Saturday, January 15, 2022

Will America Allow GOP Criminal Conspiracy to Steal Voting Rights & Install a Corrupt, Violent Authoritarian Tyranny? 🌊 ♨ ⛈

American Democracy under attack by Authoritarian Criminal Conspirators/GOP & Mad Mob Bo$$ 


President Obama's Appeal for Voting Rights Protection: We need to follow John Lewis' example & fight for our democracy

When I spoke at John Lewis’s memorial service two years ago, I emphasized a truth John knew better than just about anyone. Our democracy isn’t a given. It isn’t self-executing. We, as citizens, have to nurture and tend it. We have to work at it. And in that task, we have to vigilantly preserve and protect our most basic tool of self-government, which is the right to vote. 

At the time, various state legislators across the country had already passed a variety of laws designed to make voting harder. It was an attack on everything John Lewis fought for, and a challenge to our most fundamental democratic freedoms.

Since then, things have only gotten worse.

While the American people turned out to vote at the highest rate in over a century in the last presidential election, members of one of our two major political parties – spurred on by the then-sitting president – denied the results of that election and spun conspiracy theories that drove a violent mob to attack our Capitol. Although initially rejected by many Republicans, those claims continued to be amplified by conservative media outlets, and have since been embraced by a sizeable portion of Republican voters – not to mention GOP elected officials who do, or at least should, know better. Those Republican officials and conservative thought leaders who have courageously stood their ground and rejected such anti-democratic efforts have found themselves ostracized, threatened, and subjected to primary challenges.

Meanwhile, state legislators in 49 states have introduced more than 400 bills designed to suppress votes. Some of these bills we’ve seen before: legislation that would discourage voters – including racial minorities, low-income voters, and young people – from casting a ballot. Others aim to treat certain polling locations differently, creating one set of rules for voters living in cities and another set for people living in more conservative, rural areas.

We’re also seeing more aggressive attempts to gerrymander congressional districts. Gerrymandering, which essentially allows politicians to choose their voters instead of the other way around, isn’t new – and both parties have engaged in it. But what we’re seeing now are far more aggressive and precise efforts on the part of Republican state legislatures to tilt the playing field in their favor. In states that have approved new congressional maps, there are now 15 fewer competitive districts than there were before. Fewer competitive districts increases partisanship, since candidates who only have to appeal to primary voters have no incentive to compromise or move to the center.

Finally and perhaps most perniciously, we’ve seen state legislatures try to assert power over core election processes including the ability to certify election results. These partisan attempts at voter nullification are unlike anything we’ve seen in modern times, and they represent a profound threat to the basic democratic principle that all votes should be counted fairly and objectively.



The good news is that the majority of American voters are resistant to this slow unraveling of basic democratic institutions and electoral mechanisms. But their elected representatives have a sacred obligation to push back as well – and now is the time to do it. 

Right now, there are bills in front of the Senate that would protect the right to vote, end partisan gerrymandering, and restore crucial parts of the Voting Rights Act. The bill’s sponsors have diligently reached out to their Republican colleagues to obtain their support. Sadly, almost every Senate Republican who expressed concern about threats to our democracy in the immediate aftermath of the January 6th insurrection has since been cowed into silence or reversed their positions. When one of the bills in front of the Senate today was introduced in November, every Democrat supported it. And every Republican but one voted against moving it forward.

Protecting our democracy wasn’t always a partisan issue. The Voting Rights Act was the result of Democratic and Republican efforts, and both President Reagan and President George W. Bush signed its renewal when they were in office. But even if Senate Republicans now refuse to stand up for our democracy, Democrats should be able to get the job done with a simple majority vote. There are already 50 Senators who support bills to safeguard elections. The only thing standing in the way is the filibuster – a Senate procedure that allows a minority of just 41 Senators to prevent legislation from being brought up for a vote. 

The filibuster has no basis in the Constitution. Historically, the parliamentary tactic was used sparingly – most notably by Southern Senators to block civil rights legislation and prop up Jim Crow. In recent years, the filibuster has become a routine way for the Senate minority to block important progress on issues supported by the majority of voters. But we can’t allow it to be used to block efforts to protect our democracy. 

That’s why I fully support President Joe Biden’s call to modify Senate rules as necessary to make sure pending voting rights legislation gets called for a vote. And every American who cares about the survival of our most cherished institutions should support the President’s call as well.

For generations, Americans of every political stripe have taken pride in our status as the world’s oldest continuous democracy. We have spilled precious blood and spent countless treasure in defense of democracy and freedom abroad. But as we learned during the Jim Crow era, our role as democracy’s defender isn’t credible when we violate the rights and freedoms of our own citizens. And at a time when democracy is under attack on every continent, we can’t hope to set an example for the world when one of our two major parties seems intent on chipping away at the foundation of our own democracy. 

No single piece of legislation can guarantee that we’ll make progress on every challenge we face as a nation. But legislation that ensures the right to vote and makes sure every vote is properly counted will give us a better chance of meeting those challenges. It’s how we can overcome the gridlock and cynicism that’s so prevalent right now. It’s how we can stop climate change, and reform our broken immigration system, and help ensure that our children enjoy an economy that works for everyone and not just the few.

Now is the time for all of us to follow John Lewis’s example. Now is the time for the U.S. Senate to do the right thing. America’s long-standing experiment in democracy is being sorely tested. Future generations are counting on us to meet that test.

https://www.obama.org/

KEY FEATURES OF THE FREEDOM TO VOTE ACT

For American democracy to work, our citizens must have equal opportunities to vote, and the public needs to trust that our elections are fair. But politicians have increasingly worked to make it harder for Americans who oppose them to vote, and trust in our democracy is dropping.

The Freedom to Vote Act makes it harder for politicians to choose who votes and creates national standards to ensure greater transparency and security in how votes are counted.

Specifically, the Freedom to Vote Act will

* Create nationwide voter ID standards

* Require 15 days of early voting and vote-by-mail options for all voters

* Ensure every ballot has a paper trail, and every voter can track their mail-in ballot

* Make Election Day a federal holiday

* Fund strong, state-run audits to protect democracy and election integrity

* Allow same-day voter registration for American citizens with proper identification

 The Freedom to Vote Act is our best shot at ensuring all American citizens have the opportunity to vote and that all votes are counted fairly. This is how we make sure America’s government stays beholden to the will of the people, not the politicians.

https://www.freedom-to-vote.com/




Voting Laws Roundup: Brennan Center

This year’s tidal wave of restrictive voting legislation will continue in 2022.

In 2021, the state legislative push to restrict access to voting was not only aggressive — it was also successful.

Between January 1 and December 7, at least 19 states passed 34 laws restricting access to voting. More than 440 bills with provisions that restrict voting access have been introduced in 49 states in the 2021 legislative sessions. These numbers are extraordinary: state legislatures enacted far more restrictive voting laws in 2021 than in any year since the Brennan Center began tracking voting legislation in 2011. More than a third of all restrictive voting laws enacted since then were passed this year. And in a new trend this year, legislators introduced bills to allow partisan actors to interfere with election processes or even reject election results entirely.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-december-2021



Filibuster Out of Control 

Although filibustering originally required the minority to stand up for their principles and actively engage in debate— without pause —if they wanted to delay the vote, over time Senators relaxed their interpretation of those unwritten rules to permit them to avoid a vote without verbally justifying their views.

​The filibuster has a mixed history, but the most famous and longest filibusters came during the Civil Rights era to prevent the end of Jim Crow.

​Since that time, it has gotten easier and easier to filibuster, to the point that it has gotten out of control. Though the filibuster was originally used to debate a bill, over time it became used to dispute judicial nominations too.

When the filibuster became a default tactic to essentially "pocket veto" bills and nominations, it was used rampantly. There were more filibusters during President Obama's time in office than in the 50s, 60s, and 70s combined. In the history of the Senate before 2009, just 68 judicial nominees ever required a vote to end the filibuster ("cloture"). In contrast, 79 nominees between 2009-2013 required cloture, (ultimately leading the Senate to change its rules so judges could no longer be filibustered.)

Reforming the Filibuster throughout History

The first major change to the filibuster was introduced in 1917 to overcome the tactic being used to stall important votes around World War I.  The Senate created the cloture rule, allowing a vote of 67 Senators (later reduced to 60) to end debate and force a vote.

Over the past several decades, the Senate has changed its filibuster rules many times, passing more than 161 pieces of legislation from 1969 onward under exceptions to the established filibuster rules. 

The Nuclear Option

After more than a century of failed clotures and haggled exceptions, the last decade has pushed Senators to reevaluate their own rules. Because the filibuster has become such a common and easy tactic for the minority to block the will of the elected majority in the Senate, both parties have increasingly moved to reform and limit the filibuster.  

The most famous of the recent reforms was the so-called “nuclear option” that then-Republican Senate Majority Leader McConnell finally used in 2017 to override the Democrats’ filibuster to confirm Supreme Court justices by a simple majority vote — requiring only 51 votes to the previous 60.  

The term “nuclear option” was coined by former Republican Senate Majority Leader, Trent Lott.  It was seen as an unthinkable step to do away with the filibuster completely for judges because each party knew that such a change would undermine the historic precedent of appointing judges that could draw consensus from both parties.

​After decades of different changes, carve-outs, and exceptions, the secret filibuster continues to undermine the will of the majority in America. Most recently, it threatens the John Lewis Freedom to Vote Act, which has broad majority support by the American public. 

This has many Americans wanting filibuster reform, not through the “nuclear option” which President Biden opposes, but by restoring it to the original talking filibuster that encourages debate, voting, and provides protections to the Republican minority.

https://www.filibusterreform.com/what-is-the-filibuster


VP Kamala Harris pushed hard for voting rights — then hit a brick wall

The VP’s work was more extensive than known. 

More than six months ago, Vice President Kamala Harris embraced a new mission: to lead the administration’s push for federal voting rights legislation.

It was a chance to make her mark on a hugely important issue. And it took on added importance as her tenure turned bumpy over the summer. She dove into it.

For months, she helped craft political coalitions with civil rights leaders, built outside pressure on Congress and engaged privately with lawmakers. She met with Black leaders, helped create a list of actions that federal agencies could take to promote voter engagement and, more recently, added a larger media profile, with a high clip of national interviews. She spoke at the anniversary event for the Jan. 6 insurrection alongside President Joe Biden and then accompanied him to Georgia for a speech this past week to make a last public plea to pass new protections for voting.

On Friday, her work — and that of the administration, as a whole — hit a brick wall, as two moderate Senate Democrats said they would not support weakening the rules of the chamber to pass the party’s two election reform priorities. It’s left Harris in a now familiar place: stymied and with an uncertain path forward.

Harris’ aides and advisers say she’s unbowed by the setback. They view her more aggressive posture and increasingly public persona as an implicit sign that she’s solidified her standing in the White House. Allies argue she's finally getting a chance to succeed after prior misuse.

“When you're vice president, you really can't get out front of the White House," said Bakari Sellers, a friend of the vice president’s and one of her most vocal supporters. "It's tough. But with the president actually being forceful in nature about and not fence-sitting about his position on the filibuster on this issue, it gives her the tools necessary to be successful and that's the only concern I've ever raised. You want to make sure that she's not being handicapped."

The expectation going forward is that Harris and the administration will keep pushing for legislative progress in addition to meeting with key stakeholders. A White House official said Harris’ team is formulating plans on what next steps look like and that both public and private engagements for Harris are being discussed.

When asked on Friday what the next step on voting rights would be, Harris told reporters, “Well, we keep fighting. We are committed to seeing this through however long it takes and whatever it takes." She noted that she had, just today, “extensive meetings and discussions about how we can see this through.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/15/harris-voting-rights-push-527186

MLK, Jr.’s Birthday, The Racist Filibuster and the Fight for Voting Rights

Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan/ Democracy Now!

U.S. democracy is in crisis, as Republican supporters of the January 6th Capitol insurrection restrict or even eliminate democracy’s core tenet of one person, one vote. Former President Donald Trump is driving democracy’s demise, spouting the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him through massive voter fraud. Countless audits, over 60 court cases and both Democratic and Republican state Secretaries of State confirmed President Joe Biden trounced Trump by over seven million votes.

Nevertheless, Republican shills up and down the party power structure, from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to operatives at the state and local level, have embraced Trump’s Big Lie, ramping up voter suppression, gerrymandering and the use of dark money to ensure they can grab power and hold it indefinitely, even as the GOP is shrinking as a share of the electorate.

Two bills are currently before the Senate to stop this slide into authoritarianism: the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Similar versions have already passed in the House. Senate Democrats must first overcome Republican filibusters, though. The filibuster has long been used to derail civil rights legislation in the Senate, and now is no different.

It normally takes 60 of the 100 senators to defeat a filibuster, currently an insurmountable barrier in the face of Republican opposition. Democrats could use a targeted override of the filibuster, a “carve-out,” which would need the votes of all 50 members of the Senate Democratic caucus along with the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris. But two conservative Senate Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have indicated they likely won’t support the maneuver.

“Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace,” President Biden asked at a speech Wednesday in Atlanta, advocating for the temporary filibuster override needed to advance these voting rights bills. “Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”

Bull Connor was the brutal, white sumpremacist Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham, Alabama during most of the civil rights era. Biden’s reference to Bull Connor echoed a Nation Magazine article written by Martin Luther King, Jr., in March, 1964, as activists were pushing passage of the Civil Rights Act:

“As had been foreseen, the bill survived intact in the House. It has now moved to the Senate, where a legislative confrontation reminiscent of Birmingham impends. Bull Connor became a weight too heavy for the conscience of Birmingham to bear. There are men in the Senate who now plan to perpetuate the injustices Bull Connor so ignobly defended. His weapons were the high-pressure hose, the club and the snarling dog; theirs is the filibuster. If America is as revolted by them as it was by Bull Connor, we shall emerge with a victory.”

The essay appeared four months after President Kennedy’s assassination and nine months before King received the Nobel Peace Prize.

“It is not too much to ask, 101 years after the Emancipation, that Senators who must meet the challenge of filibuster do so in the spirit of the heroes of Birmingham,” King continued in that piece, invoking the powerful memory of the four young African American girls killed in the racist bombing of The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on September 15th, 1963, and two more youth killed in rioting that immediately followed. “There could be no more fitting tribute to the children of Birmingham than to have the Senate for the first time in history bury a civil rights filibuster. The dead children cannot be restored, but living children can be given a life. The assassins who still walk the streets will still be unpunished, but at least they will be defeated.”

That filibuster eventually failed, and the Civil Rights Act became law, followed by the monumental Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA). The VRA revolutionized African American political participation in the U.S., especially in the Deep South. The rightwing never stopped attacking it. Two recent Supreme Court decisions, Shelby v. Holder in 2013 and Brnovich v. the DNC in 2021, gutted the VRA, unleashing a flood of gerrymandering and laws designed to reduce voter turnout, disenfranchising millions of voters from Democratic-leaning urban centers and other communities of color.

“Frederick Douglass told us a long time ago: ‘Power concedes nothing without a demand,’” Georgia-based activist Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, said Thursday on the Democracy Now! news hour. As we mark what would have been Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 93rd birthday, now is the time to demand that the U.S. Senate override the Jim Crow filibuster and pass meaningful voting rights legislation.

https://www.democracynow.org/2022/1/13/mlk_jrs_birthday_the_racist_filibuster

KNOW YOUR RIGHTS

Voting Rights are Human Rights!

Learn more about how to exercise your voting rights, resist voter intimidation efforts, and access disability-related accommodations and language assistance at the polls. For help at the polls, call the non-partisan Election Protection Hotline at 1-866-OUR-VOTE.

https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/voting-rights/


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