Voting Rights Summer Turns Its Attention From Texas To Washington, D.C. This Week – Keep Up The Pressure

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Saturday was the fourth and final day of the Poor Peoples Campaign’s Georgetown-to-Austin Moral March For Democracy. Hundreds of marchers made their way to Austin, TX, on Saturday as thousands more joined them at a protest for voting rights.

At Saturday’s rally, country music legend Willie Nelson led more than a thousand spectators in singing “vote them out” from the steps of the Texas Capitol during a rally wrapping up a four-day march in support of Democratic state legislators who bolted for Washington two weeks ago to block GOP-backed voting restrictions. ‘Vote them out’: Willie Nelson headlines Texas protest rally:

“If you don’t like who’s in there, vote them out,” Nelson sang, inviting he crowd to join him in singing lyrics he’d previously written about taking a stand at the ballot box.

The march began Wednesday and ended Saturday when participants walked up to the doors of the Texas Capitol building in a rally sponsored by activist group Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. It was led, in part, by Beto O’Rourke, the former Democratic congressman and presidential candidate who has not ruled out a run for Texas governor in 2022. Earlier this week, O’Rourke and marchers shut down the frontage road of Interstate 35 during the morning rush hour, funneled between restaurants and cut a path from Republican-controlled statehouse districts to Democratic ones.

Marchers compared what the GOP says are measures meant to protect against fraud and restore confidence in American elections to Jim Crow-style restrictions. There has been no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

“I ask you to think about every man and every woman who had the courage in their convictions and did what they needed to do in their own moment of truth in this country’s history,” O’Rourke told the crowd.

Bishop William Barber II from the Poor People’s Campaign and Beto O”Rourke were interviewed by MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart.

If Senate Democrats can’t get a filibuster carve out for voting rights legislation, their next move might be to attach key voting rights protections to the infrastructure reconciliation bill.

On Sunday, the face of appeasement of GQP Jim Crow 2.0 voter suppression, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), said he “can’t imagine” supporting a carve-out to filibuster rules to help pass voting rights legislation. Manchin ‘can’t imagine’ supporting change to filibuster for voting rights:

Manchin was asked a direct question about whether he could imagine supporting such a carve-out during an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“I can’t imagine a carve-out,” Manchin responded.

He noted that in 2013, a Democratic majority backed a carve-out to the filibuster so that Cabinet appointees for former President Obama could be confirmed. That led to more carve-outs, including for the Supreme Court.

“I was here in 2013 when it was called a carve-out. We’re just going to do the Cabinet for the president, and then it went into, we’re going to do the judges who are lifetime appointments for circuit and district,” he said.

“They were even going to do Supreme Court, but they didn’t at that time. The Democrats were in control. 2017, Mitch McConnell’s in control, comes right back in and guess what? That carve-out worked to really carve us up pretty bad. Then you got the Supreme Court, OK, so there’s no stopping it,” Manchin said.

Manchin has previously said he would not vote to change the filibuster, which would stymie Democrats’ chances of moving sweeping voting rights legislation at a time when GOP legislatures in states across the country are imposing tougher election laws that Democrats say will depress the vote of their supporters.

https://twitter.com/knightopia/status/1421868207875502091

In an opinion at CNN, Beto O’Rourke writes, Beto O’Rourke: Texas offers Americans a stark history lesson (excerpt):

Like the Democratic Party today, the Republican Party of 1890 had recently won majorities in the US House and Senate, and, with the election of Benjamin Harrison in 1888, controlled the presidency, too. And like today’s Democratic Party, those Republicans publicly resolved to use that power to secure voting rights, especially for the Black targets of voter suppression efforts in the South. The Federal Elections Bill duly passed the House of Representatives that year and debate on its passage soon began in the Senate.

But unfortunately for that bill and for millions of Black Americans, the Senate Republicans were unable — or perhaps unwilling — to overcome a filibuster threat led by the Democrats. It didn’t help that Harrison, who had campaigned on a platform of restoring voting rights, remained on the sidelines for much of the action.

So, after all the righteous indignation over the election outrage in Texas had been spent, the majority party meekly gave up the fight for voting rights. They blinked in the face of the filibuster and denied America the chance to establish a true multiracial democracy.

In the aftermath, state legislatures throughout the former Confederacy imposed Whites-only primary laws and additional forms of Jim Crow voter suppression, including poll taxes, literacy tests and extraordinary residency requirements (all of which Whites could bypass thanks to the “grandfather clause” that exempted those whose grandfathers had been registered voters).

It took 75 years, a relentless voting rights movement and the first president from Texas to provide another opportunity to reestablish the right to vote in the South. Soon after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. pressed President Lyndon B. Johnson to work on an accompanying voting rights bill. After Johnson told activists that he just didn’t have the power to move Congress, King resolved to “get the President some power.”

Over the following months, civil and voting rights leaders brought the issue to the forefront of the national conversation. Through protests and marches, direct action and extraordinary courage, they successfully engaged the conscience of the country. And when John Lewis was beaten within an inch of his life leading a march from Selma to Montgomery on March 7, 1965, Johnson finally had the power he needed.

Just eight days after Bloody Sunday, the President convened a joint session of Congress and told the assembled members that no other issue was as important as securing the country’s democracy. “Should we defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue,” he said, “then we will have failed as a people and as a nation.”

As far as Johnson was concerned, no short-term political interest would compromise the intensity of this fight for the most important of American rights. By using the full power of the presidency, he helped move Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act on August 5, 1965 and signed it into law the next day.

[W]hen the US Supreme Court stripped critical protections from the Voting Rights Act in its 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, Southern legislatures responded in much the same way that they did following the end of Reconstruction and the defeat of the Elections Bill of 1890: they moved to dramatically restrict the ability to vote. This time, voter suppression would come in the form of new voter ID laws, polling place closures and racially gerrymandered districts designed to reduce the voting power of Black and minority voters, the poor, the very young and the very old.

This anti-democratic movement aggressively metastasized following former President Donald Trump’s Big Lie about widespread election fraud in the 2020 election. In just the first six months of this year, more than a dozen states enacted new laws to make it easier to restrict access to the ballot box.

In Texas, the Republican-led legislature’s voter suppression bill was bad enough for Democratic lawmakers to leave the state for Washington, D.C. in an effort to block its passage and plead for federal action in the form of the For the People Act.

Much like the Federal Elections Bill of 1890, the For the People Act‘s provisions are commensurate with the scope of the current threat to American democracy. The bill would ensure equal access to early voting and mail-in voting, establish automatic voter registration, make election day a national holiday and end gerrymandering (redistricting used to “draw” people of color out of voting power in states like Texas). In March, the House passed the For the People Act on a party-line vote, just like with the 1890 elections bill.

But the For the People Act has been stopped by the threat of a filibuster in the Senate, in a manner quite similar to the 1890 elections bill. Though Democrats have the power to overcome this procedural vestige of segregation, they have been paralyzed by intra-party disagreements and an unwillingness to take seriously the challenges faced by Black and brown voters. Their inaction risks dooming the bill to failure.

That defeat doesn’t have to be America’s fate.

Just as civil rights leaders and everyday Americans successfully pushed Johnson to use the power of his office to pass voting rights, we can do the same to push President Joe Biden to make voting rights his number one priority — and to place all of his political capital into urging the Senate to carve out an exception to the filibuster. (Exceptions already exist for federal judges, Supreme Court justices, budget deals and fast-track trade agreements.)

Those Texas Democratic legislators who took the fight to the nation’s capital are pushing the President to do just that. Their quorum break, which will end on August 6, exactly 56 years after the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, has bought us some time to save free and fair elections before it’s too late.

NOTE: Dozens of legislators from other states to join Texas lawmakers in D.C. to lobby for voting bills:

More than 100 state legislators from across the country will converge in Washington on Monday to join their Texas counterparts in pushing the Senate and President Biden to take action on voting reform legislation.

The lawmakers represent more than 20 states, including some in which Republican-led legislatures have passed or are considering new voting restrictions, and will urge senators to pass the For the People Act, or at least show progress on a federal voting law, before their summer recess. They are scheduled to rally outside the Capitol on Tuesday and press their case during other public events and private meetings.

[T]he action was organized by Declaration of American Democracy, a coalition of activist groups supporting the For the People Act. It comes as other groups have stepped up efforts to call attention to voting rights in the hope of spurring Congress and the White House to act. Fair Fight Action and CAP Action are flying in 40 voters to appeal to senators, and the Poor People’s Campaign, led by the Rev. William J. Barber II, has scheduled a nonviolent demonstration in Washington on Monday. Several political and civic groups led by Black women have held weekly demonstrations at the Hart Senate Office Building, and several activists and three members of Congress have been arrested.

Texas state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, who along with 49 of his Democratic colleagues left the state to block Republicans from passing voting restrictions, welcomes the reinforcements, especially from states such as Arizona, Georgia and Florida, where GOP lawmakers and activists have amplified and acted on Trump’s false claims that he lost reelection because of widespread voter fraud.

[A]ctivists have praised Biden for a speech last month in which he condemned former president Donald Trump’s unfounded attacks on the nation’s election system and the rush of states to pass restrictive laws, but they also expressed frustration that he has seemed more engaged in getting his infrastructure bill passed.

The question is, what will the President do with it?

Biden is certainly no Harrison, who campaigned for office on a platform of voting rights but then allowed the matter to languish once in office. In fact, Biden gave an extraordinarily powerful speech in Philadelphia earlier this month, describing in the starkest of terms the existential threat our democracy faces. If he follows that up by using the tremendous power of his office to help change the rules of the filibuster to save our democracy, he will stand alongside Johnson as a champion and savior of American democracy.

But he must take to heart the lessons of Texas: when we fight for the right to vote, we can expand democracy to include everyone. But when we give up without a fight, we can lose democracy itself.

Politico reports that “House Democrats are set to introduce new voting rights legislation named for the late Rep. John Lewis — a bill likely to include some key provisions of their more sweeping but stalled election reform proposal — by the end of this week.” Voting rights push reinvigorates as House Dems tee up new bill this week:

They aim to ensure all congressional Democrats can get behind the legislation as the bigger voting bill faces a near-impossible path forward in the Senate, despite a high-profile White House meeting on Friday to discuss a possible path forward. But even the Lewis-named bill faces an uphill climb in the upper chamber, where the “Grim Reaper of Democracy,” Mitch McConnell has questioned the need for the legislation.

The Lewis-named bill, a top priority of the Congressional Black Caucus, aims to restore provisions of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act that were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013. Democrats are revising the legislation in an effort to stave off future legal scrutiny and address an early-July Supreme Court decision that could limit the scope of forthcoming voting rights challenges. POLITICO first reported in June that the Black Caucus and Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.), who chairs a key subpanel overseeing federal elections, pushed for the Lewis bill’s consideration to be moved up.

“We are going to get this bill prepared and hopefully announce what it is on Aug 6 — a bill that can go to the Senate,” said Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), noting that the bill could be introduced on the anniversary of the signing of the landmark 1965 legislation. A vote would likely occur later, he said.

The planned introduction comes as Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer met with President Joe Biden on Friday on voting rights legislation. Democrats’ bigger elections and ethics measure is stuck thanks to opposition from Senate Republicans and resistance from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) to some of its provisions, leaving Democrats frustrated on the path forward.

In the meantime, they’ve been ramping up their advocacy: Three House Democrats have been arrested at Hart Senate Office Building in the last three weeks in protests over voting rights.

“This is of the highest priority for us – the sanctity of the vote, the basis of our democracy,” Pelosi said.

The renewed push on the Hill comes as some voting rights activists become increasingly discouraged with — or angry at — the perceived lack of action in Washington.

[S]everal groups are pushing for Biden to hold more meetings to hear directly from activists. The group of Texas lawmakers who fled the state earlier this month are still agitating for a meeting with Biden. They met with Vice President Kamala Harris earlier in the month.

Texas lawmakers say that time is running short — both with the planned Senate recess fast approaching, and the end of the special session they blocked coming up next week.

The Moral Mondays on The Mall resumes today in Washington, D.C.





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