Maya Wiley: "Money is Undermining Our Rights, Including Voting Rights"

This week we talk to the President and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

Maya Wiley is a leading civil rights attorney and activist who likely needs no introduction. Wiley has served as the counsel to (a previous!) mayor of New York City, a professor and senior vice president at the New School University, chair of the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board, and legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. Now, Wiley is President and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of civil rights organizations that was founded in 1950 and was instrumental in passing landmark legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

I spoke with Wiley about the reasons Congress needs to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act, and why we need to keep our attention on threats to voting rights.

Meaghan Winter: When there are so many horrible things happening, how do we decide where to focus our attention?

Maya Wiley: These are incredibly dangerous times for every single right we hold dear. At The Leadership Conference, we are focused on civil rights, which are the pillars that are central to democracy. There's no democracy without civil rights, and there are no civil rights without democracy. We’re watching an outright attack on all civil rights, an outright authoritarian attempt to take power.

Voting rights is a central focus, because voting is central to where and how people have power, no matter their resources, no matter what they look like, no matter how they worship, no matter how they identify. Particularly for people of color, and particularly for low-income people, voting is the center point of democracy. Voting is central to the fight for every single one of the issues we also care about because it’s how people can have a voice in identifying their problems and demanding solutions.

We also know that it's our vulnerable communities that are most likely to have their rights not only abused but outright taken away. We're watching the militarization of our law enforcement. Federal troops could impact people’s feeling of safety and comfort going to the polls, which we should all be concerned about.

Winter: What do we need to know about voting rights now?

Wiley: It's important for people to remember what all is encompassed when we say voting rights. There are different aspects to the ability to access the right to vote. There's the right to vote and to not be discriminated against; there’s the power of whole communities of people because they're Black or because they're Latino or because they're Native American, or because they're Asian American or Pacific Islander, and that includes how we draw districts.

Lawmakers are making it harder to vote for some demographics – like Black people, Native Americans, Latinos, people with disabilities, people who are elderly, women who have gotten married and changed their names – because they don’t like how they tend to vote. The Supreme Court has taken some voting rights away and Congress needs to put them back.

Winter: Can you help us understand how these redistricting efforts like the one in Texas fit into broader, decades-long voter disenfranchisement?

Wiley: We come from a history in this country where people had to fight to make sure Black people were allowed to learn and allowed to vote. One of the ways of disenfranchising Black people was diluting Black voting blocs. Meaning, you could say, “We're going to separate out Black voters by how we draw the lines of the districts, congressional districts, state assembly districts.”

Sadly, we also have segregation, so you can draw districts, and you’re not just diluting Black voters, right? You can draw lines and bust up Latino, Asian American, Native American communities so that they have less collective power to get somebody in office who understands their problems and the solutions they want. So, that's a long history. We’re becoming more diverse, the number of voters who are people of color has grown, that’s become a bigger threat to people who share a certain ideology and who are not likely to win those voters with that ideology.

If you look at the patterns, Black people, historically, largely vote for Democrats. So, if you're a Republican, you're going to say, we don't want those Black people to have power because that challenges our power. Well, the Supreme Court basically has said: Have at it. As long as you can say it's for partisan reasons, you can discriminate against Black people or Native Americans or Asian Americans. You can deny them a voting bloc. The Supreme has basically said as long as you say it’s for political reasons, we’ll let you discriminate.

By overturning years of precedent, the Supreme Court has given states a pass for this gerrymandering shenanigans that is all about undermining the ability of voters, particularly voters of color, elderly students, and people with disabilities, to vote. Then, once they’ve gerrymandered, they’ve consolidated state legislative power, so they can make it even harder to vote, by closing state polling places, passing voter ID laws. Once you’ve done that, you’ve reduced the ability of these massive percentages of whole state populations from having true ability to pick someone who comes from and understands their communities.

If a group of Black people or Native people, or any other group of people that has been discriminated against, came together to say, “We're going to bust up districts that are mostly white so they can't have political power,” we would be pilloried. They would find a way to make it a crime. We'd be in jail. What’s happening right now is not just offensive and anti-democratic, it's devastatingly racist and a reversal of everything we've gained for every American, not just us, because they have ensured that they can make it harder for anybody to vote.

They’ve been using these tactics throughout our history, and especially post-Barack Obama winning the presidential election in his first race. This all predates Donald Trump's becoming a presidential candidate. It’s a playbook, but it's now a playbook on steroids. It's now a playbook that has been irradiated by the same wealth and billionaires who have also been part of the active undermining of our protections against corruption.

There’s always been a linkage between lying about why our elections and disparaging people of color. If you go all the way back to the beginning of the voter ID laws fights, those fights were based on the argument that undocumented immigrants were showing up in voting in our elections. There was one lie and conspiracy theory that folks were literally crossing the border to vote and then going back over the border. I mean, it was insane, it was unsupported, it was racist, and it was intended to be all those things, to stoke fears in people about changing demographics. It was a horrific manipulation, but now it's an outright federal government attack, not just unraveling of civil rights protections, but weaponizing the federal government and utilizing these lies to justify directly and aggressively taking voting rights away from people.

Winter: What’s the connection between the fight for civil rights and the fight against corruption?

Wiley: The big donors who have supported politicians who are doing incredible damage to our democracy are the same people who've been investing in organizations that are the creators of the Project 2025 playbook, which includes an outright onslaught and frontal attack on civil rights, including voting rights, and calls for the weaponization of the government against us. Money is undermining our rights, including voting rights.

Those organizations have had a very long playbook. There’s nothing that we should be confused about. Taking rights away is about taking power. That is the central operating principle of corruption, whether it's legal or illegal. And that’s another problem we have: Too much of this corruption is legal.

The massive grift that's happening right now out of Washington is something that the civil rights community is working on. Tech companies are pushing for deregulation, removing guardrails against discrimination with artificial intelligence, with how they take and use our data for surveillance. These are the same tech companies that are running to the table and promising fealty and and using their access to power and their resources in a way that's undermining our ability to ensure that people are protected, including from monopolistic power. The super rich are given the priority over our schools being funded, over people being able to see a doctor when they’re sick. It’s all part of the same thing.

Winter: What are some of the things that organizations you work with are doing that are the way forward?

Wiley: I hear, “Why aren't people doing anything? Why are people capitulating? How do we get people to have courage, to not be afraid?” What makes me sad is that so much is happening. People aren't seeing it, and some of that’s because of traditional news media, news coverage and how people get their news. It’s the problem of the work not being visible.

The Leadership Conference as a coalition is over 240 national organizations. Voting rights is a top priority for everybody. The coalition looks like America. There's nobody who's backed away from this fight in our coalition.

Secondly, it’s critical to know that voting rights has always been fought for and won by local heroes and sheroes, a lot of sheroes, a lot of black women, a lot of Latina sheroes, a lot of women who do the work every day, even with threats. Participating in elections as poll workers, as we know, has become incredibly fraught with threats, but I'm going to tell you, those folks have not backed down. They've been doubling up, despite the fact that it's been harder to get money. There are people who are afraid in institutions, but it’s not the folks who have been always doing this work, they haven't backed down.

There’s a fight in every single state. There are lawyers bringing cases to court, and that matters tremendously. There are people coming together to fight gerrymandering, protecting voting rights, to pass their own state legislation that mirrors the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. They’re educating and mobilizing people. We're not going to stop, because the thing we've learned from our history is that it took us 100 years after slavery to get the Voting Rights Act in 1965. We never stopped, and we're not stopping now.

[All of these attacks on voting rights] means organizations have to spend resources protecting the ability to do what they’re lawfully allowed to do, if they’re threatened by being hauled into Congress or being investigated. There’s a reason Donald Trump signed executive orders attacking higher education, attacking law firms and attacking philanthropy. It's because they wanted to kneecap advocacy, public education, the rights and ability to bring lawsuits, to use the guardrails we have as a democratic society. But that hasn't stopped a lot of people from either doing the work.

Winter: With all of the above happening, how are you coping?

Wiley: I am coping in two ways. One is gratitude. Gratitude for the fact that I've been given the ability to be in the fight. That's a privilege. There are people who want to be in the fight, who are working three jobs. I know a poll worker at my own polling site who's about to become homeless because housing is unaffordable. We have to remember that it’s a privilege to be able to fight.

The second is people. The way I’m personally able to stay charged up is being in community and in relationship with other people who are also fighting. I'm getting hugged by poll workers, black women, who are there every year, and it is not their day job, and they're not going away. And they are outraged, and they do everything they can in their communities. It is people who remind us who we are, why we matter, and that actually there are more of us than there are of those who are coming for us.