Republican Legislatures Around The Country Are Proving Joe Manchin Wrong

Ronald Browstein reports at The Atlantic, Democracy Is Already Dying in the States:

While senator Joe Manchin is demanding that both parties agree on any further federal voting-rights legislation, a new study quantifies how completely Republicans have excluded Democrats from the passage of the restrictive voting laws proliferating in red states.

In places such as Florida, Georgia, Arizona, Iowa, Kansas, and Montana, the most restrictive laws approved this year have passed on total or near-complete party-line votes, with almost all state legislative Republicans voting for the bills and nearly all Democrats uniting against them, according to an analysis of state voting records provided exclusively to The Atlantic by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU.

That pattern of unrelenting partisanship has left many state-level Democrats incredulous at the repeated insistence by Manchin, a conservative Democrat from West Virginia, that he will support new federal voting-rights legislation only if at least some Republican senators agree to it.

Manchin is “acting like Republicans and Democrats are working together on this stuff, and Republicans in Arizona have completely shut the Democrats out of the [legislative] process,” Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state there, told me in an interview. Similarly, Jennifer Konfrst, the Democratic whip in the Iowa House of Representatives said, “It is unfathomable to me that we would look at this issue and say we have to bring Republicans along, in this political climate, in order to make true change. I don’t see anywhere where Republicans are inviting Democrats along, or inviting Democrats to the table. Why are some Democrats saying ‘I won’t do this unless it’s bipartisan?’”

In its latest tally of state voting laws, the Brennan Center says that since January, 14 states have passed 24 laws restricting voting access. (That’s not likely to be the final tally, because the center also reports that dozens of other restrictive bills are still pending across another 18 states.) Of the new restrictions that have already passed, the Brennan Center qualifies 17 in nine states as “highly restrictive,” imposing the greatest barriers to participation. In all of those nine states, Republicans hold unified control of both the state legislature and the governorship, except for Kansas, where the GOP-legislature overrode Democratic Governor Laura Kelly’s veto of their voting changes.

Every state-legislative Democrat casting a ballot voted against 13 of those 17 laws, according to the Brennan analysis. A single Democratic state House member in Arkansas and Montana, and a single state senator in Wyoming, voted for three of the other bills. The only bill Brennan classifies as restrictive that drew meaningful Democratic support was a second bill in Arkansas, narrowing the forms of identification voters could use at polling places, which a significant number of Democrats from both legislative chambers backed.

Apart from that Arkansas voter-ID bill, the other 16 restrictive Republican measures won support from just two of the 509 state House or Assembly Democrats who voted on them, and just one of the 207 Democratic state senators. No Democrat co-sponsored any of these restrictive bills, the Brennan Center found.

Meanwhile, no more than a single Republican in either legislative chamber voted against any of these bills, other than two measures in Montana (one of which was opposed by two Republican state House members; the other by two GOP state senators) and an absentee-voting bill in Arkansas (that six in the state House opposed). Of the 1,143 state House or Assembly Republicans who voted on these restrictive bills, just 12 voted no (including the six on that one Arkansas bill); among state Senate Republicans, just seven of 458 voted no on any of these measures, the Brennan analysis found. “This was overwhelmingly a Republican partisan push and effort in the states,” says Wendy Weiser, the vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center.

The Republican offensive has been spurred by former President Donald Trump’s disproved claims of widespread voter fraud and abetted by conservative groups, such as Heritage Action for America, which has published model principles for reconfiguring voter laws and taken credit for the quick GOP actions in several states. Republicans around the country have dismissed charges from Democrats that the GOP’s inability to prove any significant fraud in 2020 shows that the new restrictions are unnecessary. As the Texas Democratic State Representative Jessica Gonzalez put it during the floor debate there, “What are we trying to fix here that is not broken?”

In Arizona, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a bill earlier this spring that would remove up to 200,000 voters from the state’s permanent early-voter rolls, which qualifies residents to automatically receive an absentee ballot every election; voting experts anticipate a disproportionate number of those culled as a result to be Latino. No Democrat in either the Arizona state House or Senate voted for final passage of the bill, which was quickly signed into law by Republican Governor Doug Ducey.

Hobbs told me that although county election officials may have registered objections directly to the legislators, in terms of the bill, “nobody was interested in making it better or listening to actual concerns or what we actually would have needed to make election administration more streamlined.” Arizona Republicans are still pushing a second provision through the budget that would strip Hobbs’s office of its authority to defend the state in election-related lawsuits, shifting control to the GOP state attorney general only until the end of his current term.

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After being steamrolled by Republicans in these debates, many state-level Democrats are mystified by Manchin’s declaration that Washington should intervene to protect voting rights only if Senate Republicans agree to do so. “I know Senator Manchin is a former secretary of state, so I know he knows this subject matter, but in some places in the Deep South, like Texas, the level of voter discrimination is not accidental; it’s intentional, and there is no common ground you are going to find with Republicans, when it is their sole mission to stop people from voting,” Democratic Texas State Representative Trey Martinez Fischer told me.

Bennett, from Montana, also finds Manchin’s position disconnected from his experience on the ground. “In Montana, we all understand the importance of bipartisanship,” he said, “but we also have to consider the reality that we’ve got people at the state and federal level who are trying to undermine the core of our democracy. Bipartisanship is important, but the most important thing is passing bills that will protect every voter’s access to a ballot.”

In his calls for bipartisanship, Manchin is effectively giving Senate Republicans a veto on whether Washington should respond to an offensive against voting rights that red-state Republicans are advancing. Martinez Fischer echoed all of the state-level officials I spoke with when he told me that although the bipartisanship Manchin wants on voting rules might be ideal, it ignores the reality of how Republicans are acting in the states today. “You have a very noble standard in Washington as to how you’d like to operate, but when you pull the curtain back, you are going to see hyper-partisanship at its worst,” he said.

Manchin has been vague and elusive on why bipartisanship should be the standard for voting laws in Washington when it’s clearly not the rule in the states, or why he believes that congressional Republicans will agree to undo the partisan advantages their state counterparts are pushing into law. (His office did not respond to a request for comment on those questions.) Privately, other Democrats and voting-rights advocates have debated whether he is being naive or disingenuous in insisting that a critical mass of Senate Republicans will ultimately vote to protect voting rights. The new Brennan data, by so starkly documenting the partisan nature of the offensive against voter access under way in the states, may point the needle further toward disingenuous as the explanation if Manchin remains adamant in his refusal to act without Republican consent.

Manchin is defending a mistake in the Senate rules that the Founding Fathers never intended. Senate Filibuster Was Created By Mistake:

In 2010, Brookings Senior Fellow Sarah Binder, an expert on Congress and congressional history, testified to the Senate that “the filibuster was created by mistake.”

We have many received wisdoms about the filibuster. However, most of them are not true. The most persistent myth is that the filibuster was part of the founding fathers’ constitutional vision for the Senate: It is said that the upper chamber was designed to be a slow-moving, deliberative body that cherished minority rights. In this version of history, the filibuster was a critical part of the framers’ Senate.

However, when we dig into the history of Congress, it seems that the filibuster was created by mistake. Let me explain.

The House and Senate rulebooks in 1789 were nearly identical. Both rulebooks included what is known as the “previous question” motion. The House kept their motion, and today it empowers a simple majority to cut off debate. The Senate no longer has that rule on its books.

What happened to the Senate’s rule? In 1805, Vice President Aaron Burr was presiding over the Senate (freshly indicted for the murder of Alexander Hamilton), and he offered this advice. He said something like this. You are a great deliberative body. But a truly great Senate would have a cleaner rule book. Yours is a mess. You have lots of rules that do the same thing. And he singles out the previous question motion. Now, today, we know that a simple majority in the House can use the rule to cut off debate. But in 1805, neither chamber used the rule that way. Majorities were still experimenting with it. And so when Aaron Burr said, get rid of the previous question motion, the Senate didn’t think twice. When they met in 1806, they dropped the motion from the Senate rule book.

Why? Not because senators in 1806 sought to protect minority rights and extended debate. They got rid of the rule by mistake: Because Aaron Burr told them to.

Once the rule was gone, senators still did not filibuster. Deletion of the rule made possible the filibuster because the Senate no longer had a rule that could have empowered a simple majority to cut off debate. It took several decades until the minority exploited the lax limits on debate, leading to the first real-live filibuster in 1837.

Thomas Mann wrote that “the routinization of the filibuster under Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — with a 60-vote threshold for action the new norm, rather than the exception — is a perversion of the intentions of the framers of the Constitution and Senate traditions.”

There is no historical or justifiable reason to preserve the Senate filibuster rule as the “Grim Reaper of Democracy,” Mitch McConnell, has weaponized it as a weapon of mass destruction. Joe Manchin’s assertion that it promotes bipartisanship is without any historical precedent – quite the contrary – it was primarily used by Southern Segregationists during the Jim Crow era to obstruct civil rights and voting rights legislation, just as Mitch McConnell is deploying it right now.

The reality is that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, and possibly a handful of other Democrats hiding behind them, are enabling a GQP Jim Crow 2.0 filibuster of voting rights legislation. Why?

Simple majorities in GQP-controlled state legislatures are passing Jim Crow 2.0 voter suppression laws. U.S. Senate Democrats should use their simple majority to constrain these Jim Crow 2.0 voter suppression laws with voting rights legislation.