon me for suggesting that John Robert sometimes seems less concerned with the law and the Constitution than with a political agenda. Is that unfair? No, it's not unfair. In fact, when he was a young member of the Civil Rights Division under Ronald Reagan, he was at that point working very hard when the Voting Rights Act came up for reauthorization in 1982 to gut it at that point. So in many ways the court's recent decision is the fulfillment of Judge Robert's dream. In fact, there's a memo that John Roberts wrote back then in which he said that parts of the Voting Rights Act would, quote, provide a basis for the most intrusive, in a fear imaginable about federal courts into state and local processes. In other words, Uncle Sam, you're meddling too much. Let's move, let's get your hands off of the state processes. You know, it's certainly consisted with Ronald Reagan's philosophy of, you know, government is not the solution, it's the problem.

So we just remove government from regulating corporations and banks and everything will be fine. So that was the Civil Rights version of Reaganism. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in her dissent, quote, hubris pride is a fit word for today's demolition of the Voting Rights Act. Was it hubris? It's politics and I think it's also ideological hubris because if you go back to the critical documents that supposedly protect the right to vote. The 15th Amendment passed in 1870. It declares that people could not be prohibited from voting because of race, color, and condition of previous servitude and added the Congress shall enforce this amendment with appropriate legislation. The first line of the 1965 Voting Rights Act says this is a bill to enforce 15th Amendment. So this was a power given to the Congress, not to the courts.

In effect said to Congress, you can rewrite these standards, you can rewrite the Voting Rights Act and it's your obligation to do so. Any chance that this Congress would do that? It seems almost impossible because the Republican Party has become the party of the South and in a strange way has taken on the appearance of the old white Southern segregationist Democrats. Now you have analysts and others saying the court's recent decision is going to actually help the Democrats in the voting booth and that it's actually going to be a spur to the energies of the Democratic Party in the coming elections. Do you see any possibility of that? I don't know because I remember what was the decisive moment that turned this whole thing around that led to the creation of the Voting Rights Act. It was the tragedy of bloody Sunday. I am concerned about the future. I think the court's decision does give a green light to all sorts of things, not simply the mischievous devices to suppress the vote.

But imagine there's a Supreme Court of the United States giving its endorsement of creating difficulties for voting. I mean it's extraordinary. And what comes of that? I don't know. You've written a book that could change this country again if every citizen read it. Congratulations. Thank you. On bending toward justice, the Voting Rights Act and the transformation of American democracy. And thank you, Gary May, for being with me. Thank you so much. At our website BillMoyers.com, we brought together legal scholars and journalists to ask them what the Supreme Court's Voting Rights Act decision means for democracy. And you can view online the new documentary on the economic struggle of two American families produced for the PBS series Frontline. That's all at BillMoyers.com. I'll see you there and I'll see you here next time.

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