Voting Rights Act of 1965 – Democracy Watch

Over at NY Mag, Ed Kilgore writes about how Vice President Kamala Harris has unveiled a fallback strategy in case voting rights bills fail to pass Congress.

First, for some context, NBC News reports on the Harris announcement:

Vice President Kamala Harris will announce Thursday a $25 million investment by the Democratic National Committee to support efforts to protect voting access ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.

The announcement comes as Republican-controlled states around the country have passed a wave of restrictive voting rights laws fueled in part by former President Donald Trump’s false claims about the results of the 2020 election.

President Joe Biden has been criticized by some Democrats and civil rights advocates for not taking a more aggressive approach to fighting those new laws after Senate Republicans blocked voting rights legislation last month.

Kilgore argues that “it’s true Democrats have failed to overcome Republican resistance to voting-rights legislation, either by securing GOP support or by convincing Democratic centrists like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to restrict or abolish the competing right of Senate minorities to kill legislation via the filibuster.” (Ed. note: Emphasis added.)

He concludes, stating that “what Harris announced should be treated as a serious and important contribution to the cause of voting rights, not dismissed as an excuse for failure to do the impossible in Congress.”

I do not take issue with Vice President Harris or her announcement. In fact, it is vital for at least one of America’s major parties to invest in voter protections while the other party attempts to dismantle what’s left of democracy in the United States.

However, there are at least two major issues with this piece:

1) A person of color’s right to vote and the “right” of 41 (mostly white) senators to block legislation are not remotely equal competing interests. The filibuster is the perfect demonstration of white supremacy in Congress. It was used to deny civil rights in the middle of the 20th century. Now it’s used to deny voting rights protections in the 21st century.

2) There is nothing “impossible” about the Democratic majority using their majority to pass voting rights bills. Is it difficult to get 50 senators (51 with VP Harris) to agree on legislation? Yes. But it is hardly an “impossible” task.

After all, Republicans managed to eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, allowing them to ram three Trump appointees onto the Supreme Court – including a seat that they held vacant for a year in the hopes of winning the White House in 2016 and another that they filled merely days before Election Day 2020 when voters opted to kick Donald Trump to the curb. (In January 2021, voters elected a Democratic Senate majority.)

It’s also worth noting that the Supreme Court just gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that the DOJ is relying on in a lawsuit challenging Georgia’s voter suppression law. So one of the fallbacks that Kilgore mentions is basically dead in the water.

The only thing preventing Senate Democrats from eliminating the filibuster for voting rights bills, reforming the filibuster (i.e. a “talking filibuster”), or eliminating the filibuster entirely is the will to act decisively in order to protect our democracy.

In an open letter, dozens of scholars from prestigious universities warned that American democracy is at risk.

“We, the undersigned, are scholars of democracy who have watched the recent deterioration of U.S. elections and liberal democracy with growing alarm. Specifically, we have watched with deep concern as Republican-led state legislatures across the country have in recent months proposed or implemented what we consider radical changes to core electoral procedures in response to unproven and intentionally destructive allegations of a stolen election. Collectively, these initiatives are transforming several states into political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections. Hence, our entire democracy is now at risk,” the scholars write.

The scholars – who span the ideological spectrum and represent universities like Brown, Stanford, Notre Dame with notable names like Norm Ornstein and Larry Sabato – add that:

Statutory changes in large key electoral battleground states are dangerously politicizing the process of electoral administration, with Republican-controlled legislatures giving themselves the power to override electoral outcomes on unproven allegations should Democrats win more votes. They are seeking to restrict access to the ballot, the most basic principle underlying the right of all adult American citizens to participate in our democracy. They are also putting in place criminal sentences and fines meant to intimidate and scare away poll workers and nonpartisan administrators. State legislatures have advanced initiatives that curtail voting methods now preferred by Democratic-leaning constituencies, such as early voting and mail voting. Republican lawmakers have openly talked about ensuring the “purity” and “quality” of the vote, echoing arguments widely used across the Jim Crow South as reasons for restricting the Black vote.
State legislators supporting these changes have cited the urgency of “electoral integrity” and the need to ensure that elections are secure and free of fraud. But by multiple expert judgments, the 2020 election was extremely secure and free of fraud. The reason that Republican voters have concerns is because many Republican officials, led by former President Donald Trump, have manufactured false claims of fraud, claims that have been repeatedly rejected by courts of law, and which Trump’s own lawyers have acknowledged were mere speculation when they testified about them before judges.
In future elections, these laws politicizing the administration and certification of elections could enable some state legislatures or partisan election officials to do what they failed to do in 2020: reverse the outcome of a free and fair election. Further, these laws could entrench extended minority rule, violating the basic and longstanding democratic principle that parties that get the most votes should win elections.

The consequence of these voter suppression laws is that America may soon cease to be a democracy. In fact, the scholars argue that some states “no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections.”

Florida, Georgia, Arizona, Iowa, and Montana have already passed voter suppression laws that put their status as democracies into doubt. Texas is among the numerous states that is still considering laws to restrict voting.

What can be done?

The scholars argue that the federal government must step in to ensure equal access to the ballot box in order to maintain free and fair elections since state legislatures are moving to undermine democracy within their borders.

The federal government has a history of intervention in order to ensure that voting rights are upheld in jurisdictions where voter suppression is common – particularly in the South. These laws date back at least to Reconstruction and more recently with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The scholars write that Congress should pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, although they argue that that “alone is not enough.” They endorse suspending the filibuster in order to pass a new voting rights law and a “comprehensive set of national standards” to maintain election integrity.

They conclude the letter with a warning: “Our democracy is fundamentally at stake. History will judge what we do at this moment.”

Over at NY Mag, Ed Kilgore writes about how Vice President Kamala Harris has unveiled a fallback strategy in case voting rights bills fail to pass Congress.

In an open letter, dozens of scholars from prestigious universities warned that American democracy is at risk.

What can be done?