The Trump court selection once asked to bring alphabetization tests for voters

Washington – One of President Donald Trump’s nominees for a federal trial, Josh Divine, argued in an university’s opinion article that people should be obliged to take literacy evidence to vote, despite the fact that such evidence was prohibited by the Voting Rights Law of 1965, they were routinely used to prevent black people from voting.

“People who are not informed about problems or platforms, especially when it is so easy to inform themselves these days, have no commercial vote, so I propose the literacy tests administered by the State,” Divine wrote in October 2010 in The Mirror, a publication of the University of Norte de Colorado. At that time, he was Junior at the University.

“In the Civil Rights Law, literacy tests were prohibited because they were used as a form of discrimination in the sense that they were only administered to certain groups of people,” he said, “but literacy tests themselves are not a bad thing.”

Here is a copy of the Divine column:

The mirror

Literacy tests in the elections have A long and ugly story In the US, they were used from the end of 1800 to mid -1960 to avoid the vote of immigrants and low -income people, who were considered not educated enough to vote. In particular, in the 1960s, the South states forced the black residents to explain complicated constitutional provisions To vote. The Historical Voting Rights Law prohibited literacy evidence, together with survey taxes, and the result was A wave In registered black voters.

The intention behind literacy tests was never to ensure that people became more informed in the elections; They were a series of trucial questions designed to prevent non -white people from voting and have political power. The voting employees, who were always white, could generally decide at will who approved or failed these evidence. Whites generally did not have to take literacy evidence, because their voting rights were linked to the rights of their grandparents before the civil war.

Divine also wrote in the column that he is happy that the United States is not “a true democracy”, which is generally understood that it means direct democracy, in which voters intervene directly into policies instead of voting to appoint representatives that then vote to represent their components.

“I am very grateful that we do not live in a true democracy, since if that were the case, the United States would not only die, its tombstone would have already resisted,” he said.

It is not clear if I divine, that he is now about 30 years old, he still thinks that it would be a good idea to let the states bring literacy tests as a requirement to vote.

The White House did not return a request for comments from News themezone.

Divine is Trump’s election for a federal life trial in the United States District Court for the Eastern and Western Districts of Missouri. (It is unusual, but a trial serves both courts).

He is currently the Attorney General of Missouri and director of special litigation in the office of the State Attorney General. Previously the conservative judge of the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas was secretly served as the main lawyer of Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO.).

Divine will benefit not only from Hawley’s enthusiastic support for its nomination, but also of the legislator’s seat in the Judicial Committee of the Senate, which listens and approves the judicial nominees before they advance to the entire Senate to confirm.

Until now, Trump has nominated a handful of people to federal judges for life in his second term, but none has still had a hearing.

Some progressive judicial defense groups already accuse Divine of not being suitable for being a federal judge.

“Josh Divine’s opinion article that advocates the literacy tests in the surveys and argues against the idea of ​​democracy itself is one of the most disturbing writings we have seen in the registration of a judicial nominated,” said Jake Faleschini, director of the Alliance For Justice Justice program, in a statement.

“It should be unquestionable that a voter suppression tool rooted in racism in southern Jim Crow does not take place in our democracy,” said Faleschini. “It is possible that he has written some of them at the university, but the university was not long ago for Divine. He is a radically young candidate to be a judge for life and does not even have close to the minimum legal experience expected of federal judges.”