Kill the filibuster and pass this bill

With the Republican Party broadly embracing election disinformation, voter suppression and minority rule, it falls to Democrats to bear the standard of democracy. Doing so will require them to finish off an antidemocratic tradition of a quasidemocratic body, the Senate filibuster.

The House on Wednesday considered Democrats’ signature response to the party opposite’s authoritarian drift in the form of HR1, an omnibus of election, redistricting and campaign finance reforms. Its fate and perhaps that of American democracy depend on the Democrats’ willingness to use the majority they narrowly won in the Senate, where their 50 seats represent 41.5 million more Americans than the equivalent Republican caucus.

Democratic San Jose Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who chairs the House caucus with jurisdiction over the bill, noted the thwarted popular will for addressing climate change and raising the minimum wage in a news conference before the House vote. “Nothing else happens unless the people’s voices are heard,” she said.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, clutching a miniature American flag on the steps of the Capitol, agreed. “This reminds me of what it must have felt like at Valley Forge,” the San Francisco Democrat said. “Everything is at stake.”

It’s not much of an exaggeration. Pelosi and her fellow representatives stood at the scene of the violent insurrection that delayed Congress’ certification of President Biden’s election just two months ago, while further security threats canceled a House session scheduled for Thursday. Though the mob that stormed the capital on Jan. 6 literally called for Mike Pence’s neck, the former vice president typified the party’s stance by embracing the false claims of election fraud that fueled the violence in an oped published Wednesday, joining former President Donald Trump in attacking HR1.

Republicanrun state legislatures, meanwhile, already have begun moving bills to limit ballot access and suppress participation. The party can also be counted on to oust several members of the House’s slim Democratic majority in two years not by persuading voters but through nakedly partisan gerrymandering, which already gives Republicans an advantage over their vote share of as many as 22 seats, or twice the current Democratic advantage, according to an Associated Press analysis. A restoration of Republican control of Congress could in turn mean that the next attempt to overturn certification of a legitimate presidential election succeeds.

HR1 would stem this antidemocratic movement by setting national standards for ballot access, easing voter registration nationwide, requiring early voting and prohibiting excessive barriers to voting by mail. It would also impose more transparency on large political donations and create a matching system for small donations to congressional campaigns. And it would mandate Californiastyle independent redistricting commissions to prevent partisan gerrymandering.

While these measures would empower voters regardless of their politics, they are unlikely to draw much support from a party increasingly dedicated to voter suppression and amenable to overturning elections. That has turned attention to what remains of the filibuster, which effectively requires 60 votes to pass most legislation and would therefore doom HR1 in the Senate. Undoing that tradition would require the assent of the more conservativeleaning Democrats such as West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema and California’s Dianne Feinstein, who have defended the filibuster. It’s time for these and other Democrats to live up to their label and defend democracy instead.