The Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act is just one more move in reducing democratic processes.
In the 2012 elections, if you added up all the votes for candidates for the House of Representatives, you'd find Democrats got 51% of the votes. But because of gerrymandering, the GOP has a significant majority there. Not only that, but the Democrats don't treat that as a serious issue.
Meanwhile, the Democrats haven't shown serious intent to change the filibuster to prevent a few Senators from blocking legislation.
The Electoral College has allowed candidates with a minority of the popular vote to become president.
The Supreme Court's [deceptively named] Citizens United ruling allows the rich to have unfair influence in elections. Imagine candidate debates where the candidate with the most big money gets to talk twice as long as other candidates. Yet, Citizens United is worse. Candidate debates take up only a tiny fraction of campaign season. Big money can have unlimited spending / ads to influence voters before the debates, and again have unlimited ads to misrepresent the debates between then and the election. Again, this isn't a serious issue to the Democrats.
We've seen states try to use selective purges of voter rolls, efforts to intimidate minority group voters, laws making it harder to register to vote, many-hours long lines to vote at certain voting sites, etc.
There are extensive efforts to keep some groups from voting, to allow unfair advantages to candidates favored by the rich and to misrepresent the votes that are cast.
In theory, these abuses could be prohibited by Constitutional amendments. However, our elected officials are already under the influence of big money - so, they aren't interested in fighting to restore democratic mechanisms. Even if they were, the Constitution can't be amended by the wishes of the majority. A Constitutional amendment requires a 2/3 vote in both the House and the Senate - in practice, that means you need about 70% of Congress members. Then, the proposed amendment must get approved by 3/4 of the state legislatures. So, in reality, you need more than 70% support to amend the Constitution.
A simple majority can pass laws taking away rights. You need something like 70% to get those rights back. Our current legal system makes it easier to pass laws restricting democracy than to make the Constitutional corrections to counteract those undemocratic laws.
As this trend to lessening democratic functions increases in pace, and our elected officials make little effort to use those unreasonably difficult countermeasures, it will only get worse. Each anti-democratic step makes it harder to elect anyone who would fight for democracy. We will have to reconsider what realistic options are left for working within the system. We will have to reconsider who really fights for democracy and who only gives lip service. We'll have to ask how much of our time, effort and money can be spent playing a game that is increasingly fixed against us. We will need to build movements that do not depend on the electoral system and do not make their choices based on events in the electoral system.
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Today, we have a Democrat in the White House - the nation's first president of a racial minority - and what does the email from the White House say the day after this ruling against the Voting Rights Act?
Here's the plan to cut carbon pollution
That's what you can expect from our elected officials on the fight for democracy.