Senate Democrats Drafting A Revised Voting Rights Bill Under Intensifying Public Pressure

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Senate Democrats are preparing to release a revised voting rights bill as soon as this week, hoping to keep the legislation alive a month after Republicans blocked the consideration of a previous, more sweeping proposal.

The Washington Post reports, Democrats craft revised voting rights bill, seeking to keep hopes alive in the Senate:

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Several key senators huddled inside Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer’s office on Wednesday to hash out the details of the bill, which is expected to at least partially incorporate a framework assembled by Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), who expressed qualms about the previous bill, S.1 known as the For the People Act.

They emerged saying a new product could be released in a matter of days.

“It’s important that the American people understand that this is very much on our radar, and we understand the urgency, and we’re committed to getting some progress,” said Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.), who said he asked Schumer (D-N.Y.) to call the meeting.

The talks come at a delicate time for the Senate, with lawmakers of both parties eager to move forward with a bipartisan infrastructure deal and Democrats eyeing a separate economic package that could total $3 trillion or more.

Schumer has pledged to make progress on both of those bills before the Senate leaves for its summer recess next month. But he is also facing pressure inside his caucus to maintain momentum on the voting rights issue, particularly on overriding state laws that have rolled back voting access in several Republican states, including Georgia.

Activists have continued to push for federal intervention in the face of Republican efforts to restrict voting based on former president Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election. Among those calling for action are Texas state legislators who fled Austin to temporarily foil a GOP push for elections legislation there and came to Washington to make their case directly to Congress.

Democrats’ attempt to advance the For the People Act failed last month on a party-line 50-50 vote, falling short of the 60 votes necessary. The base legislation included an array of Democratic campaign finance, ethics and election revisions, including mandated nonpartisan House redistricting and a public financing system for congressional campaigns.

End the filibuster for fundamental voting rights. The anti-democratic, anti-majoritarian authoritarian GQP seditious insurrectionists should not have a veto over fundamental voting rights. The GQP is a tyranny of the minority, and a domestic terrorist organization as it demonstrated on January 6.

Manchin resisted some of the more far-reaching provisions in the bill and, before voting with other Democrats to start debate on the bill, released a three-page framework that scaled back some aspects of the legislation and floated some of his ideas, including a national voter ID mandate that Democrats have long resisted.

Manchin left the meeting Wednesday and said he believed a new bill could be released in the coming days.

“Everybody’s working in good faith on this,” he said. “It’s everybody’s input, not just mine, but I think mine, maybe . . . got us all talking and rolling in the direction that we had to go back to basics,” he said.

Others who attended the meeting included Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the For the People Act’s lead author, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), chairwoman of the Senate committee overseeing election issues.

It remains uncertain how even narrower legislation could become law, with Republicans firmly opposed to the type of federal mandates contemplated by Democrats and with multiple Democrats — including Manchin — thus far unwilling to discard the Senate’s 60-vote supermajority requirement to skirt the GOP opposition.

The Filibuster will have to be reformed or ended in order to pass any voting rights legislation. This is  a given. Sen. Manchin’s belief that Republicans will support a scaled down voting rights bill is pure fantasy and borders on delusional.

The drafting of a bill, however, could give Democrats a new fight to rally around and a way to keep the issue in the public eye while working through their high-stakes economic agenda.

“What you will see over the next few days is a Democratic caucus that knows how to walk and chew gum at the same time,” Warnock said. “We’ll be working on infrastructure, and we’ll be working on the infrastructure of our democracy.”

None of the senators would discuss Wednesday which elements would be included and excluded from the revised bill, but one Democrat familiar with the talks said the bill will largely follow Manchin’s outline and is also likely to include language aimed at shoring up the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which has been weakened under recent Supreme Court decisions.

Another possible addition, that person said, is language aimed at countering “election subversion” — such as provisions in the new Georgia law that could allow the state legislature to overrule local boards of elections. The Democrat was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Time is of the essence, senator. Georgia Republicans take first step to Fulton elections takeover. Tick tock.

Asked about next steps — including a possible vote on the new legislation — Warnock declined to offer details Wednesday. “Stay tuned,” he said.

I will reiterate what I have advised before, How To Draft Voting Rights Legislation To Defang The ‘Jim Crow 2.0 Justices’ Of The Roberts Court (excerpt):

Remember that the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act decisions are what’s known as a statutory ruling, which is distinct from a constitutional ruling. The court has never ruled the VRA itself to be unconstitutional. Congress must include a provision in both the For The People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act declaring it to be the intent of Congress to override the Supreme Court’s rulings in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) and Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021).

Congress should also do the same for the campaign finance cases of Buckley v. Valeo (1976) and its progeny, e.g, McConnell v. Federal Election Commission (2003), Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), and McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission (2014), under the For The People Act.

The other provision that Congress must include in both the For The People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act is a provision stripping Article III federal courts of jurisdiction to review the new statutes. As Christopher Sprigman explains, A Constitutional Weapon for Biden to Vanquish Trump’s Army of Judges (excerpt):

[A]s it happens, [there’s] a deeper reform that the Constitution specifically authorizes. Article III of the Constitution gives Congress substantial power to strip federal courts’ jurisdiction: a power that can be employed to rein in politicized courts and even to override judicial decisions, at least when courts are standing in the way of change that a substantial and enduring political coalition wants.

How would jurisdiction-stripping work? Start with the source of Congress’s authority. Article III, section 1 gives Congress complete discretion on whether to create the lower federal courts, a power that Congress has used from the founding to limit lower courts’ jurisdiction. And Article III, section 2, clause 2explicitly empowers Congress to make “exceptions” to the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction—that is, to pick and choose for approximately 99% of the Supreme Court’s total docket what cases the Court has the power to hear. As I explain in this article, to be published in December in the New York University Law Review, under its Article III authority, Congress can remove the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction over particular cases, or particular issues, largely without constraint. 

Congress also has the power to limit the jurisdiction of state courts to hear federal questions, including constitutional claims. But on a practical level, it would not matter much even if state courts still hear federal constitutional claims. State courts lack both the authority to enjoin federal officials and the practical institutional power to counter a determined federal government. 

The implications of Congress’s Article III power are potentially profound. Congress’s power over courts’ jurisdiction means that it can claim for itself authority to interpret the Constitution in particular cases.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who has spent his entire professional legal career seeking ways to undermine the Voting Rights Act of 1965, would be defanged, powerless to inflict any more damage on voting rights.

Do these things in the revised bill, and it will survive a court challenge.

Public pressure on the Senate for voting rights legislation during this voting rights summer is intensifying. On Wednesday, the voting rights march from Georgetown, TX to Austin, TX got underway. Huffington Post reports, Rev. Barber, Beto O’Rourke Launch 4-Day March For Voting Rights In Texas:

The Rev. William J. Barber II and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke launched a four-day, 27-mile march in Texas against voter suppression, calling on Congress to end the filibuster and pass voting rights legislation.

“We are here to start this march for our democracy,” Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, said at a press conference Tuesday, the evening before people were set to start the multiday march from Georgetown to Austin.

Barber condemned Texas Republicans’ efforts to pass legislation restricting voting rights, calling such bills “the canary in the mine” and noting how Republicans in state legislatures across the country are pushing hundreds of bills to suppress the vote.

“Texas is the hardest state in the nation in which to vote. Republicans have introduced legislation that would make it even harder,” O’Rourke said Tuesday.

Barber urged the Senate to end the filibuster and pass the For The People Act. The latter bill would override much of Republicans’ state-level efforts by mandating states implement measures like early voting, no-excuse absentee ballots, and automatic and same-day voter registration.

During what they describe as a “Selma to Montgomery style March for Democracy,” activists will pause at three churches and a Muslim community center and end with a rally at the Texas State Capitol on Saturday.

In order to march, Barber said people will need to show proof that they are vaccinated against COVID-19 and wear masks.

These Democratic senators should all read Adam Serwer’s piece in The Atlantic: the idea that Democrats can out-organize and out-vote Republicans, as we did n 2020, in the face of this onslaught of GQP Jim Crow 2.0 voter suppression laws, the worst assault on voting rights since the end of Reconstruction, is no plan at all. Federal legislation is require. Democratic Leaders Are Betraying Black Voters:

Democratic leaders have a plan for overcoming the Republican Party’s attempts to restrict the franchise: Just vote harder.

Civil-rights leaders expressed their frustrations to The New York Times last week, telling the outlet that “White House officials and close allies of the president have expressed confidence that it is possible to ‘out-organize voter suppression.’”

Republican-led states have engaged in a massive campaign to narrow voting access, spurred on by the falsehood that Trump’s loss was the result of widespread voter fraud. Despite Republicans losing both houses of Congress and the White House during the Trump years, the former president’s relatively strong 2020 showing left Democrats with thin margins in the House and Senate, and key Democrats are unwilling to alter Senate rules in order to pass voting-rights legislation by a simple majority. The position of Democratic leaders is perhaps less a plan than what they believe is their only course of action.

Unfortunately, the Republican scheme to insulate the party’s political power from accountability to the American majority cannot be overcome by enthusiasm. Despite the other ideological divisions within the party, all elements of the GOP have long been on the same page when it comes to using the countermajoritarian levers of American democracy to shield themselves from the electorate.

[D]emocratic complacency can be explained by several factors. One is that, by themselves, voting restrictions have sometimes backfired, motivating the targeted constituencies to show up rather than have their votes suppressed. Another is that the ideological divisions within the caucus mean that Democrats remain short of the necessary votes in the Senate to change the rules in the chamber, which would allow them to pass voting-rights legislation with a simple majority. A third is the fact that many in the Democratic Party take Black votes for granted because they believe that racism in the Republican Party gives those voters no viable alternative. Too many Democratic Party leaders think nothing of demanding that Black voters show up in numbers sufficient to rescue American democracy every election and then do little to secure the rights of their most loyal constituents once they are elected.

If the Democratic Party is not upholding a racist double standard with its inaction, it is at least acquiescing to one. The targeted constituencies must treat every election cycle as though their fundamental rights are on the line, listen to Democratic leaders compare the voting restrictions targeting their right to the franchise as “the new Jim Crow,” and then watch those same leaders do nothing with the power they are given except tell them to simply out-organize those attempting to deprive them of their right to vote.

This pattern cannot be repeated forever. Eventually, Republicans will figure out effective schemes for minimizing the power of Democratic constituencies in order to limit the impact of so-called blue waves at the ballot box. It does not matter how many Democratic votes are cast if those votes are gerrymandered into vote-sinks that preserve Republican majorities at the state and federal levels. Organizing cannot overcome laws that allow partisan election officials to refuse to certify victories when their party is defeated. And if Republican legislatures pass proposals allowing state houses to overturn the results, the question of who wins the most votes will become moot. Historically, such attacks on the franchise have not succeeded indefinitely, but they can still have immediate and catastrophic consequences for historically marginalized communities whose votes no longer matter to those in power.

Should these Republican restrictions succeed, they will not only strengthen the ability of the GOP to win without a majority of the electorate—they will also shape the electorate itself by enhancing the political power of the GOP’s base at the expense of the rest of the country. That would move the political leadership of the United States significantly to the right of where it is today. The rhetoric of Democratic Party leaders portrays this as a crisis of democracy, particularly for the constituencies they claim to serve. Their [current] inaction suggests otherwise.





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