"To protect our democracy, I support changing the Senate rules, whichever way they need to be changed, to prevent a minority of senators from blocking action on voting rights… I've been having these quiet conversations with members of Congress for the last two months. I'm tired of being quiet.”
Joe Biden in a fiery speech in Atlanta on January 10th.
Republicans have come to a startling conclusion. Without voter suppression, from gerrymandering to out-and-out limitations on who can vote and how the voting process must be administered, they are rapidly slipping out of being able to elect national candidates. Even in once clearly and completely red states, like Arizona, Georgia, Florida and Texas, increasing big city urbanization is turning those states purple on a clear path to blue for all statewide elected offices. Younger, better educated voters and voters of color are turning the tide.
Racism and ethnic bias have been our country since its inception. In a flurry of civil rights litigation and federal statutes, the biases were so pronounced and Jim Crow laws so excluded minorities, particularly African American citizens, from meaningful access to the polls that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was enacted to implement the mandate of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution. That statute has been amended and extended on numerous occasions, most recently in 2006. Section 5 of the Act targeted states and counties (see above map) where voting practices were most egregious, putting them under federal supervision. Section 2 of the act generally disallowed state and county voting discrimination based on proscribed variables (like race).
But in 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court, now acting as if it were a legislative body superior to Congress, repealed those targeted and federally supervised jurisdictions in Holder vs Shelby County, under the dramatically unsubstantiated assumption that then current racial practices were so different from when those jurisdictions were placed under federal scrutiny, that the provisions of the act (Sections 4 & 5) governing them were no longer constitutional. Huh? The court looked back at the 1960s. That statute was amended in 2006! If that gutting of the Voting Rights Act were not enough, the Court took aim at the remaining Section 2 in the 2021 case of Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, effectively ruling that unless the wording of statutory or regulatory provision limiting or redefining voting rights clearly identified a protected class (e.g., African Americans), the fact that such legal restriction resulted in measurable discrimination was not relevant.
It is interesting to note that every single state that was under federal supervision under that Voting Rights Act has become part of a 19-state movement that has passed voter restrictions, almost all of which have resulted in enhancing Republican-likely voters and diminishing Democrat-likely voters. Those limitations required only a simple majority vote in the states in question.
Biden’s speech, noted above, corrected a general GOP voter assumption that a pursuit of greater and more open elections was a Democratic attempt to continue to “rig” elections against Republican candidates… relying on a belief by over 70% of registered Republicans that the November 3rd election was fraudulent, and that Donald Trump won by a landslide. Despite the fact that Republicans running for office on that date were on the same ballots, the rulings of over 60 courts (including Trump appointed judges) finding no measurable fraud and the audits and recounts that have sustained the results!
Indeed, Biden emphasized the litany of constant support, replete with Congressional votes and presidential signatures on amendatory acts. Support for voting rights has existed from GOP Presidents including Reagan and both Bush presidents… and Biden made it clear that even many of those Republicans who had once been the most vociferously opposed to civil rights legislation, using Strom Thurmond as a primary example. He wound up in fully supporting ending voter discrimination in his later years. Thurmond, a Dixiecrat who turned Republican by the time he reached the Senate prominence (he was South Carolina’s Senator from 1954-2003), had opposed the Civil Rights Act in 1957 with the longest speaking filibuster every by a single Senator (24 hours and 18 minutes).
Despite West Virginia’s swing-vote Democratic Senator Joe Manchin’s seeming intractable insistence on bipartisanship, his belief that this should be the only way to amend the cloture/filibuster 60-vote supermajority rule in the Senate to exclude bills dealing with voting rights, Congress has passed numerous statutes along party lines, including exclusions to the filibuster rule. Without an amendment to those arcane Senate rules – the United States is the only democracy on earth where a majority of its federal legislature cannot pass most laws – the proposed voting rights acts are dead on arrival.
Republicans continue to insist, en masse, that they are addressing public skepticism on the accuracy of our elections. However, according to members of Congress willing to express their conversations with GOP representative, over 90% of Republicans in Congress admit that Biden clearly won on November 3rd but are terrified of engaging a vindictive Donald Trump and facing extremist candidates in their primaries who have the ex-president’s endorsement.
In August, NBC News looked at swing and conservative states to test voter sentiments on the filibuster issue: “The voting rights group Fair Fight commissioned surveys with Public Policy Polling, which does polling for progressive groups, in Alaska, Arizona, Maine, Montana, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Fifty-four percent to 64 percent of voters surveyed in each state support the idea of senators passing voting bills along a simple majority — not the 60 votes currently required by Senate filibuster rules.”
If the filibuster is not tamed when it comes to voting rights, then both the 2022 mid-terms and probably the 2024 presidential elections will be severely biased with rules in red and some swing states that very obviously support GOP candidates over Dems, particularly those Republicans favoring Donald Trump and his sycophants. To the extent that purple states with voter restrictions elect Democratic governors in 2022, perhaps those governors could use their clemency powers to allow “violators” of voting restrictions to operate anyway. Then again, think of how many insurrectionists could be given clemency if Donald Trump ever becomes president again.
I’m Peter Dekom, and if we continue to exclude Democratic voters in Republican states from maximum free access to vote, we will have lost our last sliver of pretense that the United States is a democracy.
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