Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema made it clear that they were not in favor of altering the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation.
Activists have been fighting this battle for nearly a year without much support from the White House.
Biden gave a big voting rights speech in Philadelphia calling the Republican assault on voting rights “the 21st century Jim Crow,” but in that speech he never once mentioned the filibuster.
Voting rights activist groups like the League of Women Voters, People for the American Way and Declaration for American Democracy engaged in direct actions “demanding that President Biden use the full power of his office to support federal voting rights legislation,” as the league said.
The Rev. William Barber II of the Poor People’s Campaign said “Mr. President, we want you to succeed and we will stand with you. But we need you to fight against the filibuster because the filibuster is being used to fight against us, and to bring down democracy.”
Biden never met with them.
The White House says that it is going to keep fighting, but the fighting has been raging for months now, as the president focused most of his time and energy on a spending bill that is now stalled. We are now in the last stages of the fight for voting rights, and democracy is losing. In particular, the full participation of Black voters and other voters of color, as an issue, is losing.
Failure on voting rights now would be historic. Black people have less voting power now than during the civil rights era.
Republicans are the true villains here, but we must mobilize and mobilize now, as if our lives depend on it.
The reason this failure to protect voting rights is so crucial is that the slate of bills currently being advanced by state legislators is an opening salvo in a longer war to curtail voting. If the Republicans see that they can get away with the current suppression, they’ll simply pass more bills. Georgia is already taking another bite at the apple, attempting to pass a second slate of voter suppression restrictions, following the ones they enacted after the 2020 election.
As an example, the U.S. Justice Department announced today that it filed a lawsuit against the State of Georgia, the Georgia Secretary of State, and the Georgia State Election Board. The United States’ complaint challenges provisions of Georgia Senate Bill 202 under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
This includes
1) A provision banning government entities from distributing unsolicited absentee ballot applications;
2) The imposition of costly and onerous fines on civic organizations, churches and advocacy groups that distribute follow-up absentee ballot applications;
3) The shortening of the deadline to request absentee ballots to 11 days before Election Day; the requirement that voters who do not have identification issued by the Georgia Department of Driver Services photocopy another form of identification in order to request an absentee ballot without allowing for use of the last four digits of a social security number for such applications;
4) Limitations on counties’ use of absentee ballot drop boxes;
5) The prohibition on efforts by churches and civic groups to provide food or water to persons waiting in long lines to vote; and
6) The prohibition on counting out-of-precinct provisional ballots cast before 5 p.m. on Election Day.
These are typical of Republican sneaky methods today, and likely to continue unless we stop them. The NABWMT is committed to preventing the suppression of voting rights.
Source: Charles M. Blow, New York Times and the Department of Justice
I work as a clerk (equivalent to a supervisor) of a precinct of more than 3,500 in Miami. We are trained for at least one half day before we work each election. In Miami-Dade County, FL it has been getting less onerous to vote over time. This is a home rule county and we can, to some extent, avoid some of the negative changes enacted by the Florida legislature. I do fully agree that restrictions on voting and the ease of voting should not be imposed. It should be easy and legitimate to vote. Also, with reapportionment going on, there should not be gerrymandering. I know that California is a non-partisan independent commission state. I think there a dozen of these.
Hi Ollie,
Thanks for the info. It’s sad that so much of the rest of the country is NOT doing what Miami-Dade is doing. See you in Minneapolis! –mark behar