The White House To Renew Voting Rights Effort On Thursday

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will hold separate events Thursday to focus attention on Democratic efforts to combat voter suppression and protect voting rights nationwide, Democratic officials tell CNN. Biden and Harris to focus on voting rights Thursday, expand DNC program:

Harris will announce the expansion of the Democratic National Committee’s “I Will Vote” campaign with an event in the Washington, DC, area, according to a committee official. Biden will meet privately with a range of civil rights groups to talk about their efforts to protect voting rights, according to a White House adviser.

The separate events come in the midst of Republican efforts to pass restrictive voting rights laws across the country.

https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1412836723533418497

Harris, who has been tasked by the White House to lead their effort to push voting rights, will focus her remarks on why the entire Democratic Party must fight voter suppression, the DNC official said. She will also be made the honorary chairwoman of the DNC’s “I Will Vote” program.

The Biden meeting will include representatives from the NAACP, National Coalition for Black Civic Participation, National Urban League, National Action Network, NCNW, Leadership Conference for Civil & Human Rights and Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the adviser said, adding that the President is personally “revolted” by the Republican attempts to tighten election laws in response to the 2020 election.

Has the White House invited this pair of prima donna divas to meet directly with these voting rights organizations? They are the ones responsible for enabling and encouraging GQP Jim Crow 2.0 voter suppression laws, because they are the ones holding up the much needed voting rights legislation by continuing to support the Jim Crow relic of the Senate filibuster rule.

“We see this assault from restrictive laws, threats of intimidation, voter purges and more,” Biden said at a White House event in June to celebrate Juneteenth. “We can’t rest until the promise of equality is fulfilled for every one of us in every corner of this nation. That, to me, is the meaning of Juneteenth.”

So far, Democrats have been unable to get any voting rights changes through Congress. After the party’s signature voting and elections bill passed the House earlier in the year, Republicans sunk the Senate version during a key procedural vote in June. All 50 Democrats, including West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, were united in passing the bill, but all 50 Republicans voted against, meaning the bill failed to get the needed 60 votes to move on in the legislative body.

Spurred, in part, by former President Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen, Republican legislatures have passed restrictive voting laws in states ranging from Florida to Texas to Georgia to Iowa [to Arizona]. Trump has applauded the efforts from afar and pushed other states to do the same.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, lawmakers in 17 states had enacted 28 restrictive ballot access laws as of June 21, a record since 2011, when 19 laws were enacted by 14 state legislatures.

The events comes on the same day that Texas is scheduled to convene a special session of the state legislature to revive a slew of new voting restrictions effectively killed by Democrats during the regular legislative session.

Republicans responded to the Democratic effort by accusing the party of trying to push a “federal takeover of elections.”

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) was the federal response to Southern segregationist states’ Jim Crow “state’s rights” voter suppression laws that rendered the 15th Amendment a nullity for almost 100 years. It is widely regarded as the single most effective piece of civil rights legislation ever enacted by Congress.

Now six unelected radical Republican Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court have substituted their judgement for the judgment of generations of members of Congress who have renewed the VRA, and legislated from the bench by replacing the congressionally mandated test in the VRA with Justice Alito’s subjective “guideposts,” thus rendering the VRA enforcement provisions all but toothless, returning the nation to its Jim Crow era past. In doing so, the Court departed from decades of VRA precedents, violating the principle of stare decisis. See Matt Ford at The New Republic, Samuel Alito’s Boundless Contempt for Democracy:

In theory, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee was about whether two Arizona voting rulings—a policy that bans counting provisional ballots cast by out-of-precinct voters and a state law that bans most third-party collection of absentee ballots—violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In theory, Brnovich was also about how courts should decide when a state measure violates Section 2’s ban on racially discriminatory voting practices, and whether the test used to strike down the Arizona rules in question was the right one.

In practice, however, that’s not really what Brnovich was about. It instead continued the Supreme Court’s ongoing campaign to crush the life out of the Voting Rights Act. In a nihilistic ruling by Justice Samuel Alito, the six-justice conservative majority did not so much interpret Section 2 as they rewrote it and gave future litigants a roadmap to circumvent what was left. The court’s approach has dire implications not just for voting rights cases under the current law but also for possible congressional efforts to strengthen America’s democratic system.

This is grounds for impeaching these “Jim Crow 2.0 Justices” from the Court. They have far exceeded their authority under the Constitution in pursuit of the partisan political objective of maintaining a tyranny of white Republican minority rule in an increasingly diverse America. In doing so, Justice Alito gave unwarranted credence to Donald Trump’s Big Lie by citing the GQP’s decades old “voter fraud” fraud as reasonable justification for voter suppression of minority voters. See Brennan Center for Justice, The Myth of Voter Fraud; Debunking the Voter Fraud Myth.

“Democrats refuse to join Republicans in supporting common sense policies like voter ID, because their sole agenda is more power and partisan control,” said Nathan Brand, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee.

Ahem, Nathan you dumbfuck, Joe Manchin’s compromise bill does include a national voter I.D., to which even voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams reluctantly agreed to. That was enough to cause the “Grim Reaper of Democracy,” Mitch McConnell and his Sedition Caucus in the Senate to reject Joe Manchin’s compromise bill. It is Republicans who are rejecting any and all voting rights legislation out of hand. Republicans don’t believe in voting rights for anyone but Republicans.  And “their sole agenda is more power and partisan control”?  Dude, this is classic psychological projection. This is the only motivation for authoritarian Republicans. You are seriously lacking any self awareness, you hack.

In response to the Republican efforts, a range of Democratic organizations have ramped up their focus on protecting the right to vote, launching a range of programs to educate voters on new laws, publicly attack the lawmakers pushing the laws and combating the laws in court.

The Democratic National Committee campaign has been central to the party’s response to these laws.
Committee Chair Jaime Harrison announced earlier in the year that the committee would invest at least $20 million in their bid to help Democrats keep control of the House in 2022, including funding “dozens” of voter protection staffers in states like Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada and Pennsylvania. At the time, Harrison called restrictive voting rights laws “fundamentally un-American.”

“It is not who we are as a people,” he said.

The DNC has not been alone in their efforts to protecting voting rights. Priorities USA, a top Democratic super PAC, invested $50 million in voting rights work over the last four years and plans to continue the investment into 2022. And the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee announced in June plans to invest $10 million in voter protection efforts ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.

Democrats hold the power in their hands to fix this problem. Use this power while you still have it. No more coddling these weak-kneed sniveling coward Democrats who want to preserve the Jim Crow relic Senate filibuster rule for specious and unsupported reasons. American democracy is under assault from the enemies of democracy, an authoritarian crypto-fascist political personality cult of Donald Trump. There is no longer a “good faith partner in democracy” with whom to negotiate, so spare me your “bipartisan” bullshit. The fascist barbarians are at the gate (have you already forgotten the insurrection on January 6?) If you do not understand the urgency of now, you do not belong  in the U.S. Senate.

Time is of the essence. Some states have already begun redistricting. Other states will begin redistricting in August when the Census Bureau releases its revised data. There is no more time to waste. Democrats need to pass the For The People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act before the end of this month.

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 2 explicitly 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.

Congress must safeguard the fundamental constitutional right to vote from right-wing reactionary judge’s attempts to preserve a tyranny of white Republican minority rule in an increasingly diverse America.