The Republican Party has faced an option of either moderating their policies or opposing democracy by pushing voter suppression and by gerrymandering congressional districts. They have consistently chosen to oppose democracy and suppress the vote. After their promulgation of the big lie and their loss in the presidential election, the republicans were at it once again, only even more extreme than normal. They made it against the law to even give water or food to people standing in line to vote and eliminated mobile voting and limited ballot drop boxes and of course made identification requirements much more difficult. This was so extreme that it has prompted reactions from the business community and even from the MLB. Opening the vote to all legally eligible voters and making it easier for all legally eligible voters to vote should not be political. If a party is opposing making it easier for all legally eligible voters to vote and is pushing for voter suppression even though voter fraud is extremely rare, then that tells us that the party is extremist and out of touch with the majority of voters. If that wasn’t the case, then they would not be afraid of the outcome of a high turnout. This should not be a partisan issue. It only becomes partisan if a party knows that it has adopted extremist positions and can’t win with a large turnout. Their voter suppression tactics are designed to make it more difficult for voters of color and especially African American voters to vote. It is the new Jim Crow. And due to the discriminatory nature of their voter suppression bill and its opposition to democracy, MLB would not hold its All Star game in Georgia and Delta and Coca Cola spoke out against it.
MLB opposes the voter suppression bill. In theory, voter suppression should be opposed by both major political parties. The republicans politicized the right to vote and MLB stood up against that. And so what did Texas Governor Abbott say and do ? He opposed MLB for opposing the politicization of voting rights and in so doing, he politicized voting rights himself while claiming to be upset about politicization and refused to throw out the first ball at the Texas Rangers game on Monday.
If you can’t win without suppressing the vote, then you are on the wrong side of voters and you are not doing politics right. The republicans would not be doing this if they didn’t know that they will lose in high turnout elections. They should have had a distinct edge in Georgia in the run off elections after losing the presidential election because that lost should have really motivated them and could have made our voters complacent. We were not at all complacent and Stacey Abrams kicked ass and we won. This showed republicans the danger that they are in. Their extremism combined with their identification with Donald Trump and his big lie and utter apathy to the loss of American lives from the novel coronavirus and their conspiracy theories turned the electorate against them. They know this which is why they have 253 voter suppression bills in play across the country.
That’s why we have to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. We can’t allow the filibuster to prevent these bills from getting an up or down vote. If they don’t pass, we will be in the minority after 2022. Republicans don’t need the filibuster to avoid being shut out of the legislative process which is why Joe Manchin claims he supports the filibuster. They don’t need it because they are already overrepresented in Congress due to how the composition of the US Senate is determined and due to gerrymandering and voter concentration as well as previous efforts at voter suppression. Democratic Party candidates for US Senate in sum if you add up all the votes in the general election for all three cohorts won 27 million more votes than their Republican Party counterparts. Yet, the US Senate is split evenly 50-50. As we all know, the reason for this ridiculous result is that Wyoming with five people and two chickens and one dog has the same amount of US Senators representing it as California does even though California has forty million people. It’s utterly absurd. It’s dangerous allowing a minority that does not even make up a plurality of voters to dominate the federal government. Gerrymandering means that our Democratic Party has to win cumulatively speaking at least 4 to 5 percent more votes than the Republican Party in order to control the US House of Representatives. This is not even to mention how the electoral college favors the Republican Party which is made manifest by the fact that even though President Biden won seven million more votes than the former guy, he only won the electoral college by 40,000 votes. So, Joe Manchin need have no fear that eliminating the filibuster will mean that the Republican Party will be shut out of the legislative process. They are already over-represented as compared to their percentage of the vote nationally. Even without the filibuster, all republicans have to do to avoid being shut out of the legislative process is to avoid extremism and not oppose popular bills and not oppose the will of the voters. Clearly, on balance the filibuster hurts our Democratic Party.
It is a moral failure if we do not eliminate the filibuster. We can’t let an extremist 40% of the electorate dominate the federal government and it is entirely in our hands to prevent this. The filibuster enables an extremist 40% of the voters to stop what a substantial majority of voters want. Failing that and it would be a major failure, we need to at least carve out an exception to the filibuster for democracy / voting rights bills . There is no argument that can justify not at the very least carving out an exception to the filibuster for democracy / voting rights bills. Now we are only talking about voting rights. So, even if one wrongly somehow believes that the filibuster is a good idea in general, what Senate Democrat will tell us that it is morally right to allow voting rights, the foundation of our democracy, to be filibustered ? Then we must reform the filibuster to be an inverted talking filibuster. An inverted talking filibuster won’t be enough to get an up or down vote on the democracy bills because they have 50 senators who will cover the 40 shifts needed at all times.
Senator Manchin and Senator Sinema will need to decide if they support democracy and voting rights or if they support the filibuster. They cannot support both. They will have to choose. And that choice should be clear for even the most conservative democrat in the US Senate.