Above: From right, Reps. Al Green, D-Texas, Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, Rev. Al Sharpton, and Martin Luther King III, participate in the March on for Voting Rights on Saturday. The event was held on the 58th anniversary of the March on Washington. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)
On Saturday, thousands marched in rallies in cities across the country and in Washington, D.C. for voting rights, on the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s March on Washington in 1963. Thousands rally for voting rights, D.C. statehood in Washington:
Thousands of people marched on Saturday to mark the 58th anniversary of the historic March on Washington and voice their support for expanding and protecting access to the ballot.
The crowd cheered, sang and danced in the streets on the way to the National Mall while calling on Congress to pass an extensive voting rights measure and eliminate the filibuster if necessary to do so. The marchers, though fewer than in years past, also demanded D.C. statehood and an end to police brutality.
“If we keep going down this road, we’re going to be back like Jim Crow,” said Craig Browne, 74, who traveled to the nation’s capital from Wyncote, Pa.
Browne, who lived in Alabama when segregation was still in place, said he had wanted to join the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis and other civil rights leaders in the historic 1963 march, but his mother didn’t want him to miss school. So he wasn’t missing this one.
As he gathered with others in McPherson Square, he wore a shirt with the face of Lewis, who went on to become a Democratic congressman from Georgia, and carried a sign with a quote of his that read, “The vote is the most powerful non-violent tool we have.” Others also held signs invoking Lewis’s name and his words encouraging “good trouble.”
“I remember segregation,” Browne said. “I remember separate, and it wasn’t equal.”
Organizers had arranged buses to bring people in from across the country to rally on the Mall. There was a celebratory mood as demonstrators urged Congress to pass the For the People Act, a sweeping elections and ethics bill that would impose national standards for voting and override state-level restrictions. They also called for passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which aims to restore voting rights protections that have been weakened by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Civil and labor leaders have coalesced around the cause, saying this is a continuation of the same battles King fought when he inspired tens of thousands of people to show up to the seminal March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
As the crowd passed the National Museum of African American History and Culture, one protester yelled into a megaphone: “You can’t stop the revolution!”
Another group started chanting: “What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!”
Shirley Thompson, 66, of Petworth, held the hands of her great-granddaughters Harley, 7, and Laloni, 8, as she marched past the Washington Monument.
“Pass the John Lewis Act Now! Let’s get into some good trouble!” she chanted.
“We want statehood for D.C.!” she chanted into the crowd. “We want you to know we are serious!”
As the crowd turned from Constitution Avenue back onto 14th Street NW, Jeremiah Surratt began walking backward and shimmied his shoulders in rhythm with the marchers’ drums and yelled, “Black votes matter!”
Surratt, 18, of Cleveland, said he hadn’t been old enough to vote in the most recent election but wanted to ensure his voice was heard in the next one. But he said that as an African American, he felt his right to vote was vulnerable to suppression and manipulation — something that would only change with more participation from others like him.
“Young people today need to understand that your vote is important,” he said.
The demonstrators marched in two groups, one with the March on for Voting Rights between the Lincoln Memorial and U.S. Capitol and the other heading to the Make Good Trouble Rally near the Lincoln Memorial. The name of the Make Good Trouble Rally was also intended to honor Lewis, who in 1965 was brutally beaten by a state trooper as he led hundreds of protesters over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma during what became known as “Bloody Sunday.”
Rodney Lewis Jr. (no relation to the late congressman) found a place in the shade with friends to listen as speakers took the stage to talk about how Black voters, especially Black women, had been critical to President Biden’s victory last year and that of many other Democrats down the ballot. Now, they said, it’s time for those leaders listen.
Lewis held up his fist and nodded in agreement. He thought of his mother, 63, who had stood in line most of the day just to cast her vote last year in Lithia Springs, Ga., and, as a child growing up in a segregated state, had to go the back of the store for ice cream. Now, she would have to contend with recently enacted voting laws such as Georgia’s that seemed intended to make it harder for people like her to vote.
“It was traumatizing,” Lewis, 36, of Alexandria, said of his mother’s difficulty voting last year. “Why should it take all this for the right to vote? This isn’t the 1960s.”
Dwayne Smith, 60, a Brookland resident who was sitting nearby, expressed frustration that so little progress had been made since then.
Smith expressed frustration that similar issues inspired both Saturday’s march and the one 58 years ago. “Why should we have to march for basic human rights?” he asked.
Organizers said the march was also intended to voice support for other civil rights and social justice issues, too, including reparations for slavery, raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour, canceling student debt, reforming immigration, and ending gun violence and mass incarceration.
Several members of John Lewis’s family appeared onstage, including his youngest brother, Henry “Grant” Lewis, who urged Congress to pass legislation that would make it easier, not harder, for people to vote.
“So it doesn’t matter what side of the aisle you’re on,” he said. “It’s more important to be on the right side of history.”
Lewis also urged the crowd to keep fighting.
“Fifty-eight years ago, my brother and others spoke at this event for voter rights,” Lewis said. “We now realize more than ever this fight is not for a day, or a week, or a month or even a year. We must be committed to fight for a lifetime.”
The moral and constitutional crisis we face today is the direct result of forces in state legislatures that organized to push back against the political power that was mobilized here 58 years ago today. pic.twitter.com/GVh55zUqqQ
— Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II (@RevDrBarber) August 28, 2021
[T]he Rev. William J. Barber II, a North Carolina preacher who is the co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival — a resurgence of a movement created by King before his death in 1968 — also spoke at the march. He has organized protests for voting rights and a $15 federal minimum wage.
“This is not Jim Crow, this is James Crow, Esquire,” Barber has said throughout the summer about the battle for voting rights and a higher federal minimum wage. “It’s a certain sadness that we have to fight over the American people having access to the ballot. We have to fight to get the American people a living wage.”
Civil rights leaders have pointed to the influence King’s original March on Washington, and his words, had on the civil rights movement. It created the momentum, they said, for the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march in Alabama that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act two months later.
“We are at a critical, critical juncture in our nation,” organizer Arndrea Waters King, the wife of Martin Luther King III, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s eldest son, said in an interview this month. “If we don’t have victories, which I believe that we will have, the impact will be felt for generations.”
Roll Call adds, Biden, Manchin singled out as voting rights rally demands end to filibuster:
President Joe Biden and Sen. Joe Manchin III were singled out Saturday by numerous civil rights leaders and members of the Congressional Black Caucus during a rally on the National Mall to demand the Senate pass legislation that could undo state laws that may make it harder for minorities to vote.
Among other measures, speakers called for the Senate to pass a bill approved in the House last week that is named in honor of the late Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga. That bill, HR 4, would restore the Justice Department’s power to “preclear” laws that change voting procedures in many states. The department had that power under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but lost it in the 2013 Supreme Court decision of Shelby County v. Holder.
The House bill faces a likely filibuster in the Senate. A companion measure called the For the People Act, or HR 1, that would overhaul voting, ethics and campaign finance laws, stalled in the chamber in June after a procedural vote to begin debate did not receive the 60 votes needed to end a filibuster.
Speakers on Saturday said they wanted passage of those bills and one giving statehood to Washington, D.C.
Biden has stopped short of endorsing calls to eliminate the filibuster, and Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, has said he would not vote to do so. Manchin did vote to begin debate on HR 1, but only because he said he wanted to propose changes. A list of things he said he would support are included in the John Lewis bill.
“The biggest monument to white supremacy remains, and if we don’t tear it down, nothing else matters. It’s called the filibuster,” Martin Luther King III said during a rally timed to coincide with the 58th anniversary of his father, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., delivering the “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial.
Rep. Mondaire Jones, D-N.Y., said democracy was “in crisis” and cited the insurrection on Jan. 6, and Senate Republicans’ refusal to support a bipartisan investigation of it.
“We have reached what may well be our last chance to rescue this nation from racist minority rule,” Jones said. “This world can ill afford to allow white supremacists, misogynists, homophobes, folks who deny the effectiveness of vaccines and who don’t even want to certify presidential elections to take back control.”
He said to combat that possibility, “We need the White House to get involved and say we’ve got to get rid of this Jim Crow filibuster.”
[W]hile other Black activist groups staged a rally at the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday, the march led by King and Sharpton was on the Mall, with the Capitol as a backdrop. Sharpton said that was intentional because of the importance of Senate action this fall. He also noted that in Biden’s election victory speech, the president said that Black voters had had his back in the election and he would have theirs as president.
“Well, Mr. President, they’re stabbing us in the back,” Sharpton said. “You need to pick up the phone and call Manchin and the others, and tell them that if they can carve around the filibuster to confirm Supreme Court judges for President Trump, they can carve around the filibuster to [pass] voting rights for President Biden.”
Sharpton said he and the members of the Congressional Black Caucus might decide to become “filibuster busters” and “pitch tents here when the Senate comes back.”
Are Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, and a half-dozen or so cowardly Democratic Senators hiding behind these prima donna divas preserving the Jim Crow relic Senate filibuster rule, going to be moved to save American democracy and the right to vote from the seditious GQP and Jim Crow 2.0 voter suppression laws by reforming the Senate filibuster rule? Time is up. The time to act is now. History will condemn you if you do not do the right thing to save American democracy and the right to vote because of an antiquated Senate rule of white supremacy.
We've watched 2 senators (Manchin & Sinema) hold up everything. What if the Black Caucus & the Progressive Caucus were to say, "You can't get 160 votes until you do right by D.C., pass the Voting Rights Advancement Act, pass the For The People Act & raise the min wag to $15/hr"? pic.twitter.com/8wWdq1gnIw
— Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II (@RevDrBarber) August 29, 2021
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Adam Jentleson, a former deputy chief of staff to Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, and the author of “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy,” writes at the Washington Post “When Will Biden Join the Fight for Voting Rights?”, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/29/opinion/biden-voting-rights.html
Despite his institutionalist reputation, President Biden is on track to become the most productive Democratic president in a generation, not because he followed Senate norms and traditions, but because he broke them. Every president in recent memory has largely passed bills with 60 votes, the number needed to overcome a filibuster. Mr. Biden has passed most of his agenda with just 50, bypassing the filibuster. Nearly $2 trillion in economic stimulus and Covid relief, as well as a budget blueprint that opens the door to roughly $3 trillion in additional spending, along with dozens of executive and judicial nominees, have cleared the Senate with simple majorities, often with all 50 Democrats voting together, and no Republicans joining them. This early spurt of productivity led the president to proudly declare, “The Biden plan is working.”
Yet there is one major category where Mr. Biden appears content to let obstruction rule: voting rights. As other bills sidestep filibusters, civil rights bills are still forced to overcome them.
This has happened before. During the Jim Crow era, the Senate held long, contentious debates on the bills that built the middle class, such as Social Security or Medicare, but none of those bills needed to get a supermajority to proceed. By contrast, popular bills to stop lynching, end poll taxes and fight workplace discrimination faced endless filibusters, and were blocked by supermajority thresholds. While Mr. Biden and Senate Democrats aren’t intentionally recreating such an unfair system, in practice, they are, perpetuating the same double standard that upheld Jim Crow for almost a century.
But they can avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. In March, during his first speech on the Senate floor, Senator Raphael Warnock argued that “no Senate rule should overrule the integrity of our democracy.” If Senate rules happen to preserve what Warnock called “Jim Crow in new clothes,” just as they preserved the original version, they must be reformed. For Democratic leaders, this means finding the political will to never again allow bills that guarantee equal access to voting and representation to suffer unequal treatment.
Today, the standard that determines which bills receive majority votes is effectively arbitrary. Many kinds of policies are passed through reconciliation, a special procedure created in the 1970s to allow budgetary measures to proceed with a simple majority vote. Of course, trying to force civil rights bills into this budgetary track will run afoul of the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, who delivers the initial judgment on which provisions can be passed with reconciliation.
But senators can reclaim their right to shape the rules of the Senate even when doing so runs afoul of the parliamentarian, a staff member whose influence has grown dramatically in recent decades as senators lost faith in their ability to interpret Senate rules … But only senators and the vice president preside over and vote in the Senate, and they have final say over what gets included in reconciliation bills. Rather than acting as automatons who simply read the rulings that the staff hands them (literally), they can include civil rights in the forthcoming reconciliation bill and, when the parliamentarian rules against it, Vice President Kamala Harris can issue her own ruling countermanding the parliamentarian. Fifty senators can sustain Harris’s ruling and pass voting rights, without ever having to vote to alter the filibuster itself.
Senators can also simply reform the rules to ensure that civil rights bills are treated equally. Given the Senate’s ugly history of blocking such legislation, there is ample justification for targeted filibuster reforms to ensure that civil rights bills receive majority votes.
Of course, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema oppose ending the filibuster, and imbue bipartisanship with lofty importance. But at the end of the day, it is up to Mr. Biden to bring home the small number of votes needed to end the tiered system that forces voting rights legislation to garner supermajorities in the Senate, while other bills sail through with just 50 votes.
[A]nd yet it is impossible to look at the effort Mr. Biden has devoted to voting rights until now and conclude that he is pulling out all the stops. His heart does not seem to be in this fight. Instead of pressing for the reforms necessary to pass these bills with 50 votes, he has defended the filibuster, while his administration has been challenging civil rights leaders to “out-organize” the Republicans who have implemented systematic, state-sanctioned voter suppression. Many find his stance naïve. “‘Just count the jellybeans’ is a helluva strategy,” political analyst Bakari Sellers tweeted in frustration.
The effort Mr. Biden poured into infrastructure shows what genuine commitment from the White House looks like. While the president has given one major speech dedicated to voting rights, he has held numerous speeches and events on infrastructure, sending the signal that the issue is a top priority. His cabinet and staff practically camped out on Capitol Hill. By late July, according to Bloomberg’s Jennifer Epstein, his staff had held at least 998 meetings and calls on infrastructure; the office of legislative affairs had held 330 meetings and calls with members of Congress and their top aides in the previous month alone.
Mr. Biden has invited comparisons to President Lyndon Johnson, but Mr. Johnson paired accomplishments like Medicare with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Then, as now, the task was deemed so daunting that some cautioned against investing too much of the president’s political capital in the effort. By the time of his assassination, President John F. Kennedy had let segregationists take civil rights hostage to his top domestic priority: a tax cut.
But when Mr. Johnson’s advisers counseled him to give up on civil rights, too, he shot back, “What the hell is the presidency for?” He personally intervened to get the civil rights bill to the floor, then forced his former mentor, fellow Democrat and self-avowed white supremacist, Senator Richard Russell, to lead a filibuster for roughly three months, betting that he could crack an obstructionist front that had remained solid since Reconstruction ended in 1877. Mr. Johnson had to deal with more than a few reluctant senators — most of those filibustering the civil rights bill were Democrats. To beat them, Mr. Johnson did not use magic powers. He simply spent months working every angle, relentlessly.
If Mr. Biden fails where Mr. Johnson succeeded, he will have left intact the system of legislative segregation that preserved Jim Crow. Whatever else he accomplishes, that will remain part of his legacy.
The president may try everything and fail. But the stakes are so high, he has to try.
If Sinema’s after money and power, she already has that.
I can’t imagine she has anything other than ill intent and gets off on being an entitled little troll.
In Sinema’s next primary, I am going to donate as much as I can to her primary opponent.
“Are Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, and a half-dozen or so cowardly Democratic Senators hiding behind these prima donna divas preserving the Jim Crow relic Senate filibuster rule, going to be moved to save American democracy…?”
Probably not. Manchin and Sinema have dug in regarding the filibuster and they’re not likely to reverse themselves. I’m not sure what would move either of them, but it’s apparent that saving American democracy is not one of their concerns.
Some really bad people manage to get elected to Congress and a few of them are Democrats.