Democrats must keep fighting battle over voting rights
“This battle is not over,” President Biden vowed at South Carolina State University.
He was not speaking about his Build Back Better bill, the $2 trillion spending measure that’s been blocked by Sen. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat who holds veto power over the president’s legislative agenda. Rather, Biden’s promise refers to two critical proposals that would restore and protect the right to vote freely and to have your ballot counted fairly.
Build Back Better is a wish list of liberal aspirations. None of its measures, however worthy, are absolutely essential to a healthy functioning democracy.
Protecting voting rights is essential. Without fair elections, the whole system fails. As Sen. John Hickenlooper of Colorado told The Washington Post: “Voter disenfranchisement threatens our entire democracy … all your other rights are dependent on your right to vote.”
Biden’s words are especially urgent because Republicans are conducting a destructive campaign to undermine voting rights. As the Brennan Center for Justice reports, “In an unprecedented year so far for voting legislation, 19 states have enacted 33 laws that will make it harder for Americans to vote.”
“I’ve never seen anything like the unrelenting assault on the right to vote,” Biden thundered at South Carolina State. “Never.”
That assault is particularly pernicious because it’s based entirely on the lie that the presidency was stolen from Donald Trump and future elections are jeopardized by voter fraud. That is not true. Countless Republican officials — governors, election monitors, federal judges appointed by Trump, even his own attorney general, Bill Barr — agree that Biden won fairly and squarely.
There is simply no explanation for the new laws, except for one: Republicans want to suppress Democratic votes and make it easier for themselves to win. It’s now Democrats who should be shouting “Stop the steal!”
Here’s the problem: Democrats have 50 votes in the Senate but need 60 to overcome Republican filibusters, and the GOP has stonewalled all attempts to bring the voting rights reforms to the floor. So far Manchin, with the support of Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, has refused to consider changes in the filibuster rules that would free the voting bills from limbo.
Manchin makes a good point: Changes in Senate rules are best done through bipartisan consensus, otherwise the basic culture of the chamber is threatened with chaos. Sinema adds, correctly, that if Democrats abrogate the filibuster to pass voting rights, a Republican majority could easily roll back those changes in the future and pass even more draconian voting restrictions.
But politics involves a balancing of costs and benefits. And since Republicans have changed the basic ground rules, the potential rewards of altering the filibuster now outweigh the risks.
The odds are stacked heavily against the Democrats, but there are a few flashes of hope. For one thing, Manchin says he supports voting rights reforms. Sinema, too, says she favors the measures; she just opposes the process needed to pass them.
The filibuster rule is hardly immutable, however. It has been changed more than 160 times. Just recently, the Senate abrogated the rule to allow an increase in the national debt ceiling.
The Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, has vowed to press the issue of voting rights and consider changes to the rules that keep them from addressing it.
Moderate Democrats have rightly been reluctant to weaken the filibuster and possibly shred the remnants of Senate civility. But the Republican attack on voting rights really does threaten our entire democracy. And that threat has to be
There is simply no explanation for the new laws, except for one: Republicans want to suppress Democratic votes and make it easier for themselves to win. It’s now Democrats who should be shouting “Stop the steal!”