A new voting rights bill, designed by Democrats to protect the right to vote by every American, has hit a Republican roadblock in the US Senate.
Politics
Bill H.R. 1, or the For the People Act, has been called the most ambitious voting rights bill to come before Congress in a generation. It was created to improve fairness in elections by introducing the largest federally mandated expansion of voting rights since the 1960s, banning partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts, forcing super PACs to disclose big donor lists, creating a new public campaign financing system, and preventing states from making it harder for people of color and young people to vote — all improvements any elected official would want, right? WRONG!!
On Tuesday, Republican senators used the filibuster to defeat the new voting rights bill and prevent Democrats from reaching the 60-votes required for passage. In fact, the GOP refused to even hear arguments related to the bill. As expected, the vote went along party lines with all 50 Democratic senators in favor of the bill and all 50 Republican senators opposed to it.
Now, the Democrats’ only chance of reviving the voting rights bill and enacting an elections overhaul will be to eliminate the legislative filibuster, a move that could help Democrats in the short term but come back to haunt them in the long run.
Since Donald Trump’s huge electoral loss in November of 2020, Republicans have actively and brazenly done everything within their power to make it harder (for mostly Black and Brown people) to vote, while tilting the scales to make it easier for them to win.
In Georgia, Republicans have removed Democrats of color from local boards. In Arkansas, they’ve stripped election control from county authorities. Across the country, Republicans have stripped secretaries of state of their power, asserted more control over state election boards, restricted early voting, approved measures to limit the number of available ballot boxes, made it easier to overturn election results, and attempted partisan audits in the hopes of overturning the 2020 election results.
President Biden has compared these ongoing GOP stunts to “Jim Crow” racing through Republican-led states.
Moderate Democrats, including Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have each expressed a desire to maintain the filibuster in hopes of establishing an era of bipartisanship with Republicans. However, progressive Democrats have recognized that Republicans have no desire to ever work with liberals and moderates across the aisle. They believe Democrats should seize this moment of controlling the White House, House of Representatives, and Senate to get things done on their own.
“The people did not give Democrats the House, Senate and White House to compromise with insurrectionists. Abolish the filibuster so we can do the people’s work.” – Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts
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“There is a rot — a rot at the center of the modern Republican Party,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Tuesday. “There is no principle behind these laws: not fraud, not election integrity, not security, not better election administration. The only principle is blatant partisan electoral advantage.”
CNN: If the expansive voting rights bill suffocated in the Senate on Tuesday was the most critical defense of American democracy in decades, it seems odd that a President who put that very goal at the core of his administration didn’t do more to pass it. The bill was seen by Democrats as one of their highest priorities — a pushback against scores of ballot suppression bills by Republican-led state legislatures that threaten their ability to win future power, built on Donald Trump’s vote fraud lies. It’s the kind of scenario that calls for the vote-moving muscle of a first-term president at the apex of his power. But in the bleak political math of contemporary Washington, such a jolt of energy from the commander in chief didn’t materialize. And it wouldn’t have mattered if it did. Republicans crushed the effort at the first attempt, wielding the Senate’s filibuster rules —… Read more »