Democratic lawmakers, including more than 100 state legislators, rallied Tuesday outside the U.S. Capitol to urge the Senate to delay its summer recess until passing the For the People Act.
The Washington Post reports, Democratic lawmakers rally in D.C. to demand the passage of voting rights legislation:
The state lawmakers at Tuesday’s rally traveled from across the country, some from Republican-led legislatures that have passed or are considering new voting measures, and are joining Texas Democrats who fled to D.C. last month to block Republicans from passing voting restrictions. Some lawmakers who rallied came from states where GOP leaders have supported former president Donald Trump’s false claims that widespread voter fraud cost him the 2020 election.
“Our job was to rally the nation and bring people to Washington, D.C.,” Texas state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer (above) said to his colleagues in the crowd. He pointed out the letter on the stage next to him, displaying the more than 500 signatures from state lawmakers demanding that Congress act to protect and expand voting rights. “We want one standard when it comes to voting in America, and that is the American standard.”
The For the People Act has stalled in the 50-50 Senate because of the filibuster, which has prevented Democrats from pushing the legislation through without Republican support. Activists have been turning up pressure on Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) and Joe Manchin III (W.Va.), two Democratic lawmakers opposed to ending the filibuster.
Jana Morgan, the director of the Declaration for American Democracy, a coalition of activist and advocacy groups that support the For the People Act and organized the rally near the Robert Taft Memorial, said that passing the For the People Act is “the only way to stop the crisis unfolding in state legislatures across the country.”
She then led the crowd in chanting: “Recess can wait! Democracy can’t!”
After the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in 2013, Georgia state Rep. Renitta Shannon said Black, Brown, and Asian American and Pacific Islander voters in her state have “faced relentless attacks on their ability to exercise their right to vote.”
This has left organizers in her state trying to “out-organize new voter suppression laws just to have their community voices heard,” Shannon said. “It shouldn’t be that way.”
Other speakers at the event included Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), chairwoman of the Senate committee overseeing election issues, and Sen. Jeff Merkley (Ore.) and Rep. John Sarbanes (Md.), the bill’s lead authors in the Senate and House. Many lawmakers also invoked the name and teachings of the late civil rights leader and Georgia congressman John Lewis.
“Never give up and never give in. That’s what John Lewis said to us, whenever we were together,” Sarbanes said to the crowd. “You keep showing up, you keep fighting back.”
Michigan Advance adds (excerpt):
U.S. Senate Democrats joined with dozens of state legislators at a rally outside the U.S. Capitol Tuesday afternoon, demanding that the Senate skip August recess and pass critical voting rights legislation in reaction to Republican-led states that have adopted restrictive voting laws.
Dozens of legislators from North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Texas, among others, traveled to Washington to pressure the Senate to quickly pass S.1, known as the “For the People Act.”
The nearly 800-page package would undo dozens of restrictive voting laws already in place and faces major hurdles gaining enough GOP support to advance in the Senate.
The state lawmakers, along with half a dozen U.S. Senate Democrats, also called for an end to the filibuster in order to pass S.1 before the Senate leaves for recess.
Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who chairs the U.S. Senate Rules and Administration Committee, said during the rally that the Senate is working to quickly craft a new, bipartisan elections bill. Klobuchar said that Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a key moderate, was heavily involved in crafting the legislation.
Klobuchar recently held a field hearing in Georgia, which has become known as “ground zero” for Democrats in their fight to protect voting rights.
“These things are done to design to make sure that people don’t vote,” Klobuchar said, referring to the restrictive voting laws passed in Georgia. “That, my friends, is why we need national bedrock, basic standards for voting in this country.”
Georgia state legislators, along with U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat, stressed their state’s role in not only delivering Democrats the presidency for President Joe Biden, but also two Senate seats, giving Democrats a razor-thin majority with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking tie votes.
“This is a defining moment in America,” Warnock, who was also present at the field hearing, said. “This is really very simple. Some people don’t want some people to vote.”
He added, “This is the delta variant of Jim Crow voting laws.”
Dylan Wells from National Journal tweets:
“These voter suppression bills, at their core, are about white supremacy,” says @SenBobCasey at the #RecessCanWait rally. pic.twitter.com/W5UjBwLp4O
— Dylan Wells (@dylanewells) August 3, 2021
“We need to act, because the United States Congress is the only institution that can protect our democracy by adopting those uniform national standards to protect the ballot box,” says Sen. @ChrisVanHollen. pic.twitter.com/3kM4FGTnZU
— Dylan Wells (@dylanewells) August 3, 2021
Next up is Sen. @benraylujan, who says “it’s about time that we get into some good trouble. If we can’t get ten of our republican colleagues to join us here, all we have to do is end the filibuster.” pic.twitter.com/gYRdciFy55
— Dylan Wells (@dylanewells) August 3, 2021
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Senator Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) has announced that he will introduce the “Right to Vote Act” in the Senate. “Jon Ossoff Takes a Stand: Will Introduce “Right to Vote Act” in the Senate”, https://www.politicususa.com/2021/08/04/jon-ossoff-takes-a-stand-will-introduce-right-to-vote-act-in-the-senate.html
The legislation would create a statutory right to vote in elections, would prevent states from limiting the right to vote without justification, and ensure that every vote is counted. It has received the endorsement of Fair Fight Action, and the ACLU Voting Project.
Ossoff said he encourages activists “to keep pushing because the right to vote is fundamental.”
“People bled and died to secure it,” he added. “There does not exist in U.S. law an affirmative guarantee of the right to vote, and so the Right to Vote Act, which I’m introducing this week, establishes that affirmative guarantee of voting rights. It holds that any American citizen can challenge a state law which diminishes or restricts the right to vote, which makes it harder to vote, and require any state in our union to justify those restrictions with specific purpose and justification and to demonstrate that it is the least restrictive means to achieving their ends.”
Ossoff noted that the Right to Vote Act “may move as part of a broader measure,” supporting the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.
Above all, the legislation would “establish that every American has the right to vote and “any state that would impair, restrict or reduce it must be held to the highest standard and that American citizens can take them to court.”
Ossoff said the Biden administration is committed to securing and protecting voting rights and encouraged activists and grassroots organizers “to continue to push Congress and to continue to push all of us here to advance federal legislation that will secure the franchise in the face of state legislatures across the country that are restricting access to the ballot for purely partisan ends on the basis of [ex-President] Donald Trump’s lies about the last election.”
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Senator, I strongly recommend that you include a measure for the judicial standard of review. It should be the intent of Congress that the courts apply the strict scrutiny standard of review for fundamental constitutional rights. The Roberts court has been applying the rational basis standard of review to voting laws, the lowest standard of review.
Michael Li, senior counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice’s Democracy Program, and the author most recently of the report “The Redistricting Landscape, 2021-22,” writes at the Washington Post, “The voting fix that cannot wait: Stopping partisan gerrymandering”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/02/voting-fix-that-cannot-wait-stopping-partisan-gerrymandering/
[An] even more pernicious wave of anti-voter laws will begin shortly: the redrawing of congressional maps. Unless Congress acts quickly, Americans are on the verge of some of the most aggressive gerrymandering in the country’s history. Inevitably, communities of color, which provided almost all of the country’s growth over the past decade, will bear the brunt of this anti-democratic line-drawing.
As Democrats finalize a new version of reform legislation to replace the For the People Act, it is essential, as Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) recognized in June, that the measure include a provision to “ban partisan gerrymandering,” drawing district lines that unfairly enhance the representation of the party in power.
Such a ban — along with beefed-up remedies for abuses and uniform standards for drawing maps, including strengthened protections for communities of color — would amount to the most consequential federal redistricting legislation in history. But unlike other parts of voting legislation that might not come into play until 2022 or later, redistricting reforms cannot be put off.
On Aug. 16, the Census Bureau releases map data to states. After that, states are expected to rush to complete maps. Eighteen states, including Texas, Ohio and North Carolina, face tight fall deadlines for completing maps. Another 14 states, including Georgia and Tennessee, also could pass new maps by the end of the year or shortly thereafter based on historic practices. In a matter of weeks, the process will be over in most of the country.
Why the new sense of urgency? Many Democrats were alarmed by reports that White House aides believe it is possible to “out-organize” Republican voter suppression efforts. But here’s the reality: You cannot out-organize a well-crafted gerrymander. Once manipulated maps are drawn, they will be almost impossible to overcome.
[F]ederal legislation would transform how congressional districts are drawn, stepping in where the Supreme Court has stepped out, to restore fairness to the process and strengthen frayed legal protections for communities of color. It also would make it easier and faster for voters to challenge politically or racially discriminatory maps in court, and for the first time require meaningful transparency in a process that historically has taken place behind closed doors.
But the longer it takes to pass federal legislation, the harder it will be to fully implement its reforms. For example, the transparency provisions of the bill would be impossible to implement after the fact. That would allow lawmakers to hide maps from the public and then cram them through in a matter of hours, as happened in Pennsylvania in 2011.
When the Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that courts would not intervene to stop partisan redistricting, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. pointed the way to a solution: “The Framers gave Congress the power to do something about partisan gerrymandering.” Congress and the Biden White House need to make saving the redistricting cycle an urgent priority. Every vote should count equally — and every day matters to ensure that happens.