Problems with the Voting Rights Act

This is sort of old, but I think what George Will said is right on:

Today there are 43 African-American members of the House and Senate and more than 9,000 elected state and local officials. The state with the largest number? Mississippi. Second and third? Alabama and Louisiana. So why the continuing pretense that the right to vote is, for African-Americans, precarious and, unless the full VRA is preserved forever, perishable?

One reason is that prominent Democrats, with their habit of seizing their own party's jugular, present the party as a bad, although practiced, loser. They assert what evidence refutes—"disenfranchising" (John Kerry's word) "a million" (Kerry's number) African-American voters in 2000, and the "suppression" (Howard Dean's word) of African-American votes in Ohio in 2004. Such meretricious laments encourage some African-American leaders to strike familiar sterile poses of victimhood. For some civil-rights organizations that are reluctant to recast their mission in response to their successes, and for some African-American leaders comfortable with a vocabulary of angry complaint 40 years old, renewal of the VRA's initially temporary provisions is a comfortable and unstrenuous, although irrelevant, project.