Here’s how Sen. Sinema can honor Grant Woods

Last week, just before the beginning of the jam-packed memorial service for former Arizona Attorney General Grant Woods, U.S. Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly were escorted into the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Phoenix.

Two previous governors and other well-known Arizonans were among the 650 or so people who’d come to honor Woods, a political iconoclast who in the past couple of years evolved into a quintessential Arizona figure, very much like his one-time boss and long-time friend, the late Sen. John McCain.

Woods helped Sinema get elected. When he died suddenly on Oct. 23 of a heart attack, Sinema tweeted:

Grant Woods was an incredible Arizonan with a long record of public service to our state — and a friend whose support meant so much to me. His leadership helped deliver lasting results for Arizona over many years. I will miss him and my heart is with Marlene and their children.

I don’t doubt that Sinema had tremendous respect and affection for Woods, or that his support meant a lot to her. Given that, there is one way for Sinema to honor Woods that she knows he would want.

Just one.

Abolish the filibuster.

It’s the rule in the Senate that effectively requires a 60-vote supermajority to pass legislation.

As long as the outdated rule is in place, the Senate will not pass legislation like the For the People Act or the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which are meant to block voter suppression laws that have worked their way through Republicancontrolled legislatures, including Arizona’s.

Woods’ wife, Marlene Galan Woods, spoke to her husband’s passion for protecting voter rights toward the end of her heart-wrenching eulogy.

She said that Woods was passionate about protecting such rights, and that he “understood what counted.”

She said in part, “His last fight is probably the most important. The most dire. Stopping voter suppression in the United States of America. It is a cancer. It’s a cancer that is spreading in legislatures around our country. These are laws specifically crafted to keep minorities from voting. Grant felt that protecting an American’s right to vote was imperative to our fragile democracy.”

Sinema supports legislation that would provide voter protections.

But she also supports preserving the filibuster, knowing that voter protection proposals don’t have a chance as long as Republicans in the Senate can block it by way of the filibuster.

Grant Woods had a lot to say about that.

A while back he told an interviewer, “I do think that Sen. Sinema and every senator should support ending the filibuster for the voting rights bill. To keep the Jim Crow filibuster while losing some of these basic voting rights that are central to our democracy is preposterous.

“Sen. Sinema should know that, so should Sen. (Joe) Manchin (a West Virginia Democrat who also supports the filibuster.) At the end of the day, I’m very hopeful that they’ll come around and do the right thing. But if they don’t, then I don’t think they belong in the Senate anymore.”

If Sinema were to help abolish the filibuster she would, of course, be honoring Woods. But that’s more of a bonus than a reason.

The reason, so clearly pointed out by Woods’ wife Marlene, is because “protecting an American’s right to vote was imperative to our fragile democracy.”

Woods’ wife, Marlene Galan Woods, spoke to her husband’s passion for protecting voter rights toward the end of her heart-wrenching eulogy.