Today is the 56th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” the first anniversary at which John Lewis is no longer with us to commemorate.
If Americans want to honor John Lewis’ sacrifice and lifelong commitment to public service and his efforts to secure voting rights as a fundamental constitutional right for all Americans, it is time for some more “good trouble” for voting rights: it is time for Americans to march on state capitols seeking to return voting in America to the Jim Crow era and to march on Washington D.C. in support of passage of the For The People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. It is time for sit-ins at congressional offices and state legislator’s offices and to flood those offices with calls and emails and letters. It is time for a modern-day version of Freedom Summer beginning right now, given the urgency of this moment.
Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post agrees: We need a national crusade against Jim Crow voting laws.
Time is of the essence. 2020 Census data will be available for the redistricting process in September, and these bills must be enacted in time for them to take effect before the redistricting wars begin in earnest.
It is time to make it clear to Democrats who continue to support the anti-democratic Jim Crow era Senate filibuster rule on the unsupported bogus claim that it encourages bipartisanship – in an era where there is no bipartisanship because the “Party of No” is wholly dedicated to obstructing a Democratic president and burning down American democracy in favor of GQP authoritarianism, Republicans aren’t fighting Democrats. They’re fighting democracy. – that they will pay a heavy price not just when they are defeated at their next election, but by the judgment of history for enabling the fascist GQP overthrow of American democracy. They will be the modern-day Benedict Arnold traitors to American democracy. The seditious insurrection of January 6 is not over, it is now directed from inside the Congress and state legislatures.
Jonathan Capehart writes at the Washington Post today, Time for some more ‘good trouble’ on voting rights, 56 years after ‘Bloody Sunday’:
On Sunday, March 7, 1965 — exactly 56 years ago — the Rev. Hosea Williams and 25-year-old John Lewis walked side-by-side as they led some 600 Black men, women and children on a march for voting rights from the Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Ala., to the state capitol in Montgomery.
Only, they never made it to Montgomery. In fact, they were just about one mile into their 54-mile march — just over the Edmund Pettus Bridge — when a line of Alabama state troopers advanced on Lewis and the peaceful marchers with billy clubs, tear gas and horses.
The cracks of those clubs, the shrieking of those marchers were not just heard in the moment. They were heard nationwide later that night, when ABC interrupted its broadcast of “Judgment at Nuremberg” to show footage of the horror — a horror that proved pivotal in the civil rights movement. A week later, urging passage of the Voting Rights Act, President Lyndon Johnson said this before a joint session of Congress:
Many of the issues of civil rights are very complex and most difficult. But about this there can and should be no argument. Every American citizen must have an equal right to vote. … What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too.
Five months after what became known as “Bloody Sunday,” Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. He handed one of the pens used to sign the historic legislation to Lewis. “That pen, and the signing of the act, helped change America forever,” Lewis wrote in the foreword of “Destiny of Democracy: The Civil Rights Summit at the LBJ Presidential Library.”
“Without the signing of the Voting Rights Act, in my estimation, there would not be a Jimmy Carter, or a Bill Clinton, and I’m positive there would not be a Barack Obama as president of the United States of America.”
But today, with racial disparities in everything from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic to the use of lethal force by law enforcement, the full blessings of American life extolled by Johnson remain elusive for African Americans. And their equal right to vote has been under relentless assault since 2013, the year the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder gutted the main provision of the Voting Rights Act, which forced certain states to get preclearance of voting rights changes from the Justice Department before they could be enacted.
Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments involving voting restrictions in Arizona that could snuff out the Voting Rights Act entirely. Also last week, Georgia Republicans started moving legislation aimed at restricting access to the ballot in a number of ways, including leaving it up to each county whether to have any Sunday early voting. This would be a devastating blow to “Souls to the Polls,” the Sunday practice of African Americans casting their early voting ballots after church service. Such aggressive moves to thwart the vote are happening after President Biden became the first Democrat to win the state since 1992 and after Democrats won both of Georgia’s U.S. Senate seats.
Georgia is not alone in putting limits on the right to vote. A report from the Brennan Center for Justice notes, “As of February 19, 2021, state lawmakers have carried over, prefiled or introduced 253 bills with provisions that restrict voting access in 43 states.“ With the “For the People Act,” Congress is stepping in to stop this.
Officially known as H.R. 1, the legislation would make it easier to vote and harder for states to purge their voter rolls. While it passed the House on March 3, the bill’s prospects don’t look so good in an evenly divided Senate that requires 60 votes to get anything done. The same fate awaits H.R. 4, or the “John Lewis Voting Rights Act,” which would reinstate the Justice Department’s preclearance authority in the 1965 act.
But the American spirit, and specifically the spirit of Black Americans, will neither be diminished nor deterred by any of the efforts to deny them their right to vote. And they will get a major assist from Biden on Sunday when he issues an executive order on voting. As part of this action, the president is directing federal agencies to expand access to voter registration and to assist states to do the same under the National Voter Registration Act.
The disastrous and destabilizing tenure of Donald Trump in the White House reminded all of us how precious our democracy is. How precious our Constitution is. And how, if we want its words to truly mean something, we must actively work to make them mean something.
Lewis, who passed away last July, would call that “good trouble.” It’s what brought him to that bridge spanning the Alabama River 56 years ago. And if there is anything worth getting into trouble for, it’s safeguarding the right to vote for every U.S. citizen — Blacks, students, essential workers, the elderly, rural voters, all of us. It’s our country, too.
David Leonhardt writes at the New York Times, Voting Rights or the Filibuster?
It’s shaping up to be the most significant question about the new Democratic Senate: If forced to choose between the protection of voting rights and the protection of the filibuster, what will Democrats do?
They are now almost certain to face that decision.
“Proponents of eliminating the filibuster have said all along that their best opportunity to do so would come on a civil-rights bill, and this is the modern version,” Carl Hulse, The Times’s chief Washington correspondent, told me.
As Carl explained: “They intend to ratchet up the pressure on Democratic holdouts to overturning the filibuster by saying Republicans are using undemocratic means to hold up urgent protections for our democratic system. The votes still aren’t there, but opponents of the filibuster believe they are gaining ground.”
The swing votes include Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, two of the most moderate Democratic senators, who have both expressed support for the filibuster.
Status quo? Not an option.
The stakes involve both small-d democratic principles and partisan power. If the Senate does not pass a voting-rights bill, large numbers of Americans may find voting so difficult that they are effectively disenfranchised. And Republicans may enjoy a large built-in advantage for years to come, preventing Democrats from holding power and passing laws on climate change, Medicare, taxes, the minimum wage and more.
“If we don’t pass a redistricting reform, our chance of keeping the House is very low,” David Shor, a Democratic strategist, told New York magazine.
Shor noted that gerrymandering has already helped create a situation in which Democrats don’t just need to win the national popular vote to hold House control; they need to win it by more than three percentage points. He also argued that a fight over voting rights and gerrymandering would benefit the party politically in the 2022 campaign.
There does not appear to be a compromise path on this issue. Democrats can overhaul the filibuster — and, by extension, transform the Senate, ushering in an uncertain era in which both parties would be able to pass more of the legislation they favor. Or Democrats can effectively surrender on voting rights. It’s one or the other.
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- Ronald Brownstein in The Atlantic: “Future Americans could view the resolution of this struggle as a turning point in the history of U.S. democracy. The outcome could not only shape the balance of power between the parties, but determine whether that democracy grows more inclusive or exclusionary.”
- Ryan Cooper in The Week: [W]hether or not Democrats can overcome the Senate filibuster and their own timidity to pass HR1 is now the most important single factor in whether they can hang on to their congressional majorities, and hence stop Republicans from cheating them permanently out of national power.
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As Ryan Cooper says, “In other words, if we want a good chance of American democracy continuing to exist at all, HR1 is a necessary precondition.”
It is time to end the anti-democratic filibuster which was the tool of American racial apartheid during the Jim Crow era, and which has been weaponized under the “Grim Reaper,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, to apply to all legislation to effectuate his policy of “total obstruction” of the agenda of Democratic presidents, to the great injury and harm to the American people. This anti-democratic authoritarian villain needs to be stripped of his weapon of mass destruction to render him irrelevant, and to make the Senate functional again. It is time to make legislating “for the people” possible again.