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Race is the third rail of American politics. So perhaps it’s no surprise that Congress recently passed the Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 2006 with almost no dissent. In the House of Representatives the vote on July 13 was 390 to 33, with many in the small band of opponents objecting primarily to a bilingual ballot requirement, arguably the least important of the issues on the table. The bill reached the Senate a week later, on the day the President was rushing to the NAACP’s annual convention to beg for appreciation. That afternoon, the final vote in the world’s greatest deliberative body came down 98-0.

Abigail Thernstrom, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is currently working on a book about the Voting Rights Act, to be published by the AEI Press.