With help from Manchin and Sinema, a Republican revolution from below is driving national
The forceful move from the GOP-appointed Supreme Court majority and Republican red state officials to retrench previously guaranteed national rights “really magnifies the significance of this filibuster fight,” says Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, a nonpartisan group that advocates for voting rights. That struggle, he continues, represents “a major question of what the shape of the country is going to look like, because if Congress can’t act to protect voting rights, can’t act to protect abortion rights, unless there are 60 [Senate] votes as well as a president, then states have an open field to abuse the rights of their people and the extreme conservatives have nothing in their way.”
Battles over elections
The conflict around voting rights over roughly the past decade clearly illuminates the interlocking action-reaction dynamics of the new GOP axis.
That ruling had the immediate impact of freeing from preclearance the 15 states covered in whole or part under the law (a list that includes Alabama, Georgia, Texas and Arizona in whole and Florida and North Carolina in part). It also encouraged other Republican-controlled states to pursue new restrictions by signaling “that this is a Supreme Court that doesn’t really give a blank about your voting rights,” as Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Marymount Law School who specializes in election law, recently told me.
Yet these bills advanced into law anyway on virtually party-line, majority-rule votes because no state legislature has a filibuster rule that requires a supermajority to approve legislation.
“Not a single state requires a 60% threshold for passing legislation,” says Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in political reform at the center-left think tank New America. “For all the Republicans who say we ought to keep the filibuster, should we also do that in the state senates? Well, maybe the Texas voting law should have required a 60% threshold? Maybe the Georgia law should have required a 60% threshold?”
Operating on the same rules as the state legislatures (and effectively as the Supreme Court), Democrats in the House of Representatives last year passed two bills, on a party-line, majority-rule basis, to counter the GOP moves. Those bills, respectively, reversed the court’s decisions eviscerating the Voting Rights Act and established a new nationwide floor of voting rights, including access to mail and early voting and same-day voter registration.
But the refusal of Manchin and Sinema to exempt voting rights from the filibuster means that for the only time in this long sequence of events, Democrats must reach a bipartisan, supermajority of support to pass voter protections through the Senate and into law. The two senators’ decision means Congress can respond to the new voting restrictions only on the dim chance that Republicans in the Senate agree to override what Republicans in the states and on the Supreme Court have already done.
“If Congress is now going to be held hostage by the 60-vote supermajority requirement and be unable, even with a majority, to protect democratic rights in the states, then the national government has disarmed and leaves people unprotected from the abuses of partisans or White backlash in their own states,” says Waldman.
States’ divergence on rights widening
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