Voting rights: Are Democrats at a dead end?
Senate Democrats are pushing voting rights “to the front of the line,” said Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post. Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer this week urged his colleagues to immediately revisit two voting-rights bills when Congress reconvenes in January—and recommended that they alter the filibuster so that Senate Republicans can’t keep blocking a debate. Schumer said it was absurd that state-level Republicans could use simple majorities to ram through laws designed to suppress and even invalidate Democratic votes, but Democrats can do nothing because the Senate filibuster rule requires them to get 60 Senate votes. There’s been discussion of creating a filibuster exception to permit passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement
Act and the Freedom to Vote Act, but since any change to the filibuster requires the support of all 50 Senate Democrats, Sen. Joe Manchin’s vote is critical. He’s opposed eliminating the filibuster but vaguely says he supports “reforms.” Since Manchin co-sponsored the Freedom to Vote Act, he must surely have some sense of the urgency.
Unable to cram Build Back Better’s “welfare-state expansion” past Republican opposition, said David Harsanyi in NationalReview.com, Democrats
have now predictably pivoted to hyping up the voting bills. This planned federal takeover of elections is supposedly a last bulwark against authoritarianism and “Jim Crow 2.0.” That’s a “demagogic lie,” invented to blow up a vital Senate norm. Fortunately, it’s “highly doubtful” that Manchin will play along. Neither will another Democratic centrist, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, said Ed Kilgore in NYMag.com. Her spokesman said last week that Sinema “continues to support the Senate’s 60-vote threshold” to “protect the country from repeated radical reversals in federal policy” every time control of the Senate changes hands.
Amending the filibuster to advance one party’s agenda is justifiable “only under extreme circumstances,” said USA Today in an editorial. But we face them now. Nineteen states have passed laws curbing mail-in ballots and early voting, with some making it easier for state legislatures to overturn elections. Principled election officials are finding themselves threatened or replaced by supporters of Donald Trump’s stolen-election lie. It’s time for filibuster reform, because “the alternative—that America would suffer through a chaotic, divisive, and disputed election outcome in the not-so-distant future—is unthinkable.”