There’s an interesting link between the two events. The lone Northern Democrat filibustering and voting against the landmark 1964 legislation was Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia. Today, Republicans are threatening to filibuster these bills and their great enabler is Byrd’s successor, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia).
His staunch defense of the filibuster, and particularly his opposition to carving a small cutout to bring these voting-rights bills to the floor, make him the Republican’s most valuable ally and the nation’s most prominent obstacle to voting-rights reform.
That LBJ-era legislation led to a mass migration of southern Democrats to the Republican Party. Today’s GOP is bent on a massive voter-suppression crusade to keep minorities and Democratic voters away from the polls.
President Joe Biden gave an impassioned speech at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on Tuesday in defense of voting rights in response to complaints from his own party that he was not doing enough on the subject. Now he has to deliver, and some fellow Democrats, most notably Manchin and Arizona’s Krysten Sinema, are his biggest problems. They preach the gospel of bipartisanship to Mitch McConnell’s deaf flock of non-believers.
Biden needs to get Manchin and those like him to at least carve out a filibuster exception to get these critical House-passed bills before the Senate.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has blocked debate on the For the People Act to overhaul elections and is opposing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement bill, calling both “unnecessary” even as his party works furiously to erect new barriers to minority voting.
Biden called the Republican campaign to restrict voting rights “anti-democratic and anti-American” and the party’s crusade “the greatest threat to the right to vote and the integrity of our elections since the Civil War.”
The January 6 deadly insurrection by Donald Trump’s followers was a violent attempt to deny the outcome of the presidential election. A century and a half in the past, the Confederates did not reach the Capitol, but Trump’s troops did, yet their leader and his supporters in Congress have no remorse and are in fact trying to rewrite history.
“THE BIG LIE is just that: a big lie!” declared Biden. The Big Liar himself, the disgraced former president, on Sunday told the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas that the insurrection was a “lovefest” by “peaceful people” and “patriots.” More and more GOP members of Congress are echoing those lies as they work to block an independent investigation of what happened that day.
When it comes to voting rights, the Republican approach is “less is more.” The fewer people who vote, especially minorities and Democrats, the greater their chances of winning.
If you had to summarize the Republican voter-suppression crusade in a single word it would be “race.” The GOP is overwhelmingly the party of angry white nativists who fear the nation’s growing diversity. And it’s a party that has legitimized a broad spectrum of hate groups that include the underground of antisemites and neo-Nazis – Trump’s “fine people” of Charlottesville.
The GOP is faced with two alternatives: broaden its appeal or change the voting rules. It has become Jim Crow on steroids.
The party is taking voter suppression a “dangerous” step farther than before, said Biden. It is not just a matter of who gets to vote, but now it is who gets to count the votes, he noted.
Democrats want to restore key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act struck down by the Supreme Court, which opened the way for the current deluge of Republican-pushed draconian voter-suppression measures at the state level, making it difficult and inconvenient to vote by restricting access and even making it a crime to offer a drink of water to people waiting in line to exercise their democratic right.
More than 400 bills have been introduced in the Texas legislature alone, where nearly all Democratic House members flew to Washington this week to block enactment of new voting restrictions being pushed by Gov. Greg Abbott and Republicans.
Biden’s Justice Department has sued the State of Georgia over its new voter suppression laws and will be targeting other states. Challenging these laws in the courts is essential, but more important is writing national laws to protect American democracy.
If Biden is as serious about defending voting rights as he so forcefully declared in Philadelphia, he’s going to have to do a lot more than give stirring speeches. And if he is not inclined to push for changes to the filibuster, as his press secretary said, neither bill has a chance of passing, and he should have kept Air Force One in its hangar. Nothing will happen so long as McConnell continues to enjoy almost unlimited veto power over legislation – and over democracy itself.