On the surface, the stay issued Feb. 7, 2022, in Merrill v. Milligan was procedural. In a 5-4 decision, the justices halted a district court’s injunction that had barred Alabama from using a newly redistricted map in the upcoming 2022 elections. The Supreme Court will hear the full case in its next term starting in the fall, with the ruling due by the end of June 2023 — after this year’s midterm elections.
Had it stood, the district court’s injunction would have required Alabama to redraw congressional districts ahead of the election to give Black voters greater representation. Instead, Black voters — more than a quarter of Alabama’s electorate — will be the majority in just one of seven districts.
The Supreme Court’s order could have a significant, substantive effect on the 2022 midterm elections — and not just in Alabama. In allowing the state to use a voting map adopted in late 2021 that a court has ruled unlawful soon after passage, the Supreme Court is sending a signal to other states regarding the lack of review available regarding problematic maps they may draw.
Expanding Purcell
The justices’ decision rests on the Purcell principle — a rule the Supreme Court created in 2006 when vacating a Court of Appeals decision to block Arizona’s voter ID law a month before the upcoming general election.
In their ruling in the case Purcell v. Gonzalez, justices said federal courts should not interfere with state election processes close to a general election because doing so would confuse voters and burden election officials.
The latest ruling by the Supreme Court in Merrill appears to expand the scope of the Purcell rule significantly.
The Merrill ruling does not appear to track Purcell. The district court’s injunction in Merrill was the result of a full review of Alabama’s congressional redistricting plan. The district court heard seven days of testimony and read a substantial volume of briefings before reaching its decision.
At the conclusion of the case — handled at warp speed for a federal court — the district court wrote an opinion of more than 200 pages explaining in detail the law and facts underlying its decision.
Moreover, the injunction against Alabama’s redistricting plan was issued on Jan. 24, 2022 — more than nine months before voting in Alabama’s general election ends on Nov. 8, 2022.
In contrast, the Court of Appeals in Purcell had enjoined the use of the Arizona voter ID law without explanation mere weeks before that year’s general election.
Novel Reading of the Voting Rights Act
This apparent expansion of the Purcell principle is more than just a technical change. It could have a tangible impact on the election results in Alabama.
At the heart of the case is a dispute over whether Alabama must redraw its congressional districts to provide a second seat in which Black voters form the majority. The current map contains one such district.
That issue reaches the heart of the 1965’s Voting Rights Act and could affect Black Alabamians’ ability to elect their representatives of choice.
In Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concurrence with the court’s order, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, he suggested the stay of the injunction stopping Alabama from using its map is sensible, in part, because the plaintiffs are not clearly going to win the underlying case when it comes before the Court.
Justice John Roberts dissented from the stay, noting the district court appears to have applied the law correctly and left nothing for the Supreme Court to correct.
Meanwhile, Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent — which was joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor — argued the underlying merits in the challenge to Alabama appear so clear that the Court’s majority would need to employ a novel reading of the Voting Rights Act to make the case appear debatable.
Tilting Elections
The court’s order in Merrill suggests that the window for deciding the legality of redistricting measures before the 2022 elections has now closed.
That likely sends a message to all states — those that have not finished redistricting and those that may wish to revise their redistricted maps — that they can pass whatever maps they want, possibly tilting the 2022 congressional election, without fear of being overruled in federal court.
Republicans in the Virginia House of Delegates have rejected constitutional amendments to restore the voting rights of people who have been convicted of felonies and to remove anti-LGBTQ language from the state constitution — meaning that Virginians will not be able to vote on the measures during the state’s midterm elections this fall.
In Virginia, any changes to the constitution must be approved by two concurrent sessions of the state legislature. After that, a statewide referendum is held, and if a majority of voters approve of the measure, it will be enshrined in the state constitution.
Although the Virginia legislature approved both proposals in its previous session, the rejection of the proposals this week means that they will be thrown out, and voters will not have the opportunity to weigh in on the changes during the upcoming midterm elections.
On Tuesday, the subcommittee voted 5-4 to reject a proposal that would have automatically restored the voting rights of individuals who have been convicted of a felony and completed the terms of their sentence. The subcommittee also voted 6-4 against a marriage equality amendment, which would have altered the constitution to remove any wording that referenced the state’s defunct ban on same-sex marriage.
Virginia barred same-sex marriage in an amendment that passed in 2006. In 2015, the federal Supreme Court ruled that states could not restrict marriage on the basis of sex or gender.
“My entire life all I ever wanted to be was married. And my entire life I knew that wasn’t a possibility,” Adams said.
“You really can’t understand what it’s like to grow up in an environment when you knew you didn’t mean anything to anyone,” she added.
Republican opponents of the amendment claimed that they voted against the measure because its framework would make it possible for the state to legalize polygamy. But the language of the proposed amendment was very specific, clarifying that the state would recognize marriages “equally under the law regardless of the sex or gender of the parties to the marriage.”
More than a dozen advocacy groups, including a conservative one, spoke in favor of passing the amendment. Not a single group advocated against its passage.
“Virginians who have paid their debt to society deserve to have their voices heard at the ballot box,” McAuliffe wrote on social media. “We wont [sic] stop fighting until we fully reverse this Jim Crow era law and make restoration of voting rights automatic.”
Currently, the only way a person who has been convicted of a felony in Virginia can vote is if the governor signs an order restoring their individual voting rights. During his time in office, former Gov. Ralph Northam (D) signed more than 126,000 orders restoring the voting rights of previously incarcerated Virginians.
“When people make mistakes, and pay their debts, they deserve the opportunity to return and be productive members of society,” Northam said in a statement near the end of his tenure. “We can all be proud that Virginia has been able to provide thousands of deserving people the opportunity for a fresh start.”
Vanuatu has now regained its United Nations voting rights after recently being denied the right over unpaid fees.
The Director of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Yvon Basil, confirmed that the government had paid US$192 to regain the right to vote.
An amount of $74,562 was also paid to settle outstanding arrears, he said.
“We’ve paid out our right to vote and settled our outstanding arrears. We have no more dues with UN and are back on the good books of UN,” he said.
“UN has acknowledged Vanuatu for sorting out its dues.”
Apart from Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea — which owed $13,000 — was also deprived of the right to vote but has recovered it after paying its arrears.
According to Article 19 of the UN Charter: “A Member of the United Nations which is in arrears in the payment of its financial contributions to the Organisation shall have no vote in the General Assembly if the amount of its arrears equals or exceeds the amount of the contributions due from it for the proceeding two full years.
“The General Assembly may, nevertheless, permit such a member to vote if it is satisfied that the failure to pay is due to conditions beyond the control of the Member.”
Iran pays $18 million
News agencies report that payment by last Friday of more than $18 million by Iran, via an account in Seoul and most likely with the approval of the United States, which has imposed heavy financial sanctions on Tehran, had been announced by UN sources and confirmed by South Korea.
Guinea had to pay at least $40,000 to recover its right to vote.
UN spokeswoman Paulina Kubiak said three other countries that had lost their UN voting rights in early January had also recovered them after paying the minimum arrears required last week.
Those countries were Sudan, which had to pay about $300,000, Antigua and Barbuda, which owed some $37,000 and Congo-Brazzaville, with around $73,000 in arrears, said Kubiak.
On the other hand, Venezuela, which is facing a minimum payment of nearly $40 million, remainec deprived of the right to vote, according to the U.N.
It was the only country out of the 193 UN members that would not be able to participate in votes this year.
Anita Roberts and Kizzy Kalsakauare Vanuatu Daily Post reporters. Republished with permission.
We often hear that the U.S.’s founding documents, courts and institutions make it immune to despotism, but this claim is simply false and erases our country’s troubling history with white supremacy — one the GOP is poised to reinvigorate. During Reconstruction, for example, Louisiana experienced dozens of coups and massacres at both the local and state levels. These escalated after white supremacists refused to concede defeat in the state election of 1872, opting instead to set up a shadow government under losing candidate John McEnery. The paramilitary arm of the shadow government — the White League — tried (and failed) to oust the legitimate governor and his allies in the “Battle of the Cabildo” in 1873. Instead of arresting and prosecuting the conspirators, state and federal officials allowed them to plan their next coup, which successfully toppled the state government in the “Battle of Liberty Place” in 1874.
Failing to prosecute the white vigilantes and the insurrectionists of Reconstruction, the U.S.’s first attempt at multiracial democracy, all but ensured their eventual success. This pattern played out across the South as the old enslaving class spread racist fears of nonexistent Black insurrections to successfully promote a frenzy of racist violence in a bid for power. Perhaps we might tell ourselves that white vigilantism is “unconstitutional” and would never survive the courts, but the unfortunate truth is that the Supreme Court has historically condoned these tactics. In the 1876 Cruikshank ruling, the justices decided that the white paramilitaries who murdered roughly 150 Black Louisianans in 1873 did not violate their civil rights because the Bill of Rights only applied to states, not to private individuals. White conservatives understood the ruling as granting them immunity from prosecution for murdering Black Americans and enacted a wave of racist violence months later in the election of 1876 that formally ended Reconstruction.
We sit at just such a juncture, where Donald Trump and members of his administration tried repeatedly to overturn the results of the 2020 election. We now know that Trump officials, lawyers and campaign staff explored a variety of strategies designed to overturn the election results, including a mid-December unsigned executive order directing the recently installed Secretary of Defense Christopher C. Miller to seize voting machines. Trump allies, meanwhile, met with Republican senators two days before the mob attack on the Capitol to discuss the now-notorious coup PowerPoint detailing how Republicans might install Trump on January 6 and then declare martial law. Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, texted at least one member of Congress, “I love it” regarding the planned coup. While it is true that some of Trump’s foot soldiers who staged the Capitol breach have faced repercussions, its architects continue to hold meaningful power and influence and are successfully removing the guardrails that staved off their last coup attempt.
Although prominent Democrats hope that it is possible to “out-organize voter suppression,” our history suggests otherwise. After the formal end of Reconstruction, white vigilantes used intimidation and violence to negate the 15th Amendment (which guaranteed Black men the right to vote), but overwhelming Black majorities in some districts enabled Black voters to elect Black state representatives like Robert Smalls in South Carolina.
White conservatives, who campaigned under explicitly racist slogans like “This is a White Man’s Country; Let White Men Rule,” could not stomach so brazen an affront to their fundamental commitment to white power. Beginning with Mississippi in 1890, Southern states with large Black populations rewrote their state constitutions to destroy the last vestiges of Black political power, using poll taxes, literacy tests and even a grandfather clause that allowed poor and illiterate whites to vote so long as their grandfather had been able to vote during slavery, when Black Americans could not.
Like today’s voter purges and restrictions pushed by the Republican Party, the Jim Crow constitutions of the 1890s used race-neutral language to target Black voters, ensuring that even if a handful were able to vote, they would never be able to wield power. As Robert Smalls protested at the South Carolina Constitutional Convention in 1895, “this convention has been called for no other purpose than the disfranchisement of the negro.” The new Jim Crow constitutions accomplished precisely that, cutting Black registration from 130,000 to 5,000 in Louisiana, 147,000 to 8,600 in Mississippi, and 147,000 to 21,000 in Virginia. In Williams v. Mississippi, the Supreme Court even declared these measures constitutional in 1898. Despite the clear targeting of Black voters, the ostensibly race-neutral language meant that, as with Cruikshank, the court refused to intervene to uphold the 15th Amendment so long as it meant protecting the rights of Black Americans.
Our political system is already skewed by deeply gerrymandered districts designed to maximize Republican power, and although a majority of Americans support an end to partisan redistricting, Republicans are further expanding gerrymandering in states like North Carolina, where Trump garnered 49 percent of the vote in 2020, but where the GOP is are now positioned to claim 70 percent of the House seats.
On top of this effort, Republican legislatures are making it harder to vote, passing laws restricting voting hours and methods in 19 states while creating new criminal penalties for handing out water in Georgia and for encouraging potential voters to request a mail-in ballot in Texas. To make matters worse, Republican-controlled states including Florida, Georgia, Texas and Arizona passed laws handing control of elections from nonpartisan boards to partisan officials. A slate of new far right Republican candidates for secretary of state who control election returns and certification in key battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada, meanwhile, refuse to concede that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. If we fail to act to protect voting rights and overturn these laws, Democrats will likely face a substantially more repressive landscape in 2022 and 2024.
While Republican election rigging and insurrectionary efforts create a dire situation, it is one we might be able to navigate with robust First Amendment protections. The mass protests of the civil rights movement, for example, inspired the Johnson administration to pass a series of reforms including the Voting Rights Act.
That’s not to say this kind of mass mobilization would be easy or without risks, but a movement similar to the “militant nonviolence” of the civil rights era could overcome the racist authoritarianism of the GOP. Almost in anticipation of this possibility, Republicans passed a slate of state laws making it easier for police to arrest protesters and for vigilantes to run them over with their cars. They did so at the very moment that they made it easier to overturn elections but harder to vote. Under those circumstances in GOP-controlled swing states, protesting a subverted or overturned election means taking enormous bodily and legal risks, severely constraining the right to assemble when it would be most needed.
The same might be said for the Republican attack on education, again waged at the very moment the GOP expanded voter suppression and anti-protest laws. Republican-controlled legislatures passed or are in the process of passing laws that make it illegal to teach the U.S.’s racist history or its impact on systems of power. Officials and administrators in GOP-controlled states have banned professors from testifying in court to overturn voting rights restrictions in Florida, banned books dealing with racism from public libraries in Texas, and promoted a nationwide campaign of threats and intimidation against school board members.
These attempts to ban teaching and writing about white supremacy harken back to antebellum slavery, when enslavers banned abolitionist teaching and literature, burned abolitionist pamphlets, and murdered abolitionist authors, printers and activists like Elijah Lovejoy. Historically, this approach to abolitionist writing made it extremely difficult and dangerous to oppose white supremacy, contributing to the misinformed and reactionary white Southern society that seceded from the U.S. to defend slavery in 1860.
Fortunately, our history also shows that there are things we can do.
We can wage an organized campaign to demand bills creating a free, fair and transparent democracy. We already have exactly that legislation sitting in the Senate, blocked by a Republican filibuster that is itself a relic of Jim Crow. We can, today, exert overwhelming pressure on legislators to pass bills protecting our right to vote and guaranteeing a truly representative democracy with robust First Amendment protections. We can also demand the Department of Justice (DOJ) take every available opportunity to investigate and hold accountable the organizers of the January 6 mob attack on the Capitol. Although we have often failed on this front, the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act and the creation of the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ in 1957 raised the costs of white vigilantism and show that a genuine commitment to justice can turn the tide of white supremacist organizing and violence. Historically, failing to take aggressive action against white vigilantism all but guarantees escalating white vigilantism and the creation of some form of apartheid regime.
While we work to improve our existing institutions and hold them accountable, we can also embrace a culture of mutual aid and public good against which white conservatives cannot prevail. From Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King Jr. to Angela Davis and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, we have generations of equal rights and abolitionist activists whose wisdom we can employ. They remind us that elite white minoritarian rule is genuinely unpopular and that working together to care for one another not only improves our lives but forces the state to be more responsive to the needs of its people. Our history demonstrates that together, we can defeat this white backlash, protect our democracy and build powerful new coalitions that bring together organized labor and racial justice movements. We must. Our future depends on it.
America’s national media typically pay little attention to the moves the nation’s state lawmakers make. Not this year. State legislative battles have emerged over recent months as a top-tier national story. And deservedly so. The battling at the state level — on a tidal wave of proposed new voter-suppression laws — could well determine the course of American democracy.
But state lawmakers are threatening democracy with more than schemes for voter suppression. In one state after another, legislators have been advancing and enacting tax cuts that pump more dollars into rich people’s pockets — and fix in place more plutocratic power over the political process.
In Arizona, for instance, the tax cuts enacted last year figure to deliver 55.5 percent of their benefits to the state’s top 1 percent. Arizonans making over half a million dollars will save an average $30,000 off their tax bills. Taxpayers making between $21,000 and $40,000 will average $13 in savings.
In Arkansas, among other tax changes, lawmakers chopped the highest state income rate — on income over $37,200 — from 5.9 to 4.9 percent. The state’s overall tax changes will save the poorest 20 percent of Arkansas taxpayers an average $17 each. Households in the state’s top 1 percent will average $10,400 in tax savings.
In Kansas, a state that should know better, a similar story. A decade ago, the state’s right-wing governor gave taxpayers of means a massive tax break that cratered state revenues and, relates Wesley Sharpe of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “forced schools to shift more costs on to parents and teachers” and “left millions of people without health insurance.” The Kansas economy, meanwhile, would see no sign of the “shot of adrenaline” the governor had promised the tax cut would deliver.
Now the Kansas legislature, news reports indicate, is revving up for more tax cutting. Lawmakers appear “likely to consider a bill that would take Kansas from three income tax brackets to a single rate,” a move that would destroy what remains of progressivity — the notion that higher incomes should face higher tax rates — in the state’s tax code.
Last year 14 states cut their taxes, either by enacting new rates that heap big benefits on the rich or having the cuts triggered by legislation passed in previous years. Some 20 states, the Institute for Tax and Economic Policy calculates, “are already discussing tax cuts for 2022.”
This rash of tax cutting has received precious little national attention, and — given our turbulent times — that shouldn’t surprise us. The ongoing tax cuts, after all, seem to involve mere dollars, not our national future as a democracy. But tax cuts for the rich and attacks on the integrity of our democracy go hand in hand. The same state legislatures that are pushing voter suppression are pushing “tax relief” for their state’s most affluent.
“Many of the same states — Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, and Kansas, to name a few — considering tax cuts are also making it harder for people to vote,” explains analyst Wesley Sharpe, “such as by criminalizing efforts to assist voters with disabilities.”
Statehouse cheerleaders for grand private fortune have also shown little respect for the niceties of democracy as they rush to lavish tax breaks on the already well-endowed. Arizona may be the most outrageous example. State GOP lawmakers there have been bending over backwards to undo the tax-the-rich will of the voters.
Those voters in 2020 approved a referendum that significantly raised taxes on Arizona’s rich to pay for increased funding for the state’s public schools. The voter-backed tax hike, details the Tax Foundation, “created a 3.5 percent high earners tax atop of the state’s existing 4.5 percent top marginal income tax rate, functionally yielding a new top rate of 8 percent.”
State lawmakers in Arizona would not accept the referendum result. In their 2021 session, they proceeded to rewrite the state’s basic tax-rate structure. They slashed the already existing 4.5 percent rate “to ensure” that the combined top rate Arizona’s richest face never exceeds 4.5 percent, essentially erasing the tax hike on the rich the referendum had put in place.
A “small group of politicians is helping their rich friends avoid paying their fair share to public schools,” responded Rebecca Gau, the executive director of Stand for Children Arizona. “Worst of all, they are trying to silence voters.”
Gau and other angry Arizona education advocates subsequently collected enough signatures to put onto the November 2022 ballot a referendum that would repeal the 2021 legislative session’s exceedingly rich people-friendly rate-rigging.
But Arizona’s conservative lawmakers have still another wildcard to play. They sense that state education advocates will prevail at the polls in this November’s referendum and kill the tax cut for the rich the legislature passed last year. The lawmakers’ new strategy? They’re planning to repeal the 2021 tax cut themselves in the 2022 legislative session and, as local news reports explain, “replace it with a new version, a move that would end a voter referendum that has stopped the tax cut law from taking effect.”
In the meantime, the Tax Foundation observes, no wealthy Arizonans will be facing the top 8 percent rate that voters adopted in 2020.
Rich people-friendly state lawmakers are moving on other fronts as well. Kentucky friends of grand private fortune want to replace more of the state’s income tax revenue with regressive hikes in the state sales tax. Iowa has begun a phased-in repeal of its inheritance tax. In Mississippi, the governor is calling for the total elimination of the personal income tax.
How are these pals of plutocrats justifying their magnanimity toward mega-millionaire households? They’re pointing to the sizeable budget surpluses many states are currently experiencing.
But those surpluses, points out Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy analyst Neva Butkus, reflect a set of special circumstances that range from billions in federal Covid aid to changes in tax-filing deadlines during the pandemic that have left many 2020 and 2021 tax payments getting collected in the same fiscal year. Using the surpluses these special conditions have created as an excuse for permanently cutting the taxes rich people pay makes no fiscal sense.
The same legislators who were touting tax cuts for the rich as the perfect solution to our problems before the pandemic, adds ITEP’s Butkus, are now calling tax cuts for the rich the solution to our problems during the pandemic.
“Tax cuts,” she notes, “cannot be a solution to everything.”
Tac cuts carefully targeted to families struggling to get by, to be sure, can make solid policy sense. But tax cuts for wealthy households that have become wealthier during the pandemic have no redeeming social value. We shouldn’t be cutting the taxes these rich people pay. We should be raising them. And if we did that raising, the resulting revenue — and opportunities for real social progress — would be stunning.
Just how stunning? Oxfam, the Institute for Policy Studies, Patriotic Millionaires, and the Fight Inequality Alliance have just issued a new report that does the math, nation by nation and for the world as a whole.
In the United States, a nation whose billionaires now hold more wealth than the population’s poorest 60 percent, even a modest annual wealth tax — say one that started with a 2 percent levy on wealth over $5 million and topped off with a 5 percent bite on wealth over $1 billion — would raise close to $1 trillion a year, $928.4 billion to be more exact.
Oxfam is also proposing a one-time 99 percent tax on all the wealth the world’s ten richest men — a group that includes nine Americans — have gained since Covid hit. If these 10 richest men lost 99.999 percent of their combined fortunes, Oxfam goes on to note, each of them would still be richer than 99 percent of humanity.
Over the weekend, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) praised the Arizona Democratic Party for censuring Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) over her obstruction of federal voting rights.
In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Sanders called Sinema’s vote in the Senate last week against filibuster changes to allow the passage of voting rights legislation “terrible.”
Certain Republican states “are moving in a very, very anti-democratic way,” he said. “It was absolutely imperative that we change the rules so we could pass strong voting rights legislation. All Republicans voted against us, two Democrats voted against us – that was a terrible, terrible vote.”
“I think what the Arizona Democratic Party did was exactly right,” Sanders concluded.
Last week, Sinema and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) voted against a proposal to enact a talking filibuster for Democrats’ voting rights bill, which would allow the Senate to pass the measure with a simple majority vote. It was a last-ditch effort to protect voting rights as Republicans shred them to pieces.
The Arizona Democratic Party announced that it had voted to censure Sinema on Saturday after months of frustration with the senator’s obstinate defense of the filibuster.
“[T]he Arizona Democratic Party is a diverse coalition with plenty of room for policy disagreements,” party chair Raquel Terán said in a statement. “[H]owever on the matter of the filibuster and the urgency to protect voting rights, we have been crystal clear.” Terán said that, while the party supports Democratic candidates, the consequences of Sinema’s “failure” to protect voting rights are too dire to ignore.
The state party has expressed frustration over the senator’s obstruction before. Last year, it threatened to hold a vote of “no confidence” for Sinema’s filibuster defense, which has caused a near-absolute deadlock in the Senate over Democratic priorities.
A censure is largely a symbolic ruling that does not carry formal consequences in this instance. However, it is a strong rebuke to Sinema, as her own party essentially rules to stand against her, and will likely fuel a primary campaign to unseat her when she’s up for reelection in 2024.
In October, a poll found that, if the election were held soon, Sinema would easily be defeated by Democratic challengers. In a head-to-head race against Ruben Gallego, an early favorite to primary the senator, Sinema loses 62 to 23 percent, according to the poll.
Sanders told reporters last week that he would be open to supporting a candidate who ran against her. In a video posted to his Twitter, he said that it was “pathetic” that Sinema and Manchin would vote to obstruct voting rights during such a crucial time for the country.
However, with Sinema and Manchin not up for reelection for another four years, Sanders is saying that it’s crucial for their stances to be made clear now. In interviews and an op-ed in CNN last week, Sanders has made it clear that he thinks more Democratic agenda items should be put to a vote so that voters can clearly see what the conservative Democrats oppose.
“Funny things happen when a bill gets to the floor,” Sanders said on “Meet the Press.” “Let’s put a strong bill on the floor. And if Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema want to vote against it whatever, Republicans want to vote against it – we can go from there. But what we cannot continue to do, in my view, is these endless backroom negotiations. The American people have got to see where we are.”
As Senate Democrats on Wednesday failed to pass voting rights legislation in the face of Republican opposition, LGBTQ+ advocates grew worried about how rising voter restrictions being passed in states will disproportionately harm LGBTQ+ Americans — especially people of color and people with disabilities, who face multiple intersecting barriers.
While the House had previously passed legislation that would reverse some of those rules, a merged version of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act was unable to pass in the Senate without needed support from moderate Democrats on changing the filibuster, leaving the future of federal voting rights legislation unclear.
Other major advocacy groups, including two that support abortion rights, had also raised their voices to encourage a filibuster carve-out for voting rights ahead of the Senate vote on Wednesday.
The Human Rights Campaign, National LGBTQ+ Task Force, and National Black Justice Coalition — which advocates for Black LGBTQ+ people — are among the groups that called on LGBTQ+ people to pressure their senators into supporting the federal protections.
Nineteen states passed 34 laws last year restricting voting access — the most tracked by the Brennan Center for Justice since it began counting in 2011. Seven of those states have among the highest proportion of LGBT people in the country, per Gallup data tracked by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law — including Georgia and Florida, which enacted far-reaching voting restrictions. At least four states prefiled restrictive bills in December, per the Brennan Center.
Throughout this, voting rights advocates have expressed concern that without stronger federal protections, the state-level restrictions may effectively disenfranchise citizens who do not have the resources to meet new voting requirements — primarily people of color, who are often unable to vote due to strict voter ID lawsand are disproportionately subjected to longer Election Day voting lines that could be offset by expanded early voting hours.
LGBTQ+ advocates, already attuned to statehouse maneuvers after a record year for anti-transgender legislation, are paying attention. Estimates from older data analyzed by the Movement Advancement Project (MAP) show that 1 in 3 LGBTQ+ people live in the South, where eight states passed restrictive voting laws last year. That same MAP analysis, citing 2014 Williams Institute data, found that 1 in 5 LGBTQ+ Southerners are Black.
“That’s a significant percentage of LGBTQ folks, who also happen to be Black, that are going to be experiencing a return of Jim Crow-era tactics,” said Victoria Kirby York, deputy executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition.
Recently enacted laws that require photo identification to vote, with little to no ID alternatives, would prevent many transgender and nonbinary people from casting their ballot, since many in the community face financial and legal roadblocks to updating documents as they transition. Ahead of the 2020 election, the Williams Institute estimated that roughly 42 percent of eligible trans voters would be unable to vote due to not having identification that reflects their gender and meets state requirements.
Diego Sanchez, director of advocacy and policy at PFLAG National, which advocates for LGBTQ+ families and allied parents, said it can be emotionally fraught for a trans person to be challenged over their identification while trying to vote.
Prior to legally changing his name to Diego around 1994, and when some of his legal documents still bore his deadname — his name pre-transition — he feared being challenged over his identity at the polls.
“At any point at a voting place, someone if they knew me could say ‘I know that’s not that’s not your name.’ They could yell up my deadname, if they knew that. I would rather die,” he said. “It’s hard … because where you vote is where you live, so those people would see me the rest of my life.”
There are also more physical barriers to consider.
Legislation passed in states including Alabama and Texas last year to restrict curbside or drive-through voting, as well as separate efforts to make signature requirements for mail-in voting more strict, can make casting a ballot more difficult for voters with disabilities, said Bobby Hoffman, deputy director of the ACLU’s democracy division. And research from the Kaiser Family Foundation — as well as data from the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey — shows that LGBTQ+ people in the United States dispropriately report living with a disability than the rest of the population.
“All polling places are not as accessible as they should be,” Kirby York said.
The reduction of curbside or drive-through voting also can restrict ballot access for people working low-wage jobs that don’t allow for time off to vote.
“LGBTQ workers are more likely to be in jobs with lower pay, and without paid time off, meaning if there is a really long line at your polling station, your boss may not be forgiving or understanding to let you be able to cast your ballot because you’re standing in line for three, four or five, six hours,” said Ross Murray, senior director of GLAAD’s media institute.
Without federal protections, advocates and experts fear that LGBTQ+ people — and all voters — will be further impacted by state voting restrictions.
“Access to the ballot box is a fundamental right in this country – a right that is currently under threat,” HRC interim president Joni Madison said in a statement following Wednesday night’s vote. “The voting rights legislation that was before the Senate aimed to protect marginalized populations such as LGBTQ+ people, Black and Brown people, the elderly, low-income people and people with disabilities.”
“My fear is that we’re going to see a continuation of the wave of voter suppression laws that were passed by state legislatures in 2021,” Hoffman said.
A number of state laws are being challenged in court. The ACLU is suing over two voter restriction laws in Montana denounced by Native American advocacy groups as well as Texas’ omnibus bill to implement voting restrictions and Georgia’s far-reaching voting law, which is also being challenged by the Justice Department.
GLAAD and HeadCount, a voter registration nonprofit also supported by the National Black Justice Coalition, encourage LGBTQ+ voters to check their state identification laws if they are trying to figure out how to vote while homeless or if their name doesn’t match what’s on their ID.
LGBTQ+ advocacy groups need to rally around voting rights ahead of the midterms, pressure lawmakers to pass federal protections and actively protest against state restrictions, Kirby York said — or risk losing credibility.
“If we’re not seen doing it, we lose all forms of legitimacy as a movement when it comes to wanting other communities to show up for us,” she said.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis did not wait for fellow Republicans in the Senate to finish blockading federal voting rights legislation to start ramping up racist suppression efforts in his home state.
In an unusual move on the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, DeSantis proposed an alternative political map for Florida that experts said would dilute the power of Latino voters and effectively eliminate two majority-Black voting districts out of only four in the state. DeSantis then asked Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature for nearly $6 million to fund a new police agency to enforce election laws, including sweeping new voting restrictions he signed into law last year.
DeSantis’s proposed poll patrols would ultimately answer to the governor, raising fears of voter intimidation in a state where Republicans gutted a constitutional amendment meant to restore voting rights for hundreds of thousands of formerly incarcerated people. Ash-Lee Henderson, the first Black woman to serve as co-executive director of the Highlander Research and Education Center, the legendary incubator for the southern civil rights movement where King and Rosa Parks trained, said DeSantis’s call for an Office of Election Crimes and Security targeting voters “wasn’t even a dog whistle, it was overtly racist.”
“I’m disgusted, because literally residents across the state — and Florida is a huge state — said that formerly incarcerated people deserve the right to vote, said they wanted drive-through voting and mail-in ballots, and his response is, ‘all this is voter fraud,’” Henderson said. “But there is no scientific evidence to show there is this intentional voter fraud happening.”
DeSantis is hungry for right-wing media attention, and the proposals were a broad swipe at Democrats and civil rights groups, who spent the past year accusing Republican-controlled states of reviving Jim Crow with a wave of voter suppression laws. The laws passed in the wake of former President Trump’s mendacious attempts at overthrowing the 2020 election with false claims of voter fraud.
DeSantis is signaling that the GOP will take up every inch of ground abandoned by Democrats in the fight over ballot access, which has once again ignited mass civil rights protests. While it’s unclear whether DeSantis will ultimately implement new election police in Florida, he knew the federal legislation that could block such a proposal was likely to fail on Wednesday. And it did.
After an intense day of debate over race and democracy in the U.S., the Senate rejected by a razor-thin margin the Democratic push to pass their landmark voting rights bill, the Freedom to Vote: John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which was championed by Black leaders as an important step toward addressing racist suppression. The Senate’s 50 Republicans united against the bill, which they deride as a federal takeover of elections — a revival of segregationist arguments against the original Voting Rights Act of 1965, according to voting rights groups.
Henderson and other observers say DeSantis’s timing is obvious as Republicans continue to push back on any progress made by Black people since the 2020 uprisings for racial justice. The governor rails against anti-racist education, and is pushing a bill designed to shield white people from feeling “discomfort” from discussion about the nation’s racist past at work and in public schools this week.
“DeSantis is using his bully pulpit to wave a flag of white supremacy and fascism and anti-democracy in the face of what has been amazing multi-racial, Back-led movement for voting rights and racial justice,” Henderson said.
Two Democrats, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who say they support the voting rights bill, sided with Republicans and refused to tweak filibuster rules so the bill could pass with a simple majority. Both senators refused to budge on the filibuster despite intense pressure from civil rights activists and warnings from colleagues and President Joe Biden that a “no” vote would land them on the wrong side of history.
“When exceptions to the filibuster are made to raise the debt limit and to push through Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, we refuse to believe that you can’t make the exception so that Black and Brown folks, folks with disabilities, folks with criminal records, and so many more of us can have our right to vote protected,” said Rep. Cori Bush, a Black Democrat from Missouri, in a statement after the vote.
Thousands of Texans are receiving letters from the state informing them that they are flagged as potential non-citizens and could be purged from voter rolls, forcing long-time U.S. citizens to hand over paperwork, according to the Associated Press. Dana DeBeauvoir, the clerk of Travis Country, which includes Austin, said hundreds of mail-in ballot applications were rejected due to confusion over strict new ID requirements passed by the Republican lawmakers last year.
“My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like,” DeBeauvoir said in a press conference on Tuesday.
While DeBeauvoir tussled with Republican state officials over who’s to blame for the confusion over the ID rules, voting rights groups warned a number of other changes to Texas law are designed to intimidate voters and purge them from the rolls. The Texas law, known as SB1, enhanced criminal penalties and paperwork for people who assist voters, creating hurdles for elderly and disabled voters and the people who care for them.
“Different needs require different forms of assistance,” said Molly Broadway, a voting support specialist with Disability Rights Texas, told KXAN Austin. “They can misinterpret a proper form of assistance as illegal assistance.”
About 200 new measures passed in at least 19 states last year that make it harder to vote, and more are expected to come now that the Senate failed to pass the voting rights legislation. Along with other measures, the voting rights bill would make Election Day a federal holiday, mandate two weeks of early voting and restore federal oversight of states that erected barriers for Black and Brown voters in the past.
Henderson said the gears of voter suppression are now grinding beyond Texas and Florida, including in Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee. Henderson, who is a leader of the Movement for Black Lives coalition, said it’s clear why voters are increasingly threatened with criminal penalties, polling police, empowered partisan poll watchers and immigration enforcement in the wake of intense protests against police violence. After all, Black and Brown are disproportionately criminalized and targeted by police.
“It’s not hyperbolic to understand this as a racist intervention; the highest concentration of Black people in the country is in the South,” Henderson said. “The timing of it is very clearly and overtly a response to Black, Brown, Indigenous and Asian-descended and white folks coming out to say we have a different vision, a vision for Build Back Better and defunding the police.”
Republicans flatly reject that their “election integrity” efforts have a racial dimension and say Jim Crow ended years ago, but Henderson said the fight for voting rights did not end in the 1960s. Voters in majority-Black districts still wait in long lines all over the country. Attempts at racial gerrymandering in states such as Texas and Florida follow a long tradition splitting up Black, Brown and Indigenous voter strongholds to dilute their power.
“It’s a tactical intervention in order to consolidate their wealth and power because they are losing it,” Henderson said.
Democrats exploit their structural advantages as well, including through gerrymandering, allowing Republican to paint the voting rights legislation as a partisan power grab. However, Republicans have controlled a majority of state legislatures for the past decade, giving their party disproportionate control over political maps that shape elections. Before losing the Senate majority, the GOP stacked federal courts with conservatives as voting rights cases wound their way through the judiciary.
In 2020, unprecedented voter turnout gave Democrats their own an advantage by handing the party control of Congress and the White House — and, activists say, a mandate to deliver on voting rights. Yet Manchin and Sinema ensured that the Democrats could not use this advantage, and the voting rights fight would continue as it has for decades.
“We are not starting a conversation yesterday,” Henderson said. “We are talking about a centuries-old conversation in this country — if Black people are able to patriciate in this democracy.”
The number of rejected mail-in ballot applications is skyrocketing in Texas counties under new Republican-authored voting restrictions recently signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott.
The Texas crackdown on mail-in voting appears to be hitting hardest in the state’s most densely populated counties, which also tend to have more voters of color and predominantly vote Democratic. In Travis County, which includes Austin, about half of all mail-in ballot applications have been rejected ahead of the state’s March primaries, up from a rate of about 11% in the 2020 election cycle, according to the county clerk’s office. About half of applications were rejected in Hidalgo County as well, according to elections administrator Yvonne Ramon.
Dallas County has rejected 43% of the applications it received, according to elections administrator Frank Phillips. In Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, more than half of the applications received on Monday were rejected under the “ridiculous” new law, said county elections administrator Jacque Callanen. Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said the county is rejecting applications at a rate 700% higher than previous cycles because of the new “voter suppression laws that create a maze of technicalities.” Harris County includes the city of Houston, and with 4.7 million residents has a higher population than 24 U.S. states.
“Voters are being mistreated in this circumstance,” Travis County election clerk Dana DeBeauvoir told reporters on Tuesday. “My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like.”
Many of the applications have been rejected because of the new identification requirements under Texas’ new voting law, SB 1. Texas law already restricted mail-in voting by people under age 65 but the new law requires voters to include their driver’s license or state ID number in their application, or the last four digits of their Social Security number. Counties must match those numbers against the information in each individual’s voter file to approve their application.
Counties have struggled to match ID information because they lack certain data, particularly because voters are not required to provide both their state ID and Social Security numbers when they register to vote. The Texas secretary of state’s office last year said more than 2 million of the state’s 17 million registered voters did not have one of the two ID numbers on file and more than 250,000 did not have either number on file. The numbers have declined since then, but more than 700,000 voters still do not have both numbers on file and more than 100,000 don’t have either, according to the secretary of state’s office.
Nearly 500,000 Texas voters do not have a driver’s license on file, which is the first number voters have to provide on their applications.
“The voter is playing a guessing game with this,” DeBeauvoir said at a press conference. “The voter is trying to remember the number they signed up with at the voter registration office 10, 20, 30 years ago. ‘What number did I use for the voter registration database? Was it my driver’s license number? Did I use my Social Security number?’ Do you remember what you signed up with? I didn’t. I had to go back and look it up. Voters are going to have to play the same guessing game.”
DeBeauvoir said some voters’ applications were rejected because they used an older form that did not include the new voter ID requirement.
“A lot of people are still trying to use the old form because we’ve had a paper shortage, and printing of these new forms means they’re scarce,” she explained. “They’re hard to come by. Nevertheless, you have to use the new form. If somebody sends in an old form, their ballot will be rejected.”
Election officials have sought to help voters avoid mistakes that lead to rejections but the new law also bars election officials from sending unsolicited mail-in voting applications, which would include the updated form and instructions on how to properly fill it out.
“So far, we have not received instructions from the secretary of state’s office to tell voters how to look up this information, and therein is the beginning of the problem for voters,” DeBeauvoir said.
Republicans are pushing back on the concerns raised by election clerks. Republican Secretary of State John Scott said the rejection rate in Travis County was “surprising” and demanded a review of the applications.
“We call on Travis County to immediately review and re-examine the mail ballot applications in question to determine whether they were processed in accordance with state law, with the goal of reinstating and minimizing any disruption to eligible voters who have properly submitted their application for ballot by mail. We anxiously await the results of their re-processing of these mail ballot applications,” he said in a statement.
Voting rights advocates say the new law was largely aimed at restricting voting expansions in areas like Harris County, which sent mail-In ballot applications to every voter in 2020.
“They sent vote-by-mail applications to every registered voter in the county, and it caused state leadership to go berserk,” James Slattery, the senior staff attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project, told Texas Public Radio.
Isabel Longoria, the Harris County elections administrator, filed a federal lawsuit last month challenging the law’s ban on sending out unsolicited mail ballot applications.
“SB 1 makes it a crime for me to do a critical part of my job, and it hurts the most vulnerable voters,” Longoria said in a statement. “SB 1 subjects me to criminal prosecution for encouraging eligible voters to vote by mail so they may participate in our democracy — an option they have under Texas law.”
While county officials are banned from sending out unsolicited mail ballot applications, candidates and political parties are not. The Texas Democratic Party said Monday it will send out hundreds of thousands of mail ballot applications to voters 65 and older.
“We can’t rely on our Republican-run state government to do this for us,” Rose Clouston, the party’s voter protection director, said in a statement. “Texas Republicans have made it very clear that they only think Republicans should have the right to vote and it is therefore incumbent on us to help voters navigate the maze of voting laws Republicans have erected — too much is at stake if we don’t.”
Texas is one of 19 states that passed new voting restrictions last year that Democrats worry will suppress voter turnout, particularly among voters of color, especially after the U.S. Senate failed multiple times to pass new voting rights legislation in the face of a Republican filibuster.
Georgia, which also passed a sweeping new voting law last year, saw absentee ballot applications increase by 400% in November’s municipal elections, with more than half of those rejected because they were submitted past the deadline set under the new law.
The laws were prompted by a campaign of false claims of voter fraud pushed by former President Donald Trump after his election defeat. Trump’s ire was particularly directed at cities with large Black populations like Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee. President Joe Biden last week highlighted the importance of protecting Black voters from “new laws designed to suppress your vote” as he called on the Senate to change filibuster rules to pass voting rights legislation after Republicans repeatedly blocked debate on the bills. The renewed voting rights push died this week, at least for now, when Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., joined all 50 Republicans to block the filibuster changes.
“Across the United States, dozens of voter suppression laws have been introduced in state legislatures, with 34 laws enacted in 19 states,” Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., said in a statement. “These laws are clearly aimed at restricting access to the ballot box, disproportionately impacting Black, Indigenous, Latino and other communities that have borne the historical weight of voting restrictions. The failure of the U.S. Senate to restore the Voting Rights Act and protect our communities from these restrictions is a failure of our nation’s moral compass.”
Reuters‘ headline (1/20/21) put the emphasis on the Democrats’ failure rather than the Republicans’ success.
With the GOP leaning ever more heavily on a strategy of voter suppression and election manipulation to gain power, Democrats finally made an effort to stop some of those maneuvers by bringing a voting rights bill before the Senate. But Wednesday’s unified GOP filibuster—and the refusal by Democratic senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin to modify Senate rules to allow a majority vote on this one bill—killed the attempt.
To the New York Times headline writers (1/19/21), the story went: “After a Day of Debate, the Voting Rights Bill Is Blocked in the Senate.” Their counterparts at CNN.com (1/19/21) chose: “Senate Democrats Suffer Defeat on Voting Rights After Vote to Change Rules Fails.” At Reuters (1/20/21): “US Senate Democrats Fail in Bid to Pass Voting Rights Bill.”
The morning after the late-night vote (1/20/21), the Washington Post‘s homepage version of its headline read: “Voting Rights Bill Effectively Dead as Senate Rejects Filibuster Change.”
None of those headlines were given top billing, at least not by late morning Eastern Standard Time. By lunchtime, the Post‘s headline had dropped out of the Top Stories section, and CNN.com was giving its top slot to “A Look at Biden’s First Year in False Claims” (1/20/22).
CNN‘s lead example (1/20/22) of factchecking Biden was whether the president had falsely claimed to have once driven an 18-wheeler.
But notice what—or more precisely, who—is missing from all the headlines. We don’t even get a nod to any responsible actor. (“Bill Killed in GOP-Involved Filibuster,” anyone?)
The Washington press corps seems much more comfortable identifying democracy-endangering GOP obstructionism when framing it as a story about Democrats. In an extraordinarily rare instance of a story that that acknowledged the GOP as the main culprit, New York Times congressional reporter Jonathan Weisman (1/19/21) managed nevertheless to make the focus Democratic infighting and impotence in a story with the subhead, “Prominent Democrats are expressing rage at their party’s two filibuster holdouts, rather than at Republicans who have blocked their voting rights bill.” Weisman wrote:
The remarkable vitriol Democratic activists are training on two members of their own party has largely given Republicans a pass for blocking the bill and standing by new state laws devised to limit access to the ballot box and empower partisan actors to administer elections and count votes.
Manchin and Sinema surely deserve intense scrutiny for their corrupt and anti-democratic role in this chapter of our country’s history. But how many times have the supposedly moderate GOP senators that the press corps so praised over their work on the bipartisan infrastructure bill been named in a headline about the voting rights bills? It’s not Democratic activists at fault for “giving Republicans a pass” here—but don’t hold your breath waiting for journalists to take responsibility for their own role in the withering of a democracy their corporate owners have little interest in defending.
Capitol Police arrested progressive lawmaker Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) after he joined a demonstration for voting rights at the Capitol on Thursday, according to his office.
“Today, Congressman Jamaal Bowman joined a voting rights non-violent direct action at the North Barricade of the U.S. Capitol Building and was arrested by the U.S. Capitol Police,” said Marcus Frias, Bowman’s director of communications. “We will provide more information and updates as we gather them.”
According to police, protestors had begun to block one side of a barricade. The department claims it has arrested over two dozen people in relation to the protest. Un-PAC, the organization behind the protest, said that many of those arrested are young protesters, and that police have arrested them before for similar demonstrations.
Bowman, who is Black, had visited protesters on Wednesday ahead of a crucial vote to amend Senate rules in order to pass legislation to expand and protect voting rights. “Our democracy is on the line, and the Senate must act and pass voting rights immediately,” he wrote. “We’re outside the Senate steps sounding the alarm.”
Bowman is one of a string of other Black Democratic lawmakers who have been arrested in demonstrations for voting rights over the past year. Representatives Al Green (Texas), Sheila Jackson Lee (Texas), Hank Johnson (Georgia) and Joyce Beatty (Ohio) were arrested in separate voting rights protests last summer.
Bowman had joined strikers on the eighth day of their Hunger Strike 4 Democracy on Thursday when he was arrested.
“Today’s action was a means of making a statement and taking a stand against political corruption. Despite 52 of our senators standing aside as our democracy crumbles, we will not,” Shana Gallagher, executive director of Un-PAC, told Truthout.
“Young people don’t have a choice but to keep organizing to fix our broken democracy by getting big money out of politics, banning partisan gerrymandering, and protecting our freedom to vote,” Gallagher continued. “We will remember which side of history our Senators stood on, and which of them worked to deliver for their constituents, rather than for their ultra-wealthy mega donors and special interests.”
Twenty-eight protesters for voting rights were arrested earlier this week.
This is the second hunger strike for voting rights by Un-PAC demonstrators. Last month, the Hunger Strike 4 Democracy demonstrators traveled from Phoenix to D.C. after striking in front of the capitol building of their home state to no avail. The group, made up of university students, expressed frustration that Congress has failed to act on voting rights. Their first hunger strike lasted 15 days and was extremely taxing for the protesters.
The goal of the strike is to push Congress to pass the Freedom to Vote Act. The bill would overhaul current election laws by making voting more accessible across the country with mail-in ballot expansions, implementing automatic voter registration and increasing transparency around campaign finance. Lawmakers had proposed a filibuster workaround to pass the legislation, but conservative Democrats Senators Joe Manchin (West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona) joined Republicans in blocking the effort on Wednesday night.
“My question for Senator Manchin is: what is it going to take for you to actually represent your constituents?” said hunger striker and West Virginia University student Rylee Haught in a statement. “[W]e are desperate to end political corruption and for a functional, accountable democracy. Yesterday, you failed to deliver that, Senator Manchin. You are standing aside as our democracy crumbles. I will not give up on West Virginia like you did.”
In a press conference on Wednesday, President Joe Biden appeared to snub left-leaning lawmakers in his party, implying that it’s progressives – not conservative Democrats – who are obstructing the president’s agenda.
The implication came after Fox News’s Peter Doocy asked the president why he is trying to “pull the country so far to the left” – a question that itself is disingenuous, as fearmongering politicians and right-wing media have continually painted centrist Democrats as radical in order to mobilize their own followers.
In response, Biden rebuffed the idea that he has been pulling the country to the left. “You guys have been trying to convince me that I am Bernie Sanders,” he said. “I’m not Bernie Sanders. I’m not a socialist. I’m a mainstream Democrat and I have been. And mainstream Democrats have overwhelmingly – if you notice, 48 of the 50 Democrats supported me in the Senate on virtually everything I’ve asked.”
The president’s answer is contradictory; in the same breath that he casts Sanders as a non-mainstream Democrat, he implies that it is only mainstream Democrats who are supporting his policies.
It’s true that Sanders, who identifies as an independent but caucuses with the party, may not fit the mold of a so-called mainstream Democrat by current party standards, even though he has had an enormous hand in shaping the party’s agenda.
But Sanders has consistently rallied behind Biden since the president’s inauguration almost a year ago. In fact, Sanders has been Biden’s most stalwart advocate for priorities like the Build Back Better Act. Meanwhile, the two Senate Democrats who have obstructed nearly the entirety of Biden’s legislative agenda thus far are conservative “blue dog” Democrats.
Indeed, Biden’s comment came just before conservative Democrats Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona delivered a fatal blow to one of the most pressing proposals on the Democratic docket on Wednesday night.
After a year of fierce arguments over the filibuster, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) set up a vote on Wednesday to amend Senate rules in order to pass the Democrats’ marquee voting bill, the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act.
The proposal would have allowed a talking filibuster on the bill to expand voting rights and increase campaign finance transparency, clearing the legislation – which has already been passed by the House – to pass in the Senate with a simple majority vote. Biden has endorsed the filibuster changes so that the party can protect voting rights as Republicans pass dozens of bills restricting voting rights across the country.
However, Sinema and Manchin blocked the filibuster changes and the voting rights legislation. Although political journalists continually claim, with little evidence, that the two actually represent a less-outspoken faction of the party, Manchin and Sinema were the only Democrats who voted against the proposal, joining 50 Republicans in blocking the bill.
After the vote, Sanders condemned the senators for obstructing Biden’s agenda in Congress. “It’s not just this vote” that Manchin and Sinema have blocked, he said, according to Talking Points Memo. “These are people who I think have undermined the president of the United States. They have forced us to go through five months of discussions which have gotten absolutely nowhere.”
Federal voting rights legislation died in the Senate on Wednesday night after Democrats failed to unite their caucus behind a plan to change the filibuster rule, which would have allowed them to circumvent GOP opposition to the bill.
Had a simple majority vote been allowed to advance the bill, its passage would have undoubtedly been successful. But Republicans blocked the voting rights bill using the filibuster, which enables 40 senators to block any piece of legislation they disagree with.
All 50 members of the Senate Republican Caucus voted against the legislation. In order for the bill to overcome a filibuster, at least 10 GOP senators would have had to vote for cloture.
After the voting rights legislation failed to pass, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) moved to change the rules of the filibuster, proposing that it be replaced with a “talking filibuster” that would have required lawmakers to speak non-stop on the Senate floor in order for it to be sustained. But that measure failed after two right-wing Democrats, Sens. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) voted against the proposal.
In a statement after her vote, Sinema claimed that any changes to the filibuster rule — including a modest change like returning to the “talking filibuster” — would “deepen our divisions and risk repeated radical reversals in federal policy, cementing uncertainty and further eroding confidence in our government.”
The two senators were condemned for prioritizing so-called political unity when voting rights were on the line.
“Let’s not lose sight of the issue at hand: This is about ordinary Americans having to jump burdensome hurdles to cast their votes,” he added.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) vowed that she and her congressional colleagues would continue fighting to protect the right to vote for all Americans.
“Tonight, 52 Senators chose to save the Jim Crow filibuster rather than save our democracy,” Pressley said. “We won’t stop fighting to defend voting rights and keep power in the hands of the people.”
Prior to both votes on Wednesday, the third-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-South Carolina), led House members of the Congressional Black Caucus to the Senate chambers to demonstrate the need for voting rights legislation.
Today, @TheBlackCaucus marched to the entry of the Senate floor to call upon them to pass the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act and send this critical legislation to the President’s desk.
“We want the Senate to act today in a favorable way, but if they don’t, we ain’t giving up. I am too young to give up,” said Clyburn, who is 81 years old.
“Although the Senate’s inaction is disappointing, this is not the end,” he wrote on social media. “Those of us who are committed to our nation’s pursuit of a more perfect Union will continue to heed John Lewis’ admonition to ‘stand up, speak out and get in the way’ to get voter protections signed into law.”
Most Americans support the passage of voting rights protections, even if it means changing the filibuster rule. A Data for Progress poll published this month found that 53 percent of likely voters said they would approve of changing the filibuster if it meant passing the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, while just 35 percent of respondents said they would be opposed to such an action.
“Protecting the right to vote is much more important to the majority of likely voters than preserving the senate filibuster rule,” said Ethan Winter, political analyst for Data for Progress, in a message to Truthout. “It’s a bit of political cliche, but I do think that people want a government that they can see working. The legislative filibuster pretty clearly impedes this.”
“Those that defend the filibuster often talk about how it’s needed to somehow protect the Senate,” Winter went on. “I would just point out that the approval rating of congress is in the 20s.”
“Capitalism is the unfolding catastrophe,” says Bree Newsome Bass. “It’s this thing that has grabbed us all in its arms and it is just plummeting down.” In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Kelly Hayes talks with activist and artist Bree Newsome Bass about long COVID, voting rights and getting organized in these times.
Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about things you should know if you want to change the world. I’m your host, writer and organizer, Kelly Hayes. We talk a lot on this show about how to build the relationships and analysis we need to create movements that can win. Today, as we launch the fourth season of this show, I am grateful to be joined by activist Bree Newsome Bass, as we talk about long COVID, voting rights and getting organized in these times.
Bree is widely known for removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state house grounds in 2015. But Bree is also an artist, a filmmaker and a housing organizer, and to some of us, she is a regular presence in our lives, as she dispenses the kind of wisdom and analysis that gives social media real utility for activists and organizers. In recent years, I have felt a particular solidarity with Bree, even though we didn’t know each other, because we are both organizers who try to use Twitter as a platform for education and mobilization, and we were both called alarmists, on a regular basis, for being blunt about Trumpism and the rising threat of right-wing authoritarianism. When you tell people that their reality is not as secure as they thought it was, you will often be punished for it, and that’s something that a number of our guests on the show have experienced. But Bree has drawn more fire than most, because we are living through a very high-stakes culture war, and her removal of that flag was an explosive cultural moment. But no matter what the right-wingers and trolls have thrown at her, Bree has continued to use her platform to rally people in constructive ways.
I recently saw someone post on social media that despite hating “what the left needs to do right now” think pieces, they could really use something of that sort right now. This episode is not that think piece, but I hope our reflections here can fulfill a similar purpose in helping people to orient themselves as we wade through this moment.
When entire swaths of people are deemed disposable in our society, those losses are framed by the powerful as inevitable. Because there’s really no other way to market what we’re being sold. The refrain that “Omicron is mild” drives public policy, but Dr Fauci has stated there is no reason to believe rates of long COVID will be different with Omicron, so the narrative that “everyone will get Omicron” is not only harmful to immunocompromised and disabled people here and now, but also makes millions of people available for future debilitation. Workers and students are being forced into the path of Omicron, regardless of whether they can afford health care. Public officials call Omicron mild without discussing long COVID and who will and won’t have access to long term care, sick days or disability benefits. Health care workers are being told to return to work before they’ve recovered from the virus. Children are staging walkouts because their teachers’ efforts to demand safe conditions in schools have been shut down by the powerful. Bree had some thoughts to share on the broadening of disposability in the age of Omicron.
Bree Newsome: I think that there has always been a dynamic where the government only served the interest of certain people, right? And I think that it tends to kind of fluctuate as is necessary to maintain itself. So if there are certain times when it served the self-preservation of the system to say that immigrants can be a part of American capitalism, then that’s what would be embraced. And then if it seemed like it would serve the interest to scapegoat immigrants, then that’s what we pivot to, right? And so I think what we are getting another glimpse of, I guess, is what it looks like when the government completely abandons us. And again, we have seen that play out in so many different forms and fashion and to varying degrees.
It started with the prison population before it was in the total population. People who were incarcerated were just left to have COVID just break through the facilities – no kind of plan, no kind of regard, not even a part of the conversation. It was a struggle for people in long-term care facilities to really get any kind of attention. And so there was not even real mention of people who were incarcerated. We’ve seen what happens after several natural disasters where there’s no real government response, especially not in the immediate. And so I think that we have to keep that in mind. I think we have to think in terms of what happens if we can’t use the cell phone, we can’t communicate through social media, we can’t rely on there to be clean water in the pipes. We can’t rely on there to be food stocked at the grocery store.
What do we do? How do we organize ourselves for that moment? And I mean, I think that’s where mutual aid has to come into play. I think that we have to think very seriously about who we are physically connected to on a local level where we can physically share resources.
I don’t think it’s about accepting any kind of inevitability. We don’t want things to fall apart, right? We don’t want to end up living in a war zone where we have no clean water because that is absolutely a mass death situation. And there’s no amount of organizing or preparation we can do that can prevent that from being a mass death situation. So the goal is to have that resilient plan, that plan for resiliency there and to have those connections and community there as kind of like our base of operation, while we organize and resist and fight.
And I mean, that’s why I’m so in favor of mass movement. I love seeing the students walking out and the teachers protesting and the nurses. The more people stand up at once, the more likelihood we have of preventing that ultimate disaster. Because it’s collapsing one way or the other. I mean, that’s the last thing I’ll say on that. We know that it is, the system is shutting down one way or the other. One way is that ecological disaster causes it to collapse in a chaotic way. Right? And the other way is that we shut it down in an organized fashion, which is what can happen if we mass mobilize.
KH: Like me, Bree has been especially concerned about the sense of inevitability that has been marketed to the public around Omicron.
BNB: I really think it’s important for everyone to understand the gap that exists between what the pandemic response should look like and what it does look like. And I do definitely feel like with the Omicron wave in particular, what we are getting right now is a mass PR strategy to get us to resign ourselves to what the pandemic response looks like. And not talk about what it should look like or what it needs to look like in order for us to actually end the pandemic. There’s going to be another variant. What’s weird to me about the Omicron situation is that now a lot of people are talking about it as though this will just be over in a couple of weeks. They’re even sometimes just focusing on the situation in New York as though we’re not going to have peaks and waves in other regions after this. They’re talking as though there’s not long-term health effects that we know of from Omicron. They’re speaking as though Delta is not still out there. Right?
They’re speaking as though there’s not evidence that you can get reinfected with Omicron. So this idea that we just have to accept this as an inevitability and there’s nothing more that we can do – I don’t agree with that, right? There’s definitely things that we could still do, but let’s say we’re just going to go with this basically lack of policy that we have right now, where we just allow Omicron to just spread unfettered through the population. So what is the plan in the aftermath of that? And that’s what we’re not getting either. And that’s how you know that it is more of a PR strategy than any real health or governmental response.
Because if we were in a situation where there is really nothing we can do, right? We have tried everything and we are just dealing with the virus where there is nothing we can do [and] it is going to infect everyone, then I would expect to get a plan for people dealing with long-term disabilities or chronic illness. There would be a plan for expanding health care. Are you going to pay to boost up the health care system? There’s no indication that there is any plan to deal with the aftermath of letting Omicron go through the population. And I think that the scariest thing about this time to me is how there’s so much uniformity among the political spectrum in embracing that idea. That’s what’s really scary to me and I’m sure it’s scary for a lot of people.
That you have liberals and conservatives and the commentators on corporate media and everybody’s just parroting this line that we’re all going to get it. And the best you can do is just vaccinate and we can’t take any other measures. That’s what’s scary in trying to cut through the noise in this time. And I think it’s unfortunately another situation where we’re going to encounter disaster before many people realize it. I think people see what’s happening with the store shelves running out of supplies. I just talked to somebody today who was talking about the bus schedule here. So you’ve got a situation where the school buses are having difficulty operating because the bus drivers are ill. And it’s the same thing with the city bus situation. So we’re going to run into a situation where the systems themselves are breaking down. And I just wish that we would take steps to prevent things instead of having to wait until we are in the thick of the disaster for people to really realize what we should have been doing. But unfortunately, I think that’s where we’re headed.
KH: Many of us are also alarmed right now about what’s happening around voting rights. In addition to state level voter suppression laws, Republicans are targeting offices that oversee electoral outcomes. According to a recent report from the Brennan Center, “fundraising in secretary of state races is two and a half times higher than it was by the same point in either of the last two election cycles.” Campaigns in all six battleground states with elections for secretary of state in 2022 are making election denial a key campaign issue. That’s Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, and Wisconsin.
Biden’s recent efforts to circumvent the filibuster rule in order to pass the Freedom to Vote Act were thwarted by Manchin and Sinema, who have become routine villains in the story of D.C.’s slow spiral into right-wing authoritarianism. Bree had some thoughts about Biden’s approach and timing on this issue.
BNB: I think this is going to be the time that people realize what should have happened in 2021… And I think you and I are alike in that we belong to that course of people that gets on folks’ nerves, because they don’t want to hear it. All through 2021 when we’re talking about what should be happening, trying to get people to understand how politics works. And that there’s a timeline that when you are trying to move something politically, there’s a strategy that has to go behind it. There’s a timeline that has to go behind it. There are factors and emotions and just where the public opinion and attention is. You have to seize upon those things. January 6th, that brought everything to a standstill. If you were someone who from 2015 through January 2021 was still of this belief that we were being hyperbolic in what we were saying about Trump, “Trump is going to refuse to leave the White House. What is the plan? What is the plan?” We were saying that for years.
January 6th was a time that captured all of those people. It even captured some Republicans. You had this moment where everybody was like, ‘Oh my goodness, this is where we are.’ That was the moment to seize all of that energy and that momentum and say we have to pass voting legislation right now. We have to pass protections right now for this for everything that we have seen, everything that we can tell is coming down the pipeline, we have to pass that right now. Now we have to carve out a rule in the filibuster for this. What we got in the immediate aftermath was Joe Biden talking about unity and let’s move forward. And I remember because that was another thing that a lot of us were like lighting our hair on fire and screaming about. What do you mean “unity” and “moving forward”? These people don’t even acknowledge that you were just elected president.
So when he goes to Georgia and he gives this speech [last week], this is something that should have happened a year ago. And so now you’re trying to cram into a few days a campaign that should have been taking place a year ago. That you would’ve had much more political power to try to push forward a year ago and maybe could have swayed some people. You had some people who voted for conviction for Trump. It might have been possible. Maybe it wasn’t ever going to happen, but it certainly was more possible a year ago than it is now. So I don’t know where it goes from this point forward, but I’m hoping, I keep hoping that with each one of these moments, that there are more people among especially the democratic loyalists, like the people who are constantly apologizing for the party no matter what.
I’m hoping that there is a moment where they realize how the Democrats fail them. Right? And how that failure to push for voting rights for instance, is a reflection of where the priorities are being placed. And then they can ask themselves why are priorities being arranged in this way? Right? I feel like a lot of times when I am tweeting or speaking, those are some of the people that I’m trying to reach and persuade and help them to sharpen their analysis and just recognize why we keep ending up at these dead ends.
I don’t think most people are well informed on the history of voting rights. I don’t think most people are well informed on the concept of democracy even. And that is all intentional. We have, in my view, experienced a generation of deliberate miseducation and historical revisionism around the civil rights movement specifically, around the history of voting rights, around what voting is – has kind of been distorted in a lot of ways. This idea that voting is the full extent of our power is actually disempowering in my view, because what it tells people is that their only time, their only avenue for participating in politics is when they vote. And then otherwise they’re supposed to wait until the next election cycle when they get to voice an opinion again. And you see how that shows up in the conversation, the national conversation, whenever people are protesting or criticizing the response is you need to vote. Or why didn’t you vote before? Or just make sure you show up and vote next time.
And the thing is that, I mean, one, as far as the rewriting of the civil rights movement, voting was never the only cause of the civil rights movement. So there has been this thing where they have tried to reduce the entire civil rights struggle and Black freedom struggle to the right to vote. Right. Which shows up in a lot of other ways, I’m sure we’ll get to later. But then also it has created this sense that once we had the right to vote, so since we have the right to vote, that’s all we need. All we have to do is show up and vote and elect people who promise or at least claim that they are going to work in our best interest. And then we just have to cross our fingers and hope that they do. And that’s a problem too, because you’re seeing now, at least I hope people are seeing, how you have to push the people that you elect to actually follow through on things. I mean, I don’t think Biden would be up at Capitol Hill right now if people hadn’t made such a stink about it.
I think there’s a lot of things that would be allowed to just completely fall by the wayside if people didn’t push on it. So I feel like the population to a large extent has been demobilized, and I don’t think that is unintentional. I think that [happens] through the miseducation around social justice movements, the reduction in civics education, just basic things that teach people about how the government works. I don’t know if that is [also happening] nationally, but I know for instance, here in North Carolina, Republicans launched a specific attack on civics education because they don’t want an educated and engaged and informed population, because those are the kinds of people that hold people accountable. Right?
And so I think a lot of what we have to do when we’re trying to organize and mobilize people is also just helping folks to understand this concept of what politics should be. Or certainly if we have a system of self-governance, right – what does that look like? What does it look like to actually have representation versus having people who collect your money when they’re running for office, right. Take donations from you and claim that they’re representing you, but they’re not actually representing you because they’re representing big money interests or other things that are actually oppositional to what you need.
KH: Having squandered a window of possibility on the fantasy of bipartisanship, the Democrats are floundering. Right now, we are being told that passage of a voting rights bill is not possible because of the intransigence of two senators. But as Bree has emphasized, it’s really important that we don’t zoom in on that particular aspect of the crisis and sort of lose the larger picture, because that invests way too much faith in the structures and systems at work. The truth is, the institutions that people like to think of as stable are wholly breakable, and people also have the wrong idea about capitalism’s relationship with democracy, particularly at this stage of collapse.
Thinking back to January 6, for example, we saw some corporations come out in defense of democracy. We saw things like Twitter suspending Trump’s account, and to some people, that signaled that even Twitter had some kind of commitment to democracy. But corporations were not against the coup because they support democracy – they were against the coup because they did not want to experience the destabilization of a violent coup, led by an incompetant game show host who was also wrecking the economy. The orderly erosion of democracy, in a manner that maintains the status quo and allows for a greater consolidation of wealth – that’s their jam.
The neoliberal project has been a process of insulating and protecting capitalism from the people, by weakening public education, breaking unions, and by outsourcing the harshest working and environmental conditions that U.S. corporations produce to other countries, while ramping up the corporate control of elections.
Philosopher and political theorist Achille Mbembe discusses the aforementioned outsourcing of suffering and death in his book Necropolitics. So-called liberal democracies maintain their identity around a sense of belonging or membership that ultimately determines who is deserving of life. The commonality that exempts people, for now, from being abandoned on the other side of a wall or border might be citizenship or a lack of contact with the criminal system. People may revel in the distinctions that exempt them from abandonment, or feel bad about them, but most people accept these demarcations. Meanwhile, the state deploys weapons or policies “in the interest of maximally destroying persons and creating death-worlds.” (Mbembe characterizes “death-worlds” as “unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead.”)
Corporations also have the power to create and maintain death worlds, and that power has been encased and upheld by global trade agreements, which privilege the rights of corporations over the rights of sovereign nations and over democracy itself. The violence this system inflicts in heavily exploited countries, and in sacrifice zones here in the United States, has been invisibilized and draped in exceptionalism.
So we’ve seen the hyper-consolidation of wealth during the pandemic and we have also seen hyperradicalization on the right. Conservatives are swiftly moving forward with Jim Crow 2.0 and replacing any semblance of history in the public school system with colonial worship. The cultish right-wing politics of the pandemic era tell white people that they belong, and celebrate the exclusion and disposal of marginalized people. The practitioners of these cultish politics do not expect democracy. They’ve already declared it dead with the myth of a stolen election.
So as we face the potential collapse of what passes for democracy in the U.S., we have to understand that collapse is not necessarily unwelcome by many of the monied forces that want to preside over the larger era of collapse that we’re experiencing. As climate collapse advances, and it becomes clearer to more and more people just how much our interests diverge from those of the ruling class, they are going to want us thoroughly under control. So we have to consider the politics that are being applied here and now, and decide now whether we will continue to experience collapse on these terms.
When Bree and I talked about the climate crisis, long COVID and what all of this portends, she did not mince words about what needs to happen.
BNB: Capitalism has to collapse. It has to collapse. I think I would define capitalism as the catastrophe. Capitalism is the unfolding catastrophe. It’s this thing that has grabbed us all in its arms and it is just plummeting down. And it’s a question of are we able to get off before it takes us all down with it? So I think capitalism is the catastrophe. And I’ve seen you write on that before, that concept of collapse and how it’s hard for people to grasp. And I think that’s so true. And I don’t think I even recognized that before the pandemic, because one of the things that has been so difficult for me personally to wrap my mind around, is the insistence on carrying on as normal.
That’s what drives me up a wall because I personally have difficulty carrying on as normal. I’m the opposite kind of personality. I’m operating with a concept of what the alternative is, so that’s what I’m reaching for. But I can imagine that if you especially can’t imagine an alternative to the status quo, then it just feels like that’s the only thing you can cling to. What do I cling to except getting up and doing everything the way that I’ve always done it.
KH: So what is to be done? Bree and I both had some thoughts about that.
BNB: I think the question is what is your move, right? What is your move based on where you are? Who are the people that you are connecting with? And then it’s a matter of how are we putting all of these things into conversation with each other? I’m not on the front lines of the voting rights fight right now. I got arrested at a voting rights sit-in back in 2013 but [for] the past, gosh, almost six years or more now, I’ve really been focusing on a hyperlocal level on this housing issue and just trying to keep people from getting displaced. Because from my perspective, there’s no way I see that we are able to organize a community that is being constantly displaced from their homes. So maybe through that lens of land loss and gentrification and displacement and tenants rights, we can build a foundation to do other things.
Now when I’m making that estimation in terms of where I’m focusing on myself, I’m not saying that none of the other things matter, and I’m completely in support of the people who are on the front line of the voting rights movement. I’m completely in support of the people who are challenging the whole electoral concept and who are holding space for those kinds of conversations or who are doing other kinds of radical organizing. And I don’t think that there is any way that you get to the level of organization that is necessary to overturn a capitalist system or replace the oppressive powers that we are going up against unless you have people in all those different sectors. Where are all the sides that we are facing attack from?
I know some people don’t like war analogies, but I think we are at war. I don’t even think it has to do with what your stance is on war itself. But the fact is that war has been declared on us. So what are all the fronts? They’re at the school boards. I was just on a call yesterday with folks who are working with me on housing, but they’re also trying to organize a response at the school boards because that’s one of the fronts. [Right-wing forces] are attacking media. They are purging books from the bookshelves. They have an electoral strategy. They are trying to elect people who are going to be in place to basically overturn the election. I would say any place that you can identify as a front line, which is pretty much everywhere, is a place to make a move.
It’s just a matter of who are going to be the soldiers on that front line. And there’s so much space for everybody that I think it’s just a matter of helping people see the many different places they can show up. And this is the last thing I’ll say on it. As an organizer, like I said, I identify the things that I do, but I’m not trying to organize people around myself. I’m not even necessarily trying to organize everybody to do exactly what I am doing. I’m trying to organize people to identify what they can do, because if you think about how organized society is in all its various sectors, that’s how organized the counter response has to be. We have to have a plan for the classroom. We have to have a plan for the university. We have to have a plan for the healthcare system. All of those different areas require people who can focus on those areas.
Mass popular political education is so, so essential. That is in some ways what I try to do using a platform like Twitter. I’m working right now on putting together a booklet that is giving people a real analysis around the housing issues (how housing intersects with all of these other issues) and just giving a systemic analysis so that we can help people move from an understanding that the rent is too high to why we need to decommodify housing.
Because you can’t possibly move people who don’t have a collective understanding. We can’t mobilize masses of people in a direction without having a clear sense of what we are mobilizing around. I mean, again, I think we have two possible outcomes. One is that people just react to what they are experiencing, because they’re going to react. People are already reacting, they’re burning out, they’re leaving jobs, they’re falling into despair, they’re getting depressed. People are going to react. But if we have a really massive movement around educating people, educating people outside of elite institutions, educating people where they can be reached where they are at, then people can react in a way that is much more organized and much more directed. And I do think that’s some of what we are seeing. I do think that has been part of the power of social media in particular in recent years. But I think we can always do more.
KH: Bree and I both agree that people need to broaden their political vision in this moment, and their sense of what it means to be politically engaged.
BNB: I think that there are so many people who just have a very narrow image of what activism is or what it means to protest or what it means to resist or what it means to be political. This idea that we are supposed to avoid politics or certain places are not supposed to be political. There’s really no such thing as an apolitical space. The classroom is not apolitical. The hospital is not apolitical. The newspaper is not apolitical. And so I think it’s a matter of once you recognize that there’s a problem, then the only question is what do I do? What do I do now with my awareness?
And so I think it’s important to just demystify that. I think people have this image of activism as something that grabs headlines, or it’s written about in the history books. Most events in social justice movements don’t make the history books, but they’re there, they are the history, right? Because social justice movements are about masses of people. And so that’s why I just, I think it’s so important that we seize upon moments like this, where we have so many people who are getting politicized. You have students, young people, who are organizing themselves. I mean, we have to support them. We have to support all of these people, and everybody who takes that action and shows up is not going to show up with a full analysis necessarily. Maybe they haven’t been studying these issues as much as we have.
But we need to embrace all of those people, that should not be a barrier for entering a movement that is about keeping everyone safe. I think the slogan “no one is safe until everyone is safe” is the perfect statement for these times. That’s just what I try to drive home to people as much as possible.
I would really ask everyone, please ask yourself first, what is something that you really care about? What is something that is really resonating for you as an issue, as a concern in this moment. And then please look locally at who is addressing this issue? Where can you support? And ask yourself, “how can I support?”– whether it’s time, whether it is a donation, whether it is spreading awareness, whatever it is. There’s a small group of dedicated people who show up and do this work every day. And we know everybody doesn’t have the capacity to do it every day. But all we need is more people to support and find a way to support and that’s how we do the heavy lifting.
KH: A lot of people I know are stuck in a pretty traumatic place right now. I am no expert, but I know it’s pretty hard to heal from trauma while the experience is still occurring, and for teachers and students who are being sent to school in districts without testing or soap in the bathrooms, for medical workers who are being ground under, for people who have lost loved ones, or who can’t get the medical care they need because the system is buckling – for so many people, I think there’s a lot of justified hurt and anger that is boxing out some of the other things we need to feel right now.
In times like these, the animosity and angst we feel, which are often grounded in real harms and injustice, can begin to crowd out compassion. There is a terrible sense of belonging at work in the United States right now. It is the belonging of identity-based myths and fascistic politics. It is the kind of belonging that reinforces borders and demarcations of disposability. The belonging that we must cultivate, in opposition to our own organized disposal, cannot be cynical or confined to one issue or ideology. This sense of belonging will manifest itself in all of the ways we do the work of justice and care for one another. It will be both organized and spontaneous. If, for example, you see someone you care about starting to slip into cynicism, despair or contempt, you might reach out, not with critique, but with encouragement – perhaps in the form of a shared, cherished memory that you think embodies their values, or perhaps with a call to action. Small reminders of who we are, in relation to other people, can go a long way in hard times.
As Bree said, we all need to decide what our next move is, and the answer will not be the same for all of us. Much of our attention is fixed on some of the crises and limitations of the moment. This is a good time to engage with the struggle for voting rights, if you feel moved to do so, or to find ways to amplify or support that work. But we cannot remain wholly fixed on legislative feuds between Biden and Manchin and Sinema as though they were celestial events determining the fate of humankind. These outcomes will be hugely impactful, but they are not the full fabric of our existence. We cannot afford to freeze in terror. We must focus on what we can do.
As we careen from crisis to crisis, our attention may be pulled or fixed, but our bodies still inhabit spaces where loss, disposability and injustice are occuring in real time. Our jobs, identities, relationships, and physical locations all ground us in these webworks of injustice. We need mutual aid infrastructure, community organizing, unionized workplaces and popular education spaces as urgently as we ever have. The uncertainties of this moment only amplify those needs. We must ground ourselves in what we can do, and ask ourselves who we can act in concert with to do the most good. You cannot act against every injustice at once, nor can you heal every wound, but you can pick a path and do your best. Above all, we must stay grounded in our humanity, because these times have the potential to snatch it away, bit by bit.
As activists and organizers, we are builders in an era of collapse. Our work is set against all probability – and it is in that space of cherished improbability where our art will be made, our joy will be found, and where our ingenuity will fashion ways of living and caring for each other, even as the ground shifts beneath our feet. Life will be a scramble, but we will not scramble alone.
I want to thank Bree Newsome Bass for contributing so generously to this episode and for all that she does as an organizer and an educator. I was grateful for the conversation, and I hope people will answer Bree’s call to figure out what they can contribute in this moment, and get moving.
I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.
Ahead of a crucial vote to amend the filibuster to support voting rights, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has said that he would be open to supporting candidates levying a primary challenge to conservative Democrats Senators Joe Manchin (West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona).
Sanders told reporters on Tuesday that he would consider backing primary challenges to the two filibuster holdouts when they’re up for reelection. The senators, who are basking in the praise and political contributions from conservative groups, stand in the way of nearly every Democratic priority currently before Congress.
The Senate’s protracted battle on the filibuster is coming to a head this week. Schumer announced on Tuesday that he will bring a filibuster reform vote to the chamber after Republicans inevitably vote to shoot down the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act, which could take place as soon as Wednesday or Thursday.
Though the two lawmakers aren’t up for reelection until 2024, both senators’ approval ratings have been falling fast as they stand in the way of Democratic progress – and an October poll found that Sinema would lose to progressive challengers if the election were held immediately.
Sanders, who has previously expressed frustration with the two senators, condemned their opposition to filibuster reform in a Twitter video on Tuesday.
“Right now, every Republican will be voting against us, and that’s pretty pathetic,” he said. “But what’s equally pathetic, as of now, two Democrats will be voting against us as well. I would hope very much that those two Democrats, Senator Sinema and Senator Manchin, will rethink their position and understand that the foundations of American democracy are at stake.”
Schumer is proposing an implementation of a talking filibuster for the voting rights bill. This means that the bill will be able to pass with a simple majority vote after any opponents delay the vote by speaking on the Senate floor, if they so choose. Currently, bills must overcome a 60-vote threshold in order to pass.
The Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act, which is a combination of two voting rights bills that have both been passed by the House, would greatly increase financial transparency in campaign donations and restore provisions of the Voting Rights Act meant to protect marginalized voters.
Voting rights advocates and progressives have welcomed Schumer’s plan, saying that it’s necessary to put senators’ views on the filibuster issue – which serves as somewhat of a proxy vote for voting rights – on the record. Sinema and Manchin have both already said that they will vote against the reform.
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer confirmed Tuesday evening that if Republicans continue to obstruct a long-delayed voting rights package, he will move to bring back the talking filibuster for just that legislation.
Schumer (D-N.Y.), flanked by other top Senate Democrats, announced the plan during a press conference after a caucus meeting that followed a floor debate on the House-approved bill, the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act.
The strategy was welcomed by progressives, including Christina Harvey, executive director of the advocacy group Stand Up America.
“Senate Democrats are on the Senate floor right now embracing a rare opportunity to substantively debate voting rights,” Harvey said. “But they have an even rarer opportunity to pass the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act at the end of this debate, if they are willing to stand together and do it.”
“Now that they have found a way to open debate, under the current rules, Democrats can and must force a public debate that ends with a majority vote after every senator has exhausted their time,” she said. “It may take weeks, but if Senate Democrats can find the political courage this moment requires, they have the tools right now to pass voting rights legislation and save our democracy.”
Throughout the current congressional session, voting rights legislation has been blocked by Senate Republicans as well as two Democrats — Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — who have so far opposed abolishing or reforming the filibuster.
Make Republicans start a talking filibuster. Then we can ask Senator Sinema and Senator Manchin: what was the point of the filibuster? To debate? Is this enough debate? There is no limit to what we need to do right now to save our democracy. pic.twitter.com/IQhEo7Dntw
“The Senate spent an entire year drafting, considering, and debating voting rights legislation,” Schumer said during the press conference. “Senate Republicans have spent the same amount of time refusing to negotiate with our members, including Sen. Manchin, or even debate this legislation.”
The Democratic leader highlighted that over the past year — in the wake of former President Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” about the 2020 election — GOP state legislators have enacted voter suppression laws in key states across the country, sparking demands for Congress to fight back.
“If the Senate cannot protect the right to vote, which is the cornerstone of our democracy, then the Senate rules must be reformed,” Schumer declared. “If the Republicans block cloture on the legislation before us, I will put forward a proposal to change the rules to allow for a talking filibuster on this legislation.”
“We feel, very simply, on something as important as voting rights, if Senate Republicans are gonna oppose it, they should not be allowed to sit in their office,” he added. “They gotta come down on the floor and defend their opposition to voting rights, the wellspring of our democracy.”
The GOP shouldn’t be allowed to sit in their offices and block voting rights
They should have to come to the floor and defend anti-voting rights positions
The Senate has an opportunity this week to do that—a vote to change Senate rules to promote public debate on voting rights pic.twitter.com/QvCQBcPI0w
While Democratic Sens. Tim Kaine (Va.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Jeff Merkley (Ore.), and Raphael Warnock (Ga.) all spoke after Schumer, whether the rule change happens will ultimately depend on Manchin and Sinema.
After Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the majority whip, suggested the talking filibuster approach to journalists earlier Tuesday, Manchin signaled that he would not support the change.
Politico’s Burgess Everett tweeted that “Manchin says he doesn’t support a talking filibuster that goes around [the] 60-vote threshold and won’t support the nuclear option to change rules,” adding that the senator “says he’s fine with a primary challenge over this.”
According to the reporter, Manchin specifically said: “I’ve been primaried my entire life. That would not be anything new for me… It’s rough and tumble. We’re used to that. Bring it on.”
MANCHIN told @christianjhall and other reporters he’s against this new talking filibuster plan. NOT willing to go nuclear, as he has said consistently over the last few months https://t.co/eIIwZjya5D
Though Schumer refused to indicate whether he would support 2024 primary challenges to Democrats who don’t get onboard with filibuster reform, only saying that “I’m not getting into the politics,” earlier in the day Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told journalists that he would back such efforts.
“What’s at stake is the future of American democracy,” said Sanders. “And the fact that all over this country, Republican governors and legislators are moving aggressively to suppress the vote and to impose extreme gerrymandering, among many other things.”
“Anybody who believes in American democracy has got to vote to enable us to go forward with 50 votes to suspend the filibuster, at least on this vote,” he added.
Sen. Joe Manchin asked questions at the Dems’ caucus meeting, and several Democrats sought to “clarify” his view about the historic use of the filibuster, per source
Sen. Sinema was not physically present but participated on the phone and didn’t speak
As Common Dreamsreported earlier Tuesday, the progressive advocacy group Indivisible found that 94% of its members in Arizona said they would support primarying Sinema when she is up for reelection in two years if she sinks voting rights legislation.
Indivisible and Stand Up America are among the organizations urging Senate Democrats to hold the Senate floor for “as long as it takes” to pass their voting rights package.
As Megan Hatcher-Mays, Indivisible’s director of democracy policy, put it: “We want a full airing of the ways Republicans are undermining our right to vote across the country — on a partisan basis, for the record — and how the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act would save our democracy from these attacks.”
Over the last two months, it’s become increasingly clear that President Joe Biden’s best days in office might be almost certainly behind him. Though he was never going to be an FDR-type figure, overly credulous press coverage and endorsements notwithstanding, Biden could claim significant victories in his first year in office. The American Rescue Plan Act, passed in March 2021, and the bipartisan infrastructure bill, passed that November, were massive pieces of legislation that far exceeded Obama’s response to the global financial meltdown during his first year in office.
Now, entering his second year, Biden’s agenda appears to be dead in the water. The much-touted Build Back Better Act, Biden’s signature legislation, has completely stalled out on Capitol Hill. It was initially linked with the infrastructure bill, but Democratic leadership and conservatives in the party were successful in beating down the Congressional Progressive Caucus until they ultimately relented and separated the bills. Ever since the bills were decoupled, Biden’s social spending bill has been dying a slow death at the hands of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
In the final days of 2021, Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, sensing impending doom, switched gears. The top priority became voting rights and election reform, although what that meant specifically was anyone’s guess. The White House and congressional leadership began pushing two bills, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Separately, some Senate Democrats began working with Republicans on a bill to amend the Electoral Count Act, which would change the law that Donald Trump attempted to exploit to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The January 6 committee is working on their version of a similar bill.
Schumer, for his part, has been reluctant to move forward with the much narrower Electoral College reform bills, believing that it would undercut any broader voting rights expansion. Last week, Biden gave what was touted as a major speech on voting rights, during which he finally supported a “carve out” for the Senate’s filibuster for voting rights legislation. The following day, he went to Capitol Hill to marshal support for his various efforts.
Both the speech and the trip to negotiate with lawmakers risked being too little, too late. Local Georgia voting rights groups boycotted Biden’s address because they believed voting rights had become a second-tier issue for Biden, rather than a core priority. New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote that Biden’s efforts “came in the last days of the battle.” As for his attempt to twist arms in the Senate, Politicocharacterized it as “doomed for failure.” Even more embarrassingly, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema apparently blindsided the administration with a Senate address reiterating her opposition to a filibuster carve-out just minutes before Biden was set to meet with Democrats to rally support for his voting bills.
Much like Biden’s and Schumer’s approach to the Omicron wave, the White House and congressional leadership appear to be several steps behind on every issue they touch. The administration is reactive, and has been on its back foot for months. Biden’s poll numbers have cratered, which is to be expected to a certain extent, but he and his advisers aren’t doing themselves any favors with their scattershot approach.
Most of the blame for this sorry situation rests squarely at the feet of Senators Manchin and Sinema. Some have said working with Manchin is “like negotiating via Etch A Sketch” due to his constantly shifting negotiating positions. He holds so much power in the closely divided Senate that liberal TV host Chris Hayes has argued the White House should wave the white flag and just ask Manchin to write a Build Back Better bill that he’d sign. “I don’t quite understand why we haven’t gotten to the point where they say, Senator Manchin, write the bill that you will vote for and we will pass it, because that’s the only way out of this,” Hayes toldThe New York Times’s Ezra Klein. Others have argued for a similar approach to election reform, claiming that fixing the law Trump tried to use to stay in power, the Electoral Count Act, is the best and only option on the table.
Unfortunately, even these inadequate measures may prove to be too large a lift. Manchin, for his part, has already walked away from one version of the spending bill that he had previously endorsed. There’s no reason to believe he wouldn’t do the same again. And any bipartisan election reform legislation that hampers Republican legal claims toward minority rule could stall out in a million different ways. Still, it’s understandable for those on the left to look over these meager offerings and take what few victories may be available. The time for playing hardball may have passed Biden by, and his pressure campaign is likely as much a form of virtue signaling to disaffected liberal voters as it is a real push to get passable legislation.
The broader blame for the predicament the Democrats find themselves in falls on the shoulders of the faction of the party that Biden and Schumer belong to — the same faction as Manchin and Sinema. Decades of divestment from pro-labor policies in favor of neoliberal Clintonian triangulation has resulted in a party at odds with itself. The party is uninterested in, and incapable of, pursuing long-term strategies that require building a bench of progressive candidates and elected officials. Instead, the party’s organs function as an incumbent reelection racket and a jobs guarantee program for wealthy consultants whose only function is to punch to the left.
There’s no reason that the Democrats couldn’t field, support and elect a working-class candidate in West Virginia or Arizona, if that had been a multiyear priority. Rather than spending time and money training and cultivating teachers, working-class activists and union organizers, the Democratic Party has treated those types of candidates as hostile enemies to be vanquished. Instead, they prioritize prosecutors and veterans of a particular, centrist ideological bent. As a result, there will always be a Joe Manchin or a Kyrsten Sinema — or a Joe Lieberman — willing to tank the party’s entire agenda.
The irony is that after spending his career as a conservative Democrat, Biden’s agenda is being thwarted by his own supposed allies. He ran as a creature of the Senate, who could force Republicans to support some of his most ambitious plans due to his decades in elected office. Now, he can’t even whip support from his own party. If the Democrats hadn’t spent decades doing everything possible to disempower the left and the party’s activist base, Biden might actually be able to advance his legislation. Unfortunately for the millions of people in the United States who stand to benefit from Biden’s stalled plans, that has never been a priority for the modern Democratic Party.
“The denial of this sacred right [to vote] is a tragic betrayal of the highest mandates of our democratic tradition,” Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1957. Now, on January 18, 2021 — one day after we celebrated King’s birthday and one year after a mob of right-wing Trump supporters attacked the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair election — the Senate is debating voting rights legislation aimed at stopping voter suppression. But the legislation appears doomed to failure.
The right to vote is “preservative of all rights,” the Supreme Court said in 1886 in the case of Yick Wo v. Hopkins. The Constitution mentions the right to vote in five separate places — the 14th, 15th, 19th, 24th and 26th Amendments, each of which empowers Congress to enact “appropriate legislation” to enforce the protected right. Yet right-wingers — enabled by congressional Republicans and reactionary members of the Supreme Court — are mounting a full-court press to prevent marginalized groups from voting.
During Reconstruction after the Civil War, the 15th Amendment was added to the Constitution. It prohibits the federal government and the states from denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.
As a result of the civil rights movement, Congress passed the landmark Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965 to enforce the 15th Amendment. It links racial discrimination with the right to vote.
The VRA forbids voting changes if their purpose or effect is to diminish the ability of citizens to vote on account of race, color or language minority status. “The right to vote was the crown jewel of the civil rights struggle,” said Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Supreme Court Uses States’ Rights Rationale to Usurp Congress’s Power
Although Congress re-authorized the VRA four times with strong bipartisan majorities and each reauthorization was signed by a Republican president, the Roberts Court has now usurped the power of Congress and eviscerated the VRA.
In the 2013 case of Shelby County v. Holder, a 5-4 right-wing majority of the court struck down the provision of the VRA which required that jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination obtain preclearance from the Justice Department or a panel of three federal judges in the District of Columbia before making voting changes. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote on behalf of himself, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy.
The majority took a states’ rights approach (citing “equal sovereignty”) which will allow states to enact racist voting laws. They looked only to the end of discriminatory voting tests and the lack of disparity between whites and non-whites in voter registration and turnout since the enactment of the VRA. The court then concluded that the formula set forth in Section 4 for requiring Section 5 preclearance need no longer be used.
At that time, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer, filed a scathing dissent. “Hubris is a fit word for today’s demolition of the VRA,” Ginsburg wrote.
“Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet,” Ginsburg noted. Moreover, the dissent explained, “the VRA is grounded in Congress’ recognition of the ‘variety and persistence’ of measures designed to impair minority voting rights.”
The dissent said discrimination is “more subtle” today, citing “second generation barriers” to voting that reduce the impact of minority votes. Ginsburg mentioned racial gerrymandering and at-large voting instead of district-by-district voting in cities with sizable Black populations. She also listed vote dilution (drawing redistricting maps in a way that minimizes the voting strength of the non-white population), curtailment of early voting, moving polling places away from predominantly Black neighborhoods and purging voter rolls of many Black voters.
After Shelby, state after state enacted — and continue to enact — voter suppression laws. They prevent easy access to polling places, provide for early closure of polls in Black and Brown communities, make it harder to receive mail ballots, reduce early voting, restrict voter registration and prevent the accurate counting of votes. States including Georgia and Texas have drawn extreme gerrymandered maps which entrench the power of Republican politicians.
Using baseless and alarmist claims about “voter fraud” (which is virtually non-existent) as a justification, states are passing voter identification laws that make it harder for marginalized communities to vote. GOP-led states insert Republicans into the election process and empower state legislatures to overturn presidential election results even after certification by election officials.
In 2020, the Supreme Court made it more difficult to mount legal challenges to voter suppression measures. The court held 6-3, again along ideological lines, in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, that two Arizona voter suppression laws (ballot harvesting and out-of-precinct voting) did not violate Section 2 of the VRA, which forbids any voting procedure that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race.”
Shelby Invited Congress to Draft Another Preclearance Formula for “Current Conditions”
“Congress may draft another formula [for preclearance] based on current conditions,” the Shelby majority stated. Two bills are pending in Congress to address the “current conditions” of voter suppression.
The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would establish new criteria for determining which states and political subdivisions must obtain preclearance before changes to voting practices may take effect. States need preapproval based on the number of voting rights violations they have had in the past 25 years. After 10 years without violations, they no longer require preclearance.
The Freedom to Vote Act cracks down on voter suppression. It would facilitate early voting, allow same-day voting and online voter registration, protect voters from purges, ban partisan gerrymandering, mandate disclosure of major campaign donors, prevent state restrictions on mail-in voting, require the counting of votes that are postmarked on or before Election Day and arrive at polling places within a week, set uniform standards for voter ID, provide that no one has to wait longer than 30 minutes to vote and require voter-verified paper records.
The House has passed a voting rights bill that contains provisions of both the John Lewis Act and the Freedom to Vote Act. On January 18, the Democrats in the Senate started debate on the bill with a simple majority.
Although there are enough votes to pass the bill with a simple majority, Democrats also need 50 votes to change Senate rules to allow cutting off debate and moving to a vote. The filibuster effectively requires 60 votes (including 10 Republicans) to advance legislation. Democrats do not have a majority to change the filibuster rules because Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) oppose overriding the filibuster for voting rights legislation.
Democrats are considering procedural maneuvers to allow the bill to pass with 51 votes without altering the filibuster rule. They would force Republicans to mount a talking filibuster to hold the Senate floor with procedural motions and speeches. It could go on for days or weeks, and Democrats hope that Republicans would tire of it and relent. But this strategy, which hasn’t been used in decades, poses major challenges. It is, in effect, a Hail Mary pass.
“I think the tragedy is that we have a Congress with a Senate that has a minority of misguided senators who will use the filibuster to keep the majority of people from even voting. They won’t let the majority senators vote,” King said in 1963.
As the Senate debates these voting rights bills, the American people will see for themselves how racist Republicans, aided and abetted by Manchin and Sinema, are stonewalling legislation that would protect the sacred right of everyone to vote.
The family of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on the day commemorating his life and legacy on the need to strengthen voting rights in the United States — with some deriding specific Democratic Party lawmakers for failing to recognize the seriousness of the matter in their prolonged defense of the Senate filibuster.
Leading a peace walk in Washington, D.C., on Monday, King’s family, including his 13-year-old granddaughter, directed much of their criticism toward two centrist Democrats, Senators Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) and Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), who have said they won’t support changes to the filibuster rule in order to pass voting rights legislation.
“Senator Sinema, Senator Manchin, our future hinges on your decision,” Yolanda Renee King said, “and history will remember what choice you make.”
“Our rights are on the line. This fight is personal for me — it’s our future,” she added.
King’s son, Martin Luther King III, also addressed the two right-wing Democratic lawmakers, noting that the King family didn’t buy their arguments that protecting the filibuster would help to heal political divisions in Washington, and that the idea likely would not have been supported by the civil rights icon himself, were he alive today.
“They think the real problem isn’t that our rights are being stolen — they think the real problem is a disease of division that can be cured with some optimism and conversation,” King said. “My father worked to bring people together…. But he knew that when someone is denying you your fundamental rights, conversation and optimism won’t get you very far.”
“You were successful with infrastructure, which was a great thing,” King added, referencing the bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed last year. “But we need you to use that same energy to ensure that all Americans have the unencumbered right to vote.”
Democrats are forging ahead with a plan to force the issue of filibuster reform to be addressed later this week, as they continue to push legislation meant to strengthen voting rights and combat restrictive laws that Republican-led states across the nation are enacting. The plan, however, is all but doomed to fail due to continued opposition from Manchin and Sinema to changing the Senate rule.
Still, many Democrats say it’s necessary to showcase where Republican senators stand on the issue of voting rights — and to perhaps highlight where their own centrist members stand, too.
On Monday, Sinema also tweeted a message in recognition of the federal holiday.
“Today we remember the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Sinema wrote.
That social media post was largely met with derision from several quarters. Many political observers pointed out that King himself was no defender of the filibuster, particularly when it came to recognizing and protecting the right to vote.
“I think the tragedy is that we have a Congress with a Senate that has a minority of misguided senators who will use the filibuster to keep the majority of people from even voting,” King said himself in 1963. “They won’t let the majority of Senators vote.”
Senate Democratic leadership insists they will debate two critical voting rights bills even though Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have publicly denounced their party’s plan to make changes to Senate filibuster rules that would give Democrats the votes needed to pass the landmark legislation. Meanwhile, thousands marched in support of the legislation and the necessary filibuster rule changes in Washington, D.C., on Monday, the federal holiday marking Martin Luther King Jr. Day. We speak with movement leader William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, who criticizes the Democrats for bifurcating the Build Back Better economic legislation from voting rights and says movements must plan sustained, nonviolent direct action to ensure politicians pass legislation that benefits poor and low-wealth people.
On what would have been Martin Luther King Jr.’s 93rd birthday, voting rights advocates and progressive lawmakers rallied in Arizona on Saturday to target the first-term Democratic senator blocking legislation aimed at strengthening ballot access amid growing GOP-led suppression efforts.
In attendance at Saturday’s demonstrations in Phoenix were members of the King family, which is planning to lead a march to Washington, D.C. on MLK Day with a simple message to lawmakers: “No celebration without legislation.”
Referring to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s (D-Ariz.) Thursday speech defending the 60-vote legislative filibuster, Martin Luther King III argued Saturday that “what she said is, ‘I support voting rights, but not as much as I support the ability of someone to take those rights away.’”
“The filibuster is a meaningless Senate rule,” he added. “It’s a remnant of slavery used to block civil rights for generations.”
Yolanda Renee King, the 13-year-old granddaughter of Martin Luther King Jr., speaking in Phoenix today about voting rights:
“For all the elected leaders out there who will tweet, post and celebrate my grandfather…my message to you is simple. Don’t celebrate. Legislate.” pic.twitter.com/rKi0l6MCbB
Sinema’s opposition to changing Senate rules means that the House-passed Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act — new legislation that combines Democrats’ two major voting rights bills — is likely to fall victim to a Republican filibuster when the majority party attempts to move to a final vote on the measure Tuesday.
If the Senate GOP filibusters, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is expected to try to alter the chamber’s 60-vote threshold — an effort that is also doomed to fail unless Sinema and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) drop their support for the rule.
The Arizona Democrat’s refusal to consider even a voting rights exception for the filibuster has infuriated Arizona residents who’ve watched the state’s Republican-controlled legislature ram through voter suppression measures along party lines, making a mockery of Sinema’s purported desire for bipartisan cooperation.
“I want the Senate to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, and the only way that will happen is if we carve out the filibuster,” Tessa Williams, an Arizonan who attended Saturday’s demonstrations in Phoenix, told the local Arizona Republic. “It’s critical to protect the right to vote. It’s under threat right now, and I think it’s much more important that Senator Sinema gets behind this legislation than hold on to the filibuster.”
Williams said she feels “betrayed” by Sinema’s decision to prioritize the Senate filibuster over voting rights, a sentiment that other Arizonans have expressed in recent months as the Democrat has repeatedly obstructed her own party’s agenda.
Sinema’s speech Thursday—delivered just before President Joe Biden addressed the Senate Democratic caucus in a closed-door meeting — intensified calls for her ouster in 2024, the end of her first six-year term. A recent Data for Progress survey showed that 70% of likely Arizona Democratic primary voters disapprove of Sinema’s job performance.
“She is really disappointing a lot of Arizonans,” Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), who is believed to be gearing up for a primary challenge against Sinema, said in an interview Friday. “The fact that she’s using a very archaic rule that’s not even found in the Constitution to stop voting rights is very problematic for a lot of Arizonans.”
During a rally in Phoenix on Saturday, Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.) — who implored Arizonans to “vote her the hell out of office” if Sinema doesn’t budge on the filibuster — introduced Gallego as “the next senator from the great state of Arizona.”
In the wake of Sinema’s floor remarks Thursday, more than 70 women involved with Arizona’s Democratic Party signed an open letter urging the reproductive rights political action committee EMILY’s List — a leading contributor to Sinema — to “immediately make a public demand to Senator Sinema to support ending the filibuster now.”
The Daily Posterreported last week that anti-abortion groups have been pushing Sinema to uphold the legislative filibuster, which is standing in the way of House-passed legislation that would codify Roe v. Wade into federal law.
Sinema is a co-sponsor of the Women’s Health Protection Act, just as she’s a co-sponsor of the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
About an hour from where voting rights advocates marched in Phoenix on Saturday, former President Donald Trump held a rally in Florence, Arizona that underscored the threat he and the Republican Party pose to democracy.
As the New York Timesreported, “Mr. Trump’s favored candidate for governor, Kari Lake, is a first-time office seeker who has threatened to jail the state’s top elections official. His chosen candidate to replace that elections official, a Democrat, is a state legislator named Mark Finchem, who was with a group of demonstrators outside the Capitol on January 6 as rioters tried to stop the certification of the 2020 election.”
The Times added that when Trump “took the stage in the evening, he lavished praise on the slate of election-denier candidates in attendance.”
As conservative U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin on Thursday joined his right-wing Democratic colleague Kyrsten Sinema in announcing his opposition to abolishing the Senate filibuster, progressive observers excoriated the pair — who recently supported a filibuster carve-out to raise the debt ceiling — for obstructing their party’s landmark voting rights legislation.
Manchin (W.Va.) followed his Arizona colleague in voicing support for protecting the filibuster, which racial justice campaigners call a “Jim Crow relic” because it has been used so many times to block voting and civil rights legislation.
Mother Jones senior reporter Ari Berman noted that Republican-led states “have passed new voter suppression laws, gerrymandered maps, and election subversion bills through simple majority, party-line votes, yet Sinema and Manchin demand [a] bipartisan supermajority to protect voting rights.”
Berman said the pair “are like spineless Republican senators during end of Reconstruction who supported filibuster of voting rights bill that would’ve blocked poll taxes and literacy tests,” actions that “ushered in 75 years of Jim Crow.”
Sinema & Manchin represent 2.8% of US population but allowing 41 GOP senators representing just 21% of country to block voting rights bills supported by 70% of Americans that would protect voting access for tens of millions. US political system completely broken
In a lengthy statement in which he declared that he “will not vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster,” Manchin cited former Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va), an erstwhile Ku Klux Klan member and ardent segregationist who infamously filibustered the landmark 1964 Voting Rights Act for 14 hours. Byrd would renounce racism later in his congressional career.
“Senator Byrd’s insight helped explain why at no time in the history of the United States has the Senate been able to end debate on legislation with a simple majority,” Manchin falsely asserted, as the rules of the first U.S. Senate in 1789 allowed debate to end after a simple majority vote.
Some progressives also noted that just over a month ago, both Manchin and Sinema approved a carve-out to the filibuster in order to raise the federal debt limit.
We’re old enough to remember a whole month ago when both Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin voted to make an exception to the filibuster for the debt ceiling.
“Sinema and Manchin voted last month to abolish the filibuster for the debt ceiling — but won’t vote to abolish the filibuster for voting rights,” tweeted human rights attorney Qasim Rashid, who said that’s because “raising the debt ceiling keeps them employed — but expanding voting rights makes them irrelevant.”
Manchin’s statement came after President Joe Biden met with the Senate Democratic caucus and urged members to take the necessary steps — including abolishing or modifying the filibuster — to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
Republican senators have blocked the bills by invoking the 60-vote filibuster rule.
Multiple outlets reported that Biden would meet with Manchin and Sinema Thursday evening in a last-ditch attempt to salvage the two voting rights bills.
“We’re going to keep fighting until the votes are had.”
When asked earlier in the day whether the president has accepted that he “cannot sway” the pair when it comes to the filibuster, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said that “we’re going to keep fighting until the votes are had.”
Vox senior correspondent Jamil Smith tweeted that Sinema “thought it would be a good idea today to spit on John Lewis’ legacy,” and that she and Manchin know that their “own party is the only one trying to repair a Voting Rights Act that requires repair.”
During a Thursday speech on the Senate floor, conservative Democrat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona) announced that she would not support changing the filibuster rule, potentially dooming any chance of voting rights legislation being passed in the foreseeable future.
On Thursday, Sinema claimed that the filibuster debate was “harried,” adding that she believed that there “could have and should have been a thoughtful public debate at any time over the past year.” Her comments ignore several months of discussion (and weeks of negotiations) on the subject, both inside and outside of the Senate.
Sinema also claimed that she isn’t opposed to a “legislative response” to the voting restrictions that have been enacted in GOP-led states across the country. But she also can’t “support separate actions that worsen the underlying disease of division,” she said.
Her remarks came briefly after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) announced a plan to begin the process of addressing the filibuster. Schumer promised a vote to change the filibuster by next week, though he didn’t go into detail about specific changes he wants to pursue.
“Every senator will be faced with a choice of whether or not to pass the legislation to protect our democracy,” Schumer said in a statement announcing the plan.
Several political commentators on social media said that Sinema would be responsible if Democrats fail to pass voting rights legislation.
“Sinema is speaking on the Senate floor and, get this, criticizing GOP state legislatures for restricting voting rights,” MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan said. “But… what is she going to do about it at the federal level? Many of us wait with baited breath.”
“Sinema is effectively asking the authors of Jim Crow and vote-rigging to give their permission for her to stop it,” said Jennifer Rubin, a Washington Post opinion columnist. “This is worse than incoherent or cowardice. It’s a moral disgrace.”
Rubin continued by speculating whether Sinema would “ask the segregationists for permission to vote for [the 1964] Civil Rights Act,” were she voting on the bill decades ago.
That law was passed at a time when a “talking filibuster” rule was in place, rather than the current form of the filibuster, which doesn’t require lawmakers to speak nonstop. Reenacting the talking filibuster is one of the reform options currently being considered by Democrats.
Some observers also rejected Sinema’s insistence that she was protecting the filibuster out of respect for bipartisanship.
“Sinema is saying that the filibuster simply ensures that lawmakers bring legislation that is broadly supported by the American people,” said HuffPost Washington Bureau Chief Amanda Terkel. “That’s just not true. Plenty of legislation has wide public support. But it still doesn’t go anywhere.”
“Ultimately, Sinema’s speech isn’t an exercise of bipartisanship. It’s one that serves to protect power that Democrats and Republicans alike enjoy,” wrote Jalil Smith, a senior correspondent for Vox. “Proclamations of support for voting rights from any Senator unwilling to eliminate the filibuster are just scenery for the gullible.”
Ohio Supreme Court justices struck down Republican-drawn district maps in the state on Wednesday, ruling that they were unconstitutionally gerrymandered. The state’s redistricting panel will now have 10 days to redraft the maps.
The decision was made 4 to 3, with one Republican justice breaking from her party to rule with the three Democrats. In the majority opinion, Justice Melody Stewart wrote that the maps didn’t match statewide voting preferences, which were 54 percent for Republicans and 46 percent for Democrats in the past decade.
“[T]he commission did not attempt to draw a plan that meets the proportionality standard,” Stewart wrote, adding that the commission’s maps unfairly favored one party.
Although the justice didn’t specify which party, the maps were drawn by Republicans. Ohio voters passed a constitutional amendment in 2015 aimed at preventing partisan gerrymandering; the redistricting commission will have to redraw maps to obey that amendment.
The decision was celebrated by voting rights advocates who have argued in lawsuits that the new map is unfairly biased toward the GOP and that the map violates the Voting Rights Act by suppressing Black voters.
“The Ohio Supreme Court took an important step in rejecting the cynical partisanship that was behind the Republicans’ gerrymandered state legislative map,” Marc E. Elias, a voting rights attorney who represented plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits, told The Washington Post. “Our fight for fair maps and voting rights continues in Ohio and around the country.”
The news was also celebrated by Alicia Bannon, who aided plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits and who serves as the Judiciary Program director for the Brennan Center for Justice.
“The General Assembly maps entrenched a GOP supermajority and flouted clear partisan fairness requirements in the Ohio constitution – abuses that especially impacted Ohio’s Black, Muslim and immigrant communities,” she said in a statement. “The commission is now tasked with drawing replacement maps. We will be watching to ensure that all Ohioans get the fair representation they are due.”
Indeed, plaintiffs had accused the redistricting commission of ignoring the fact that Black voters have historically had their voting power diluted by district maps. Voting rights advocates pointed to a September hearing in which a Republican mapmaker told the commission that “legislative leaders” instructed him to deliberately disregard racial data in drawing Ohio House and Senate districts.
The bipartisan redistricting commission, which is made up of five Republicans and two Democrats, was created in order to help quell partisanship in map drawing in the state. But lawmakers were able to sidestep the commission, allowing the Republican-controlled legislature to draw what experts said was an extremely gerrymandered map.
The map gave heavy favor to Republicans, further entrenching previously red districts and ensuring that more competitive districts were still right-leaning. It also took one surefire seat away from Democrats, creating a high possibility of 13 Republican seats and only two Democratic seats in the state, FiveThirtyEight found.
While this plan avoids an initial filibuster, final passage of voting rights legislation will still require a confrontation on the Senate rule at some point. Either Republicans will have to allow a vote on the bill without blocking it — a highly unlikely possibility — or Democrats, faced with a GOP filibuster, will have to amend the rule after the bill is blocked.
“To ultimately end debate and pass the voting rights legislation, we will need 10 Republicans to join us — which we know from past experience will not happen — or we will need to change the Senate rules as has been done many times before,” Schumer wrote in his memo.
At that point, “every senator will be faced with a choice of whether or not to pass the legislation to protect our democracy,” Schumer added.
Currently, the specific changes to the filibuster that Schumer intends to propose are unclear, although there are several possible options. Democrats could restore the “talking filibuster,” which would require a senator to speak nonstop in order to block legislation. They could also create a “carve-out” that allows exceptions to the filibuster rule if a bill relates to voting rights. Finally, Democrats could opt to ditch the rule altogether – but although progressive advocates have repeatedly called for the elimination of the filibuster, it’s unlikely that this measure will be considered.
Even members of the Senate Democratic caucus are unsure which path Schumer plans to take.
Moderates in the Senate Democratic caucus have been negotiating with Manchin on the filibuster for weeks. Recently, a source with knowledge of the negotiations said that Manchin’s inconsistency has been a major obstacle.
“You think you’re just about there. You think you’ve got an agreement on most of the things and it’s settling in. And then you come back the next morning and you’re starting from scratch,” the source said.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) has issued his conditions for backing reforms to the filibuster that are so strict as to make such changes to the controversial Senate rule unlikely to occur.
Manchin also stated that a supermajority should be required in any vote to change the filibuster — a requirement that would essentially doom any chances at reforming the rule.
Rules should only change “with two-thirds of the people that are present [in the Senate],” Manchin said. “So it’s Democrats and Republicans changing the rules to make the place work better.”
Any changes to the filibuster rule currently require the support of at least 50 senators.
Biden has expressed support for such changes, including eliminating the filibuster itself if it remains an impediment to protecting voters’ rights and access to the ballot.
Speaking in Atlanta, Biden said that “the threat to our democracy is so grave that we must find a way to pass these voting rights bills.”
Lawmakers should be allowed to “debate” on voting rights bills, the president said, then “vote, let the majority prevail.”
“And if that bare minimum is blocked, we have no option but to change the Senate rules, including getting rid of the filibuster for this,” Biden added.
Biden also voiced support for the return of a “talking filibuster,” which requires senators to stand and speak nonstop in order to block legislation. Currently, filibuster votes allow 40 votes to block all pieces of legislation without any further action.
Biden noted that the talking filibuster was the norm when he started in the Senate in the early 1970s. “But that doesn’t happen today. Senators no longer even have to speak one word,” Biden noted in his speech. “The filibuster is not used by Republicans to bring the Senate together but to pull it further apart. The filibuster has been weaponized and abused.”
Manchin’s goals of bipartisanship have been criticized by other Democrats, who note that protecting the rights of voters shouldn’t require bipartisanship, especially if one side is opposed.
Manchin has been involved in negotiations over possible changes to the filibuster with other moderate Democrats in the Senate. So far, those negotiations have been difficult, sources have said, due in large part to the West Virginia senator’s changing attitudes from one day to the next.
“You think you’re just about there. You think you’ve got an agreement on most of the things and it’s settling in. And then you come back the next morning and you’re starting from scratch,” one insider involved in the negotiations told Axios.
President Joe Biden plans to give a speech on Tuesday in Atlanta, Georgia, to discuss the need to pass voting rights legislation at the federal level — and to express his support for changing the filibuster rule in the U.S. Senate to do so.
Republicans have used the Senate filibuster to block major voting rights bills four times over the past year. As GOP-led state legislatures across the country impose voting restrictions in response to Trump’s 2020 election loss, advocates have demanded that Democrats enact voting rights protections, even if that requires limiting the power of the filibuster.
Prior to the announcement that Biden will support changing the filibuster, a coalition of voting rights groups said that the president shouldn’t come to Georgia unless he had a plan for passing voting protections through both houses of Congress.
Speaking on voting rights without a strategy to address the filibuster issue would be “an empty gesture,” the coalition said, adding that it would “reject any visit by President Biden that does not include an announcement of a finalized voting rights plan.”
Since the coalition released their statement, the president has prepared a speech about the need to change the filibuster in order to pass voting rights bills, which he plans to give upon his arrival in Georgia.
“The next few days, when these bills come to a vote, will mark a turning point in this nation,” Biden plans to say on Tuesday. “Will we choose democracy over autocracy, light over shadow, justice over injustice? I know where I stand. I will not yield. I will not flinch.”
“I will defend your right to vote and our democracy against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” the president will go on. “And so the question is: where will the institution of the United States Senate stand?”
Democrats in the Senate have yet to determine the specific changes to the filibuster rule they will actually propose. Negotiations between moderate members in that chamber have stalled, due in large part to Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-West Virginia) lack of consistency on the issue.
Manchin is an ardent defender of the filibuster, so it’s likely that any adjustments will be minimal, as changing the rule would require the support of all 50 senators in the Democratic caucus. But Manchin’s stance seems to change from one day to the next, sources close to the negotiations have said.
“You think you’re just about there. You think you’ve got an agreement on most of the things and it’s settling in. And then you come back the next morning and you’re starting from scratch,” one source said, adding that trying to get Manchin’s support for changing the rule has been “like negotiating via Etch A Sketch.”
Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) promised a vote on changes to the filibuster by January 17 if Republicans continue to block voting rights legislation. Although that deadline is getting closer, Schumer hasn’t yet proposed specific changes to the rule.
In order to change the filibuster rule and pass voting rights legislation, the Senate “must evolve, like it has many times before,” Schumer said.
Democrats have been negotiating with Sen. Joe Manchin, a right-wing Democrat from West Virginia, so that they can amend the filibuster rule and pass voting rights legislation. But Democratic insiders say the process has been difficult — and one source even compared it to “negotiating via Etch A Sketch.”
Insiders told Axios that Manchin has been inconsistent throughout negotiations, changing what he wants out of a deal from one day to the next.
“You think you’re just about there. You think you’ve got an agreement on most of the things and it’s settling in. And then you come back the next morning and you’re starting from scratch,” the source said.
That same source described the talks with Manchin as being “like negotiating via Etch A Sketch,” referencing a children’s toy that erases itself at the slightest disturbance or shake.
Democrats are focusing on finding a way to pass voting rights protections before the 2022 midterm races, in hopes of preventing Republican-run state legislatures from further disenfranchising voters across the nation. But Republican lawmakers have utilized the filibuster to block major voting rights bills four times in the past year, including a version of the For the People Act proposed by Manchin; for such a law to be passed without GOP obstruction, there must be changes to filibuster.
Even as Democrats promise to set up a vote on changing the filibuster later this month, Manchin refuses to get on board, claiming that the action is too partisan, even if it means passing much-needed voting rights legislation. Manchin has said that he doesn’t want to support a voting rights bill unless the bill is bipartisan, a demand many in the Democratic Party have said is unreasonable.
Democrats are trying to persuade Manchin to support one of a few possible changes to the filibuster. In negotiations, they have discussed removing the filibuster requirement for all bills relating to voting rights; lowering the threshold needed for a cloture vote on a filibuster; and returning to a “talking filibuster,” which would require senators to stand and speak non-stop.
Most of the negotiations seem to involve three moderate members of the Senate Democratic caucus, who until recently were also wary of changing filibuster rules. Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia), Jon Tester (D-Montana), and Angus King (I-Maine) have all taken part in the talks with Manchin, trying to convince him to back the effort to change the rules.
Democrats have also been trying to entice Manchin in other ways, including getting big names to call his office directly. Per reporting from Politico, Manchin has received phone calls from former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, urging him to end his stubborn defense of the filibuster in its current form. Famed talk show host Oprah Winfrey has also reportedly called Manchin’s office to try to convince him that the filibuster isn’t worth defending if it means the right to vote is imperiled.
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are planning to visit Atlanta, Georgia, next week – but a coalition of voting rights organizations are telling them to stay in Washington, D.C., unless they can visit with a plan for strengthening voting protections across the U.S.
In a statement from the White House earlier this week, Biden and Harris announced that they would be visiting Atlanta on Tuesday, January 11, with the aim of promoting voting rights legislation in Congress.
In a statement released this week, a coalition of voting rights organizations said that Biden and Harris should delay their trip until they explain how voting rights legislation can be passed in a narrowly divided Congress. Several pieces of voting rights legislation have indeed failed in the Senate due to Republican filibusters.
The group suggested that any visit to the state without a plan to overcome such hurdles would be pointless, amounting to no more than a publicity stunt.
“Georgia will not be used as a two-dimensional backdrop, a chess piece in someone else’s ineffectual political dealings,” the coalition said in a statement.
They added:
Georgia voters made history and made their voices heard, overcoming obstacles, threats, and suppressive laws to deliver the White House and the US Senate. In return, a visit has been forced on them, requiring them to accept political platitudes and repetitious, bland promises. Such an empty gesture, without concrete action, without signs of real, tangible work, is unacceptable.
The groups that took part in issuing the statement include the New Georgia Project Action Fund, the Black Voters Matter Fund, the Asian American Advocacy Fund, and the GALEO Impact Action Fund, a Latinx-based organization.
The coalition said it would “reject any visit by President Biden that does not include an announcement of a finalized voting rights plan that will pass both chambers, not be stopped by the filibuster, and be signed into law.”
“Anything less is insufficient and unwelcome,” they added.
The Biden administration has not yet responded to the groups’ demand.
In a speech on Thursday recognizing the one-year anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol building, both Biden and Harris emphasized the need to protect voting rights, noting that the same lies that drove Trump loyalists to attack Congress were being used to attack the right to vote in statehouses across the country.
“Right now, in state after state, new laws are being written not to protect the vote, but to deny it,” Biden said in his speech. “Not only to suppress the vote, but to subvert it. Not to strengthen and protect our democracy, but because the former president lost.”
For several months now, efforts to pass voting rights legislation have stalled due to Republican filibusters. Earlier this week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said that Democrats would take action to change filibuster rules in the chamber unless Republicans allowed the passage of voting rights legislation.
In his statement, Schumer also connected the attack on the Capitol to the assault on voting rights.
“Much like the violent insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol nearly one year ago, Republican officials in states across the country have seized on the former president’s Big Lie about widespread voter fraud to enact anti-democratic legislation and seize control of typically non-partisan election administration functions,” Schumer said. The Senate would “take strong action to stop this antidemocratic march” by passing voting rights protection bills, he went on – even if Democrats had to change the filibuster rule to do so.
However, Schumer’s statement didn’t elaborate whether he was seeking to alter the filibuster or end it altogether.
After Republican legislators in 19 states passed 34 laws restricting ballot access in 2021, largely fueled by Donald Trump’s election lies, more than a half-dozen more states are gearing up to go even further ahead of this year’s midterm elections.
Georgia Republicans, who last year passed a sweeping set of restrictions that Democrats likened to Jim Crow-era laws and led to widespread corporate condemnation and boycotts, have introduced a torrent of new voting bills that go well beyond the limits in last year’s legislation. Missouri Republicans have pre-filed multiple bills that would impose stricter voter ID requirements for in-person and mail ballots, after their previous attempts were rejected by courts. At least four states have already pre-filed seven bills that would “initiate or allow illegitimate partisan reviews” of election results, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. Republicans in multiple states have also pre-filed at least seven bills that would restrict access to mail voting.
Even those numbers only scratch the surface. Republicans introduced more than 400 bills with provisions to restrict voting last year. Of those, at least 88 bills in nine states will carry over into the new legislative session, according to the Brennan Center. Democrats have described this onslaught of legislation as an extension of the Capitol riot last January, when Trump supporters hunted lawmakers through the halls of Congress in a failed effort to block the certification of Joe Biden’s win.
“There can be no doubt that the events of January 6th were inspired by, and designed to promote, the Big Lie of mass voter fraud, which Donald Trump and the GOP have used to justify racist voter suppression laws in states across the country,” Rep. Mondaire Jones, D-N.Y., who was first elected in 2020 and sworn in days before the attack, said in a statement. “It was clear then, and is clear now, that the modern-day Republican Party is more interested in preserving the rule of its authoritarian leadership than in preserving our democracy.”
Republicans have defended the nationwide push by claiming it is necessary to ensure “election integrity” and to assuage their constituents’ concerns about election security — concerns that have been stoked for more than a year by Trump and his allies. Democrats and voting rights groups argue that many of the restrictions are attempts to suppress votes, especially those of people of color, who have disproportionately backed Democratic candidates. Some of the bills may go even further than that — and could allow Republican-led legislatures to subvert elections.
“The attack on our democracy continues in the form of a victorious nationwide wave of voter suppression and subversion of our electoral systems,” Leah Greenberg, the co-executive director of the Indivisible Project, a progressive nonprofit, said in a statement. “Republicans in state legislatures across the country have introduced and passed hundreds of bills to limit participation in democracy — targeting Black and brown voters in particular — and make it easier for partisan officials to remove election officials from their posts and subvert legitimate election results. And every day since, Senate Republicans have blocked federal voting rights and democracy reform legislation that would restore faith in our democratic processes.”
Georgia state Sen. Butch Miller, a Republican now running for lieutenant governor, is pushing a bill to ban absentee ballot drop boxes entirely, just months after supporting a provision in the state’s exhaustive Senate Bill 202 that already restricted their use. State House Speaker David Ralston has proposed a bill that would move election investigations from the secretary of state’s office to the state bureau of investigations. It’s the latest in a series of measures aimed at undercutting the power of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who rejected Trump’s attempts to “find” enough votes to help him overturn his Georgia margin of defeat. The GOP last year removed Raffensperger as chair of the State Election Board and banned him from entering any election lawsuit settlements without approval from the legislature.
Another new Republican proposal would restructure the government of Georgia’s Gwinnett County, where Biden won by 18 points, and allow the GOP-dominated legislature to pack the Democratic-led county commission with its own appointees. Nicole Hendrickson, the Democratic chairwoman of the county commission, has said the proposal “removes our voice as a board of commissioners and disenfranchises our citizens who did not have a say in any of this.”
Florida Republicans, who last year passed a wide-ranging law restricting mail-in voting and drop boxes while empowering partisan poll-watchers, have also unleashed a tide of new proposals ahead of the next election cycle. Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has called to create a massive new law enforcement unit to investigate voting “irregularities.” State lawmakers have introduced proposals to make it a felony for any third party to submit more than two ballots and to increase “maintenance” of voter rolls, which critics argue too often amounts to a “purge” of valid voters, according to the advocacy group Voting Rights Lab.
Republican legislators in five states, including Florida, Tennessee and Oklahoma, have all introduced bills that would launch partisan reviews of the 2020 election, although no recount or “audit” in any state — including those conducted or ordered by Republicans — has found any evidence of significant voter fraud.
A New Hampshire Republican bill would eliminate vote-counting machines and require all ballots to be counted by hand, which Democrats worry could lengthen the time it takes to tally ballots and create an opening for bad actors to challenge the legitimacy of the election. Republicans in the state have also proposed creating stricter residency requirements to vote, which appears to be a continuation of the GOP’s aim to restrict voting by college students.
Republican legislators in five states, including Florida, Tennessee, and Oklahoma have all introduced bills that would launch partisan reviews of the 2020 election.
Many of the bills that Republicans have already introduced will also carry over from last year. At least 57 of the 88 carryover bills would restrict mail voting, including limiting the time voters have to apply or deliver a mail ballot, according to the Brennan Center. Seven others would expand voter purges, five would impose criminal penalties for election officials who send out unsolicited mail ballots or people who assist voters in returning their ballots, and 23 others would impose or expand voter ID requirements.
“The Capitol attack was just the beginning of the campaign to overthrow our democracy,” Andrea Waters King, president of the progressive think tank Drum Major Institute, said in a statement. “White supremacists failed to steal the presidential election, so now they’re trying to steal it in the states. Dozens of voter suppression bills have passed around the country since the insurrection — these attacks on our democracy are less visible but no less insidious. We must fight against these anti-democratic laws as fervently as we condemn the insurrectionists.”
Many of the bills were written with the help of deep-pocketed conservative groups. Jessica Anderson, executive director of Heritage Action for America, sister organization to the powerful Heritage Foundation, last year bragged in a leaked video obtained by Mother Jones that in some cases the organization has prodded lawmakers to craft voting restrictions.
“In some cases, we actually draft them for them,” she said in the video. “Or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.”
Anderson recalled that the group was able to “quickly” and “quietly” help Iowa lawmakers draft bills and gather public support for a slew of new voting restrictions.
“Honestly, nobody even noticed,” she said. “My team looked at each other and we’re like, ‘It can’t be that easy.’”
Democrats have renewed their push to pass voting rights legislation before this year’s midterm elections in response to the new voting restrictions. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has vowed to hold a vote on changing the chamber’s filibuster rules by Martin Luther King Jr. Day if Republicans continue to block the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. It’s unclear whether he can convince Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., to support filibuster changes they have long opposed.
“We’re running out of time,” Schumer warned earlier this week. “What these legislatures have done in 2021 and are now beginning to do in 2022, if you wait much longer, you won’t be able to undo them in time for the 2022 elections. Even if the legislation says what they did is wrong, the courts may say it’s too close to the primary season, we can’t change it. So we have to move quickly.”
(@Lnsciales) 
