Midnight Is Approaching To Pass Voting Rights Legislation And To Save American Democracy

Above Image: h/t the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in a different context.

Axios reports, “Midnight is approaching” to pass voting rights protections:

“Defenders of democracy in America still have a slim window of opportunity to act. But time is ticking away, and midnight is approaching,” according to more than 150 top scholars of U.S. democracy in a new push to temporarily suspend the Senate filibuster and pass voting rights protections on a simple majority vote.

Read the letter.

Driving the news: Their unified front comes amid a short break in the legislative action on Capitol Hill, with the start of the Thanksgiving recess and after the House passage of President Biden’s “Build Back Better” social spending package.

• • • When Congress returns, it’ll be scrambling to avert a government shutdown, raise the debt ceiling and pass the annual defense authorization bill.
    • And Democrats will be trying to keep BBB alive in the Senate, where just one skeptic in their bare-majority ranks — such as West Virginia’s Joe Manchin — could have the power to sink it.

What they’re saying: Those challenges shouldn’t distract from the urgency of passing the compromise Freedom to Vote Act before midterm elections begin, the group says in its public letter.

• • • Written by scholars from Duke to Stanford universities, it touches on former President Trump’s “Big Lie” and some GOP efforts to empower political officials to overturn legitimate election results.
    • “The partisan politicization of what has long been trustworthy, non-partisan administration of elections represents a clear and present threat to the future of electoral democracy in the United States.”
    • Doing nothing would undermine free and fair elections and “likely result in an extended period of minority rule, which a majority of the country would reject as undemocratic and illegitimate,” the letter says.

Between the lines: Manchin is the one senator most likely to decide whether Democrats do suspend the legislative filibuster, at least in this one case.

• • • The Freedom to Vote Act was actually Manchin’s answer to a voting rights expansion by Democrats. But Republicans used the filibuster last month to block his compromise from advancing.
    • The bill included provisions to make Election Day a public holiday, have same day voter registration at all polling places by 2024 and ensure at least 15 days of early voting for federal elections.
    • Manchin has been an active defender of the filibuster. But Democrats can’t pass the bill with a simple majority unless they suspend the rule.

We’ve already been over this. Sen. Sinema Is The Biggest Obstacle To Voting Rights Legislation. She appears oblivious to the threat to the survival of American democracy and the fierce urgency of now to save it.

HuffPost reports, U.S. Added To Annual List Of ‘Backsliding’ Democracies For First Time:

The U.S. has been added to an annual list of “backsliding” democracies for the first time, with the intergovernmental organization behind the analysis citing election disinformation, voter disenchantment and the coronavirus pandemic among the reasons for the decline.

The report released Monday by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, based in Sweden, finds that the U.S. has fallen “victim to authoritarian tendencies” in recent years with this decline following a larger five-year trend seen globally.

Brian Klass explains at the Washington Post, Republican authoritarianism is here to stay:

For the past decade, I’ve studied the rise of authoritarianism and the breakdown of democracy around the world. Traveling from Madagascar to Thailand and Belarus to Zambia, I’ve tried to understand how despotic politicians and authoritarian political parties systematically destroy democracy. And based on that research, I have some bad news: The party of Reagan and Romney is long dead. The party of Trump is here to stay.

What has happened in the United States over the past five years is, in many ways, a classic of the autocratic genre. A populist leader rose to power, attacked the press, politicized rule of law, threatened to jail his opponents, demonized minorities, praised dictators abroad, spread conspiracy theoriesand lies, and then sought to seize power despite losing an election. When such despotic figures emerge in democracies, their political party has two options: push back against the would-be despot while reasserting democratic principles, or remake the party in his image. Republicans have quite clearly chosen the latter path.

[The] conclusion is depressing, but we must face reality: The battle for the Republican Party is over. The Trumpian authoritarians have won — and they’re not going to be defeated by pro-democracy Republicans anytime soon.

“More than two-thirds of the world’s population now live in backsliding democracies or autocratic regimes,” states the Global State of Democracy (GSoD Indices) report, which was first launched in 2016. “The world is becoming more authoritarian as non-democratic regimes become even more brazen in their repression.”

The report says that democratic backsliding is often a gradual process that ends with either the democracy breaking down or it returning to normal health. This takes an average of nine years from the onset of backsliding, it said.

Globally, the report found that election results have become more contested, even when the elections were found to be largely free and fair. The report cites former President Donald Trump’s questioning of the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election results as “a historic turning point” in this growing theme that has damaged public trust in elections.

“Trump’s baseless allegations during the 2020 US presidential election have had spillover effects, including in Brazil, Mexico, Myanmar and Peru, among others,” the report states. “Baseless allegations of electoral fraud and related disinformation undermined fundamental trust in the electoral process, which culminated in the storming of the US Capitol building in January 2021.”

Related, the GSoD Indices noted a decline in “clean elections” in the U.S. since 2015. Clean elections are defined in the report as ones that are free, lack evidence of voting irregularities and government intimidation, and where there’s fair electoral competition. Similar declines were seen in Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Hungary, India, Mauritius, Namibia and Poland, according to the report.

Political activism was also found to have dropped in the U.S., with the report blaming voter disenchantment and an increasing perception that governments are failing to address people’s social and economic needs. Supporting this negative perception, the report cited some states’ voter registration and voting access laws, ones either recently enacted or under discussion, which have been found to disproportionately harm minorities’ right to vote. Such controversial laws have recently gained approval in Texas, Georgia, Arizona and Florida.

The report also says the coronavirus pandemic has harmed democratic rights globally. The uneven global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines along with the rise in vaccine misinformation has not only prolonged the health crisis but has normalized restrictions on basic freedoms, the report states.

In the U.S., the report pointed to incidents at the start of the pandemic in which doctors and medical staff were ordered not to speak to journalists about shortages in personal protective equipment and other dire working conditions or they’d face termination. Elsewhere in the world, people have faced criminal prosecution if they shared pandemic disinformation, and military forces were used to enforce compliance with pandemic-related rules.

On the flip side, the report found that many democratic countries learned to adapt and continue to practice fair elections despite such exceedingly challenging conditions.

“They rapidly activated special voting arrangements to allow citizens to continue exercising their democratic rights,” the report states.

In other words, jettison the anti-democratic Jim Crow relic Senate filibuster rule to pass much needed voting rights legislation to save American democracy from GQP authoritarianism. Trumpism is the new American fascism.

It is an affront to the millions of Americans who served in World War II to fight a war to rid the world of fascism. Their sacrifice and service is being dishonored by Americans today who embrace anti-democratic fascism in the personality cult of Donald Trump. Do not surrender to the darkness.

It is disturbing that Sen. Sinema appears blind to this threat to American democracy, or is not moved to do what she should know is necessary to save American democracy.