Keep up the fight for voting rights
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Federal voting rights legislation was blocked as Senate Democrats failed to overcome Republican opposition or change filibuster rules.
The defeat came days after President Joe Biden went to the Capitol to prod Democratic senators in a closed-door meeting.
Biden later said he’s “not sure” his elections and voting rights legislation can pass Congress this year after a key fellow Democrat, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, announced her refusal to go along with changing Senate rules to push past a Republican filibuster blockade.
Sinema had actually blunted the chances of federal voting rights legislation even before Biden met privately with Senate Democrats to push the bill.
Sinema declared just before Biden arrived on Capitol Hill that she could not support “short sighted” rules change.
In a speech on the Senate floor, she said that the answer to divisiveness in the Senate is not to change filibuster rules so one party, even hers, can pass controversial bills. “We must address the disease itself, the disease of division, to protect our democracy,” she said.
Sinema and fellow conservative Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who also opposes changing Senate rules, are blocking any chance that elections and voting rights legislation can pass Congress this year.
Manchin, who played a major role writing Democrats’ voting legislation, dashed hopes of passing a bill this year, saying any changes should be made with substantial Republican buy-in — even though there aren’t any Republican senators willing to sign on.
South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn, the No. 3 Democrat in the House and a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus, was right to question the wisdom of reflexively seeking bipartisanship, saying that the right to vote was granted to newly freed slaves on a party-line vote.
Sinema and Manchin’s insistence on bipartisanship is at best naïve and misguided and at its worst a cover to avoid acting on controversial bills that they believe could hurt them with swing voters.
Bipartisanship is not always possible.
The Affordable Health Care Act was passed without bipartisan approval. The healthcare bill was vilified by conservatives but is now popular among voters.
Sinema and Manchin are holding their party to a standard that is not upheld by Republicans. The GOP did not consider bipartisanship when they voted repeatedly to dismantle President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and to block Merrick Garland, his nominee to the Supreme Court, or when former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told Obama he was determined to make him a one-term president.
The question lawmakers should ask themselves is not whether proposed legislation will have bipartisan support but whether it's good legislation that will benefit Americans and can pass with a simple majority.
Passing a comprehensive federal voters’ rights bill is necessary when Republicans are passing legislation that will make it more difficult to vote. In the past year, 34 laws adding new voting restrictions were passed in 19 Republican-controlled state legislatures. The bills are geared toward disenfranchising Democratic voters, particularly people of color.
The bills restrict voting including banning ballot drop boxes and mail-in voting, reducing early voting days and hours, restricting who can get a mail-in ballot, prohibiting officials from promoting the use of mail-in ballots and even criminalizing the distribution of water to voters waiting in the long lines these laws create.
Republicans in Florida, Georgia and Arizona have proposed an unprecedented election police agency against alleged election crimes even though fraud cases remain minuscule. This would have a chilling effect on legal voting.
The only way to unravel these attacks on voting is with federal legislation. The only way to pass federal legislation is for Democrats to win more seats in Congress, at least two more seats in the U.S. Senate to negate opposition from Sinema and Manchin.
In the face of this attempt to discourage and intimidate voters, an aggressive registration effort will be needed as well as a plan to mobilize voters in the midterms and beyond.
Biden and congressional Democrats must continue to make a forceful push to pass comprehensive federal legislation to protect voting rights.
Irv Randolph is an award-winning journalist and political commentator. The Randolph Report: News, Opinion and Information relevant to African Americans. Subscribe to get full and free access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update.