JOE – Wake Up!! Don’t Settle for Infrastructure Crumbs (which you may not even get) While These Republican Scumbags Steal the Vote and Kill Our Democracy in Every State.
Get Rid of the Filibuster.
(Dobbs) Biden Should Fight Harder
There's probably just one path to secure the right to vote. He's not taking it.
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“We are facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.”
When Joe Biden said that three weeks ago in his speech about voting rights and voter suppression at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, I think he got it right. Unequivocally right.
But there’s a disconnect. Yes, the president is talking the talk on voting rights. In fact as those rights are challenged in many states, it is not just a “significant” test, it is an existential test. But he’s not walking the walk. There’s a way to face that test, but by letting the modern-day Republican party corrupt our democracy with a filibuster in the United States Senate that would kill any new federal legislation to protect voting rights, he’s turning the other way.
Not that Biden isn’t ardent about those rights. “Help prevent this concerted effort to undermine our election and the sacred right to vote,” he pleaded in the wake of new laws in Republican-led states that make it harder instead of easier for citizens to cast their ballots. Laws that reduce the availability of mail-in ballots, that reduce the number of ballot drop boxes, that reduce the window to vote early and on Sundays, that reduce the right to deliver food and even water to people waiting in long lines at polling places. Given voting trends, it’s largely minority citizens who are targeted. It’s becoming a case of politicians choosing their voters instead of the other way around.
Biden went on to ask those who have supported suppression in all its many forms, “Have you no shame?”
Apparently they don’t. He got it right again. Yet there is still that disconnect.
Speaking in the cradle of American democracy, Biden correctly claimed, “Some things in America should be simple and straightforward. The right to vote freely, the right to vote fairly, the right to have your vote counted. The democratic threshold is liberty. With it, anything is possible. Without it, nothing.”
He is so right about that. Free elections are the foundation of our democracy. Without them, we could become a one-party state, with a dictator at the top. Voting is an inalienable entitlement, and politicians don’t have the right to take it away from us. Any of us.
But still, with what Biden called “a new wave of unprecedented voter suppression, and raw and sustained election subversion,” they are trying.
Thus, the disconnect. The president is passionate about the problem, calling the passage of new voting rights laws on a federal level— to supersede suppression on a state level— “a moral imperative.” But he is ineffectual about what is, realistically, the only way to pass them now: abolishing the filibuster, eliminating the requirement that 60 senators approve to turn legislation into law.
Sad to say, our tradition-tied president doesn’t buy into that. He told a CNN Town Hall late last month that killing the filibuster would “throw the entire Congress into chaos and nothing will get done.”
As if a whole lot is getting done now?!
That’s why I think on this one, Biden is unequivocally wrong, and is putting our right to vote— everyone’s right to vote— at risk, by not fighting to end the filibuster.
I’ve written about this before but because we’re at a pivotal point on the issue, I want to explain it again: the filibuster is only a rule, not a law. It wasn’t created by our Founding Fathers. It’s not enshrined in the Constitution. It was dreamt up 50 years after the founding of the republic, basically to prevent tyranny of the majority by allowing a minority in the Senate to talk a bill to death. But here’s what’s wrong with it: the filibuster means only 41 senators out of a hundred can block a bill. That is tyranny of the minority.
And to Biden’s fear of throwing Congress into chaos? How about throwing liberty into chaos instead. At the height of the Jim Crow era, Southern Democrats used the filibuster to block legislation that would protect (or to be realistic, simply establish) the civil rights of black Americans. Now, when it comes to voting, it’s Jim Crow redux. Or as Biden put it in Philadelphia, “Jim Crow on steroids.”
Because the reality is, the leading elected Republican in the nation right now, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, argues there’s no need for Washington to pass new voting rights laws. “This is not a federal issue,” he said back in June. “It oughta be left to the states. There’s nothing broken around the country.”
If only.
What’s broken is that Republican state legislators, claiming that they are stamping out fraud but with a clear eye on stifling Democratic votes, have reshaped voting laws to favor their party even though the 2020 election was hailed by experts— not politicians, but voting law experts— as the most fraud-free in our history. The almost uniform rejection of the Big Lie by judges both Left and Right, and by state voting commissions both Republican and Democrat, backs that up.
In an op-ed yesterday in The Denver Post, Democratic Colorado congressman Joe Neguse wrote about our plain and simple right to vote, “It is a right that many people have died to secure and a right that civil rights leaders… were harassed, jailed, and beaten to protect.”
But it won’t be enshrined without another fight.
President Biden has moved at lightning speed to reverse the crippling impact of the pandemic, human and economic. He has restored some faith in institutions after January's insurrection. But his long-lasting legacy hangs on voting rights. If he’ll see the light himself and put pressure on the holdouts in his own party to just scrap the filibuster and be done with it— the way he has been pressuring members of both parties to achieve his aims on infrastructure— Joe Biden might be recorded as one of history’s most effective presidents.
If he doesn’t, the rest may be moot.