Sen. Maggie Hassan Gives The Speech That We All Need To Hear From Sen. Kyrsten Sinema

After delivering a floor speech in the Senate, Senator Maggie Hassan talks with Rachel Maddow about the looming partisan threat to U.S. democracy and her change of heart about the Senate filibuster rule that Republicans are hiding behind to allow state Republicans to compromise the integrity of the election process.

Paul Waldman of the Washington Post again tries to explain this to the two prima donna Democratic divas who are appeasing GQP tyranny and their war on American democracy. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin mull whether democracy is worth saving:

Democrats are now considering pushing negotiations over the Build Back Better package into next year and moving immediately to pass one or both of their voting rights bills, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act.

But getting either bill passed requires a carve-out of the filibuster, the procedural weapon Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) seem to hold in higher esteem than anything on their own policy agendas or even democracy itself.

Nevertheless, the door to reform may have cracked open a tiny bit. Sinema now says she wants the Senate to debate the filibuster — as though we haven’t been debating it for a year and there might be some arguments no one has yet considered. But at least she wants to talk about it.

More troublingly, she’s still repeating a terrible argument for the filibuster. Her spokesperson warned that whatever Democrats pass into law could be “rescinded in a few years and replaced by a nationwide voter-ID law, nationwide restrictions on vote-by-mail, or other voting restrictions currently passing in some states extended nationwide.”

In other words, if Democrats are permitted to pass legislation, that would mean someday Republicans could pass legislation if they’re in charge. Which would mean Congress should simply never do anything.

But even if your heart warms at the thought of putting Congress into an indefinite legislative coma, we face an urgent problem right now, one that can’t wait. Republicans around the country are waging war on democracy, not only passing voter suppression bills but, even more dangerously, moving to make it impossible for them to lose elections, no matter the will of the voters.

It’s a three-pronged attack: wielding suppression measures to make it harder for people likely to be Democrats to vote; drawing district lines so Republicans always control state legislatures and have a disproportionate advantage in Congress; and seizing control of voting administration to make it possible to declare Republicans the winners even when they lose.

All of which is why voting legislation is in a different class from other kinds of bills, and demands a different approach, even if you’re still devoted to maintaining the filibuster for most legislation.

To understand why, consider the 10 Republican votes you’ll need to overcome any filibuster in a 50-50 Senate.

On rare occasions — as with the recently passed infrastructure bill — 10 Republicans will see it in their own interest to allow a bill to pass, even if President Biden might get a bit of credit for it. The debt ceiling is another example: Ten Republicans didn’t want to send the U.S. economy spiraling into recession, or didn’t want to see their party blamed for it, so they agreed to a procedural do-si-do that allowed Democrats to increase the ceiling on a majority vote.

But there is no bill that secures voting rights and majority rule that 10 Republicans will accept.

You can offer all the paeans to bipartisanship that you want, but that is a simple fact. It isn’t just that nearly every Republican will vote against those two voting bills. (Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska supports the John Lewis bill, but she is alone.) It’s that their party has put a commitment to minority rule, and the Trumpist belief that elections must not proceed fairly if it means a Democrat might win, at the absolute center of their identity.

They will not be moved from this position. There is no symmetry between the stances of the parties, and no compromise that can be reached. One party is trying to secure free and fair elections even if it means they’ll lose a good part of the time, and the other party is committed to nothing less than the destruction of American democracy.

Which leaves Democrats with two choices: alter the filibuster to pass legislation that pushes back on the GOP war on democracy, or sit back and watch while the pieces are systematically put in place for Republicans to steal the 2024 election, if necessary by having GOP legislatures in swing states simply declare Donald Trump the victor no matter what the voters want.

So Sinema can say she supports measures to secure democracy, but if she doesn’t favor a filibuster carve-out that allows them an up-or-down vote, then she doesn’t. You can’t say you “support” a bill when you’re actively thwarting its passage, any more than I could say “I support you getting to work on time today” if I’ve stolen your car keys and slashed your tires.

For all the work that has gone into the Build Back Better bill, many Democrats now say that voting legislation is the higher priority for the moment, and momentum is building for some kind of filibuster carve-out. In the past few days, Sens. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) have called for changing the filibuster to protect voting rights. [And Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) above.]

As for Manchin and Sinema, the most optimistic take is that they’ll be willing to sign on to some kind of filibuster workaround for these bills, but only after a protracted public process that makes clear they didn’t just suddenly change their minds.

If that’s what it takes, so be it. If they put it off much longer, there might not be a democracy left to save.

Enough! You took an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. The Party of Trump is a domestic terrorist organization that came within minutes of overthrowing American democracy in a coup d’etat on January 6, with untold numbers of members of Congress and Vice President Pence potentially executed live on TV, and they are actively working to undermine democracy and subvert the election process in waging a war against American democracy. The fascist barbarians are at the gate of American democracy. What part of this don’t you understand, senator?

The Post’s Jennifer Rubin explains the fierce urgency of now to you, senator. A new survey provides little comfort about democracy’s future:

A new survey from Bright Line Watch, an organization that monitors democratic practices, provides some interesting insights but little solace about Republicans’ commitment to democracy. They might say they support democratic principles (e.g., “All adult citizens enjoy the same legal and political rights”), but they fail to embrace the most fundamental democratic principle: acceptance of election results and the peaceful transfer of power.

The most basic disconnect from reality (and democratic values) remains the 2020 presidential winner. The survey reports, “94% of Democrats say [President] Biden is the rightful winner compared to just 26% of Republicans — a split that has also remained remarkably stable since Biden took office.” As a result, only 42 percent of Republicans have confidence in the outcome of elections compared to 80 percent of Democrats. That raises a question that was so prominent throughout the Senate runoffs in Georgia: Why vote if you think the whole thing is rigged?

The good news is that more detailed data shows not many Americans favor political violence as some previous surveys suggested. When the pollsters screened out “inattentive respondents” and provided definitions of various undemocratic behavior, they found “support is 9% for threats, 8% for harassment, 6% for non-violent felonies, 4% for violent felonies, 4% for violence if the other party wins the 2024 election, 4% for violence on January 6, and 5% for violence to restore Trump to the presidency.” The bad news is that still represents millions of people.

Even worse, the number of Republicans who buy into some form of violence is still alarmingly high. The survey reports, “Each of these levels of support is highest among Republicans who identify strongly with their party (18% for threats, 9% for 2024, 9% for January 6 violence, and 17% for violence to restore Trump compared to 12%, 2%, 6%, and 5%, respectively, among those who do not identify strongly).”

The pollsters also asked political science experts about whether a range of events were “abnormal” for a democracy. The incidents of most concern centered on GOP conspiracy theories, election denial and anti-democratic sentiments:

[S]ix events were rated as highly abnormal and important in this most recent survey, including conservative lawyer John Eastman’s plan to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, the University of Florida preventing professors there from testifying in voting rights cases, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows promoting the “Italygate” conspiracy theory about the 2020 election results, and Arizona Republicans in the state legislature stripping powers from the state’s Democratic Secretary of State.

Experts are especially alarmed that some declared GOP candidates for the House and Senate, as well as 10 of 15 GOP candidates for secretary of state in five battleground states, do not accept the 2020 results. In short, “the party is increasingly embracing Donald Trump’s efforts to undermine the legitimacy of American elections and that partisans in charge of administering elections could threaten their integrity from within.”

Like these seditious insurrectionist Trump cult members here in Arizona:

"Election integrity" protest at the AG's Office tomorrow featuring @KariLake, @jim_lamon, @RealMarkFinchem, @AZKellyT and others. So basically they'll be protesting @GeneralBrnovich's inaction in prosecuting nonexistent election fraud based on the botched audit findings. pic.twitter.com/bFEG0Uuyil

— Jeremy Duda (@jeremyduda) December 16, 2021

The transformation of one major party into an illiberal, authoritarian movement is the greatest threat to democracy we face. It manifests itself in the “anti-fraud” measures (when there is no fraud) to restrict access to the ballot and to put partisans in charge of election administration; in the GOP’s decision to rally around House members who spout virulent racism and depict violence against Democrats; and in the real potential that the John Eastman memo becomes the 2024 post-election game plan for Republicans.

Unless and until all 50 Democratic senators realize that “bipartisanship” on voting and democracy reforms is impossible with a party infected with anti-democratic impulses, they will fail to install the guardrails needed to protect the country from these authoritarian forces.

Step up, Senator Sinema.