AI
Wednesday, July 14, 2021 10:18:10 PM
A Bill Destined to Fail May Now Spawn More Plausible Options
"The Republicans’ staggering effort to attack voting rights in Biden’s first 100 days"
The For the People Act had little chance of testing the limits of what, if anything, is still possible in Washington. Oddly, it was so far from passage that it may provide some hope, because so many avenues remain to be pursued.
The Democrats’ voting bill, H.R. 1, was not redesigned or rethought between its introduction in the House in 2019 and its attempted
passage in the Senate on Tuesday. Pete Marovich for The New York Times
By Nate Cohn
Published June 23, 2021Updated July 12, 2021
The demise of the For the People Act — the far-reaching voting rights .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/12/us/republicans-voting-rights-democrats.html .. bill that Republicans blocked in the Senate on Tuesday — will come as a crushing blow to progressives and reformers, who have portrayed the law as an essential tool for saving democracy.
But it was a flawed bill that had little chance of testing the limits of what, if anything, is still possible in Washington. Voting rights activists and Democratic lawmakers may even find that the collapse of this law opens up more plausible, if still highly unlikely, paths to reform.
The law, known as H.R. 1 or S. 1, was full of hot-button measures — from public financing of elections to national mail voting — that were only tangentially related to safeguarding democracy, and all but ensured its failure in the Senate. Its supporters insisted the law should set the floor for voting rights; in truth, it set the floor at the ceiling, by guaranteeing a level of voting access ..
[.. out a bit ..
The six conservative justices in the majority concluded that the relevant part of the act can be used to strike down voting restrictions only when they impose substantial and disproportionate burdens on minority voters, effectively blocking their ability to cast a ballot — a standard suggesting that the Supreme Court would not be inclined to overturn many of the measures Republicans have pursued or approved around the country.]
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/us/supreme-court-arizona-voting-restrictions.html .. that would be difficult to surpass.
At the same time, reformers did not add provisions to tackle the most insidious and serious threat to democracy: election subversion .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/upshot/georgia-election-law-risk.html , where partisan election officials might use their powers to overturn electoral outcomes.
Instead, it focused on the serious but less urgent issues that animated reformers at the time the bill was first proposed in 2019: allegations of corruption in the Trump administration, the rise of so-called dark money in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, or the spate of voter identification laws passed in the aftermath of President Barack Obama’s election victories.
Even a cursory look at the effort by former President Donald J. Trump to subvert the 2020 election revealed a number of vulnerabilities in the electoral system, from the risk that a partisan election administrator might simply refuse to certify an unfavorable election result to the possibility that a vice president might choose not to count a certified electoral slate. None of those vulnerabilities were addressed.
Those concerns have only escalated over the last several months as Republicans have advanced bills that not only imposed new limits on voting .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/us/politics/georgia-voting-lawsuit.html , but also afforded the G.O.P. greater control over election administration. The new powers include the ability to strip secretaries of state of some of their authority and remove members of local election boards. The New York Times reported over the weekend .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/19/us/politics/republican-states.html?searchResultPosition=1 .. how some Democrats on local boards in Georgia, including people of color, were losing their positions.
[INSERT: Mitch McConnell Just Made Joe Manchin Look Like a Sucker. Again.
[...]
McConnell argued that restoring those 1965 protections would give the federal government “almost total ability to determine the voting systems of every state in America” and that other parts of the Voting Rights Act remained intact.
“The Supreme Court concluded that conditions that existed in 1965 no longer existed,” McConnell said. “So there’s no threat to the voting rights law. It’s against the law to discriminate in voting on the basis of race already. And so I think it’s unnecessary.”
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=164301208]
Video
transcript
0:00/1:58
Republicans Filibuster Voting Rights Bill
Senate Republicans used the filibuster on Tuesday to block debate on an ambitious Democratic
bill aimed at countering a wave of ballot restrictions in G.O.P.-controlled states.
It’s true that the 2020 election and Mr. Trump’s unprecedented attempt to undermine it revealed the fragility of American democracy in different and more fundamental ways than even the most perspicacious legislator could have anticipated. Originally, the bill was seen as a “political statement .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/us/politics/voting-rights-law.html ,” a progressive “wish list .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/03/16/hr-1-voting-reforms/ ” or a “messaging bill .. https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/03/politics/senate-democrats-voting-rights-bill-dynamic/index.html ,” not as the basis for a realistic legislative effort.
It was not designed to appeal to the moderate Senate Democrats, who progressives nonetheless hoped would eliminate the filibuster even as they insisted on different proposals and a bipartisan approach.
Yet oddly, the bill was so far from passage that reformers still have cause for some semblance of hope. Nearly every stone was left unturned.
As a result, many other avenues for reform remain to be pursued. None seem likely to be enacted in today’s political climate. All are more plausible than the bill that died in the Senate on Tuesday.
[So why put that bill forward in the first place??]
One of those avenues emerged in the final days of the push for H.R. 1: a grand bargain, like the one recently suggested by Joe Manchin .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/us/politics/manchin-voting-rights.html .. III, the moderate Democratic senator from West Virginia who provoked outrage among progressives when he said he would oppose the bill in its current form.
Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, opposed the voting bill in its current form but proposed several compromises that
gained favor with advocates. Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times
The Manchin compromise resembles H.R. 1 in crucial ways. It does not address election subversion any more than H.R. 1 does. And it still seeks sweeping changes to voting, ethics, campaign finance and redistricting law. But it offers Republicans a national voter identification requirement, while relenting on many of the provisions that provoke the most intense Republican opposition.
Mr. Manchin’s proposal nonetheless provoked intense Republican opposition .. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/voting-bill-showdown-looms-as-gop-rejects-manchin-plan . Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri derided it as a “Stacey Abrams” bill. Mitch McConnell, the minority leader from Kentucky, appeared to suggest that no federal election law would earn his support.
More generally, it is hard to imagine how Republicans could be enticed to accept stringent limits on gerrymandering, given the lopsided partisan consequences of such a ban.
But the strategy behind the Manchin proposal could nonetheless serve as a basis for serious legislative efforts: Democrats can offer Republicans provisions they actually want on voting, like new photo identification requirements, and see what that buys them.
The willingness of Ms. Abrams, who leads the Georgia-based voting rights group Fair Fight, to support the Manchin compromise .. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/stacey-abrams-backs-manchin-s-compromise-voting-legislation-n1271134 , despite its embrace of voter ID measures — an archetypal voter suppression provision — suggests that there may be room to explore options that might attract support from Republicans and haven’t previously been considered.
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The Fight Over Voting Rights
After former President Donald J. Trump returned in recent months to making false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from him, Republican lawmakers in many states have marched ahead to pass laws that make it harder to vote and that change how elections are run, frustrating Democrats and even some election officials in their own party.
A Key Topic: The rules and procedures of elections have become central issues in American politics. As of June 21, lawmakers had passed 28 new laws in 17 states to make the process of voting more difficult, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a research institute.
The Basic Measures: The restrictions vary by state but can include limiting the use of ballot drop boxes, adding identification requirements for voters requesting absentee ballots, and doing away with local laws that allow automatic registration for absentee voting.
More Extreme Measures: Some measures go beyond altering how one votes, including tweaking rules concerning the Electoral College and judicial elections, clamping down on citizen-led ballot initiatives, and outlawing private donations that provide resources for administering elections.
Pushback: This Republican effort has led Democrats in Congress to find a way to pass federal voting laws. A sweeping voting rights bill passed the House in March, but faces difficult obstacles in the Senate, including from Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia. Republicans have remained united against the proposal and even if the bill became law, it would most likely face steep legal challenges.
Florida: Measures here include limiting the use of drop boxes, adding more identification requirements for absentee ballots, requiring voters to request an absentee ballot for each election, limiting who could collect and drop off ballots, and further empowering partisan observers during the ballot-counting process.
Texas: Texas Democrats successfully blocked the state’s expansive voting bill, known as S.B. 7, in a late-night walkout and are starting a major statewide registration program focused on racially diverse communities. But Republicans in the state have pledged to return in a special session and pass a similar voting bill. S.B. 7 included new restrictions on absentee voting; granted broad new autonomy and authority to partisan poll watchers; escalated punishments for mistakes or offenses by election officials; and banned both drive-through voting and 24-hour voting.
Other States: Arizona’s Republican-controlled Legislature passed a bill that would limit the distribution of mail ballots. The bill, which includes removing voters from the state’s Permanent Early Voting List if they do not cast a ballot at least once every two years, may be only the first in a series of voting restrictions to be enacted there. Georgia Republicans in March enacted far-reaching new voting laws that limit ballot drop-boxes and make the distribution of water within certain boundaries of a polling station a misdemeanor. And Iowa has imposed new limits, including reducing the period for early voting and in-person voting hours on Election Day.
-------
Another avenue is a version of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would again subject Southern states to obtain federal clearance before making changes to their voting system — a requirement that a 2013 Supreme Court decision gutted.
Restoring the preclearance condition is of considerable symbolic significance, but it offers far less to reformers than the Manchin compromise. It does nothing to address the laws that Republicans have enacted this year. It would do little to protect against election subversion. It does not check Republican efforts outside the South. And it relies on the federal court system, which has a more limited view of the Voting Rights Act than reformers would like.
But unlike H.R. 1, restoring federal preclearance does have the support .. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/john-lewis-voting-rights-bill-faces-steep-uphill-climb-senate-n1269910 .. of Mr. Manchin and Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska. Mr. Manchin also seemed willing to embrace a variety of largely unspecified changes that might make preclearance somewhat more amenable to the Republicans, including an objective test to determine whether jurisdictions should be subjected to or relieved from preclearance and limits on the power of the attorney general. It remains doubtful that any changes would attract significant Republican support, but it also remains untested.
[[...] The GOP moves go back to the Caucus Room Restaurant: Oppose every bill Obama puts up.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=157545627]
A final avenue is an even narrower bill, comprising only provisions that attract bipartisan support. It remains to be seen whether even a single idea falls into this category. But many of the hypothesized proposals for addressing election subversion .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/opinion/republicans-voting-us-elections.html .. might have some chance to find Republican support, like reforms to the rules for counting electoral votes, and funding for election administration.
Other potential areas of agreement are a requirement for paper ballots; ballot chain-of-custody requirements; standards for certification of federal elections and establishing voter eligibility; and clarifying whether and when judges or local officials can defy a state legislature.
None of these proposals necessarily advantage either political party. All would have a chance to avoid the central, politicized debate over voter suppression and voting rights.
Realistically, even the most innocuous proposals would have a challenging path to passage. The window for bipartisan cooperation on these issues may have closed several months ago, as memories of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters were supplanted by politically charged fights over voting rights and voter suppression. Republicans have few incentives to support a bill, even if watered down considerably.
Yet all of these new avenues for reformers have something simple in common: They involve an earnest attempt to win 60 votes in the Senate, something that H.R. 1 did not. Many progressives scoff at the idea, but if moderate Democrats can be taken at their word, then reformers never had a choice but to at least try to find Republican support.
Voting rights activists on Tuesday called for a new push to ensure voting rights, and Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader from New York, pledged to keep fighting, calling the Senate vote “the starting gun, not the finish line.”
Perhaps reformers will surprise themselves and pull off a rare legislative win. More likely, their effort will fail and they can hope that their failure will demonstrate the impossibility of bipartisanship to Senate moderates, perhaps reopening the conversation about eliminating the filibuster.
Wherever the effort might end, a more realistic legislative push begins with an earnest effort to write a bill that is more responsive to the current threats to the system and is designed to win enough votes to pass.
Voting Rights
Democrats Vow to Redouble Voting Push: ‘Today Is the Starter Pistol’ June 22, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/us/politics/voting-rights-bill-democrats.html
Republicans Block Voting Rights Bill, Dealing Blow to Biden and Democrats June 22, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/us/politics/filibuster-voting-rights.html
Lessons from the Demise of a Voting Rights Bill June 23, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/podcasts/the-daily/for-the-people-act-voting-rights-filibuster.html
How Republican States Are Expanding Their Power Over Elections June 19, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/19/us/politics/republican-states.html
Nate Cohn is a domestic correspondent for The Upshot. He covers elections, polling and demographics. Before joining The Times in 2013, he worked as a staff writer for The New Republic. @Nate_Cohn
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/us/politics/voting-rights-bill.html
Why would you bother putting H.R. 1 forward??? There must be a reason i haven't clicked to yet.
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This is a more critical look at Biden's right to vote push. Is it fair? Why not a "carve out"???
Matt Ford/July 14, 2021
The Democrats’ Voting Rights Bill Is Dead
President Biden’s plan to protect the right to vote is to hope that someone else will come up with a plan to protect the right to vote.
President Biden offers a salute to the crowd during his voting rights speech.
Saul Loeb/Getty Images
President Joe Biden effectively conceded defeat on passing two major voting rights bills in Congress on Tuesday, pointedly declining to throw his political weight behind filibuster reform and urging private groups to find alternate means to resist voter suppression in lieu of strengthened federal protections. “Legislation is one tool,” Biden told the audience, “but not the only tool.”
The president’s speech .. https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/13/politics/voting-rights-joe-biden-trump-big-lie/index.html .. at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia carried dire warnings about the state of American democracy. Biden declared that efforts to thwart GOP-led restrictions on voting .. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/state-voting-bills-tracker-2021 .. are “the test of our time.” He described the wave of bills in Republican-led state legislatures across the country as “the twenty-first-century Jim Crow.” He offered grim predictions for the future, warning that Republicans’ “election subversion” efforts are “the most dangerous threat to voting and the integrity of free and fair elections in our history.” He told Americans that the eyes of the world and of history were upon them.
Biden’s substance fell far short of his rhetoric. Nowhere in the address did Biden mention the filibuster, which allows a minority of Republican senators to block any voting rights legislation from making it through the chamber. Earlier this year, Biden expressed some support for modest reforms, such as the so-called talking filibuster .. https://newrepublic.com/article/162023/talking-filibuster-democrats , that would make the practice harder to sustain. But he appeared to back down from that position on Tuesday. His speech included no call for even minor filibuster reforms, nor did it put any serious pressure on known Democratic holdouts, such as Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, to rethink their entrenched position.
The filibuster’s absence from Biden’s remarks lent a surreal air to the rest of his speech. At one point, he urged Congress to send both of the major voting rights bills under consideration to his desk for a signature. “We must pass the For the People Act,” he told the audience. “It’s a national imperative. We must also pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.” Republicans successfully filibustered the For the People Act last month, and it appears no closer to passage now. It was as if Biden had urged lawmakers to meet him on the other side of the Grand Canyon without saying how they should get across.
Biden and his administration have cast the struggle over voting rights and voter suppression as an existential battle for American democracy. Vice President Kamala Harris, speaking on the same topic last Thursday at Howard University, called it “the fight of our nation’s lifetime” and framed it as a continuation of past civil rights battles. “These laws create obstacle upon obstacle,” she warned. “These laws make it harder for you to vote because they don’t want you to vote. And so I will say again, your vote matters. Your voice matters.”
As with Biden’s speech this week, however, the filibuster’s role in stymying voting rights bills went unmentioned. Harris instead used her Howard address to outline a new voter-protection project at the Democratic National Committee. “With this $25 million, the Democrats are investing in the tools and technology to register voters, to educate voters, to turn out voters, to protect voters,” she told the audience. Her remarks acknowledged the intense grassroots pressure on the administration to take action. “People say, ‘What’s the strategy?’” Harris said. “Well, I just outlined it.”
The White House’s tacit admission of defeat came even as calls for filibuster reform intensified in Democratic circles. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, a major Biden ally, told Politico .. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/10/clyburn-biden-filibuster-election-reform-499051 .. last week that Biden should “pick up the phone and tell [West Virginia Senator] Joe Manchin, ‘Hey, we should do a carve out.’ I don’t care whether he does it in a microphone or on the telephone—just do it.” Since it’s unlikely that Democratic senators would abolish the filibuster in its entirety, some voting rights leaders have instead argued that a carve-out for voting rights would be justified.
But White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki almost immediately nixed the idea on Monday. “The president’s view continues to be aligned with what he has said in the past, which is that he has not supported the elimination of the filibuster because it has been used as often the other way around,” she told reporters at a press briefing. Ahead of Biden’s address in Philadelphia, Harris told NPR .. https://www.npr.org/2021/07/13/1015581214/vice-president-harris-hints-that-she-is-discussing-filibuster-changes-with-senat .. that she was “having conversations with folks” about filibuster reform, an apparent reference to Clyburn, but explicitly declined to go beyond the administration’s line on the matter.
Perhaps the strangest moment of Biden’s speech came when he criticized the Supreme Court’s ruling last month .. https://newrepublic.com/article/162698/alito-brnovich-vra-voter-suppression .. in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. His criticism was well founded: Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion lawlessly rewrote .. https://newrepublic.com/article/162912/samuel-alito-voting-rights-brnovich .. a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to make it easier for states to pass unequal restrictions. It’s hard to avoid the fact that three of the six justices in the Brnovich majority were only confirmed after Republican senators created a carve-out in the filibuster to confirm them. Despite his opposition to the ruling, Biden still refused to support a carve-out to limits or reverse the high court’s rulings on voting rights.
The Biden administration hasn’t completely abandoned the battle to protect voting rights from state-level attacks, of course. Last month, the Justice Department filed a Voting Rights Act lawsuit against the state of Georgia for its controversial slate of new restrictions on absentee ballots and polling places. Other lawsuits could soon follow. But Biden all but closed the door on Tuesday to going any further at the federal level. “Democracy or autocracy? That’s what it’s coming down to,” he declared. One side in that struggle is fighting with brand-new weapons. The other will have to simply make do with what’s left.
Matt Ford @fordm
Matt Ford is a staff writer at The New Republic.
https://newrepublic.com/article/162974/democrats-voting-rights-bill-dead
"The Republicans’ staggering effort to attack voting rights in Biden’s first 100 days"
The For the People Act had little chance of testing the limits of what, if anything, is still possible in Washington. Oddly, it was so far from passage that it may provide some hope, because so many avenues remain to be pursued.
The Democrats’ voting bill, H.R. 1, was not redesigned or rethought between its introduction in the House in 2019 and its attempted
passage in the Senate on Tuesday. Pete Marovich for The New York Times
By Nate Cohn
Published June 23, 2021Updated July 12, 2021
The demise of the For the People Act — the far-reaching voting rights .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/12/us/republicans-voting-rights-democrats.html .. bill that Republicans blocked in the Senate on Tuesday — will come as a crushing blow to progressives and reformers, who have portrayed the law as an essential tool for saving democracy.
But it was a flawed bill that had little chance of testing the limits of what, if anything, is still possible in Washington. Voting rights activists and Democratic lawmakers may even find that the collapse of this law opens up more plausible, if still highly unlikely, paths to reform.
The law, known as H.R. 1 or S. 1, was full of hot-button measures — from public financing of elections to national mail voting — that were only tangentially related to safeguarding democracy, and all but ensured its failure in the Senate. Its supporters insisted the law should set the floor for voting rights; in truth, it set the floor at the ceiling, by guaranteeing a level of voting access ..
[.. out a bit ..
The six conservative justices in the majority concluded that the relevant part of the act can be used to strike down voting restrictions only when they impose substantial and disproportionate burdens on minority voters, effectively blocking their ability to cast a ballot — a standard suggesting that the Supreme Court would not be inclined to overturn many of the measures Republicans have pursued or approved around the country.]
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/us/supreme-court-arizona-voting-restrictions.html .. that would be difficult to surpass.
At the same time, reformers did not add provisions to tackle the most insidious and serious threat to democracy: election subversion .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/upshot/georgia-election-law-risk.html , where partisan election officials might use their powers to overturn electoral outcomes.
Instead, it focused on the serious but less urgent issues that animated reformers at the time the bill was first proposed in 2019: allegations of corruption in the Trump administration, the rise of so-called dark money in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, or the spate of voter identification laws passed in the aftermath of President Barack Obama’s election victories.
Even a cursory look at the effort by former President Donald J. Trump to subvert the 2020 election revealed a number of vulnerabilities in the electoral system, from the risk that a partisan election administrator might simply refuse to certify an unfavorable election result to the possibility that a vice president might choose not to count a certified electoral slate. None of those vulnerabilities were addressed.
Those concerns have only escalated over the last several months as Republicans have advanced bills that not only imposed new limits on voting .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/us/politics/georgia-voting-lawsuit.html , but also afforded the G.O.P. greater control over election administration. The new powers include the ability to strip secretaries of state of some of their authority and remove members of local election boards. The New York Times reported over the weekend .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/19/us/politics/republican-states.html?searchResultPosition=1 .. how some Democrats on local boards in Georgia, including people of color, were losing their positions.
[INSERT: Mitch McConnell Just Made Joe Manchin Look Like a Sucker. Again.
[...]
McConnell argued that restoring those 1965 protections would give the federal government “almost total ability to determine the voting systems of every state in America” and that other parts of the Voting Rights Act remained intact.
“The Supreme Court concluded that conditions that existed in 1965 no longer existed,” McConnell said. “So there’s no threat to the voting rights law. It’s against the law to discriminate in voting on the basis of race already. And so I think it’s unnecessary.”
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=164301208]
Video
transcript
0:00/1:58
Republicans Filibuster Voting Rights Bill
Senate Republicans used the filibuster on Tuesday to block debate on an ambitious Democratic
bill aimed at countering a wave of ballot restrictions in G.O.P.-controlled states.
It’s true that the 2020 election and Mr. Trump’s unprecedented attempt to undermine it revealed the fragility of American democracy in different and more fundamental ways than even the most perspicacious legislator could have anticipated. Originally, the bill was seen as a “political statement .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/us/politics/voting-rights-law.html ,” a progressive “wish list .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/03/16/hr-1-voting-reforms/ ” or a “messaging bill .. https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/03/politics/senate-democrats-voting-rights-bill-dynamic/index.html ,” not as the basis for a realistic legislative effort.
It was not designed to appeal to the moderate Senate Democrats, who progressives nonetheless hoped would eliminate the filibuster even as they insisted on different proposals and a bipartisan approach.
Yet oddly, the bill was so far from passage that reformers still have cause for some semblance of hope. Nearly every stone was left unturned.
As a result, many other avenues for reform remain to be pursued. None seem likely to be enacted in today’s political climate. All are more plausible than the bill that died in the Senate on Tuesday.
[So why put that bill forward in the first place??]
One of those avenues emerged in the final days of the push for H.R. 1: a grand bargain, like the one recently suggested by Joe Manchin .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/us/politics/manchin-voting-rights.html .. III, the moderate Democratic senator from West Virginia who provoked outrage among progressives when he said he would oppose the bill in its current form.
Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, opposed the voting bill in its current form but proposed several compromises that
gained favor with advocates. Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times
The Manchin compromise resembles H.R. 1 in crucial ways. It does not address election subversion any more than H.R. 1 does. And it still seeks sweeping changes to voting, ethics, campaign finance and redistricting law. But it offers Republicans a national voter identification requirement, while relenting on many of the provisions that provoke the most intense Republican opposition.
Mr. Manchin’s proposal nonetheless provoked intense Republican opposition .. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/voting-bill-showdown-looms-as-gop-rejects-manchin-plan . Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri derided it as a “Stacey Abrams” bill. Mitch McConnell, the minority leader from Kentucky, appeared to suggest that no federal election law would earn his support.
More generally, it is hard to imagine how Republicans could be enticed to accept stringent limits on gerrymandering, given the lopsided partisan consequences of such a ban.
But the strategy behind the Manchin proposal could nonetheless serve as a basis for serious legislative efforts: Democrats can offer Republicans provisions they actually want on voting, like new photo identification requirements, and see what that buys them.
The willingness of Ms. Abrams, who leads the Georgia-based voting rights group Fair Fight, to support the Manchin compromise .. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/stacey-abrams-backs-manchin-s-compromise-voting-legislation-n1271134 , despite its embrace of voter ID measures — an archetypal voter suppression provision — suggests that there may be room to explore options that might attract support from Republicans and haven’t previously been considered.
-------
The Fight Over Voting Rights
After former President Donald J. Trump returned in recent months to making false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from him, Republican lawmakers in many states have marched ahead to pass laws that make it harder to vote and that change how elections are run, frustrating Democrats and even some election officials in their own party.
A Key Topic: The rules and procedures of elections have become central issues in American politics. As of June 21, lawmakers had passed 28 new laws in 17 states to make the process of voting more difficult, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a research institute.
The Basic Measures: The restrictions vary by state but can include limiting the use of ballot drop boxes, adding identification requirements for voters requesting absentee ballots, and doing away with local laws that allow automatic registration for absentee voting.
More Extreme Measures: Some measures go beyond altering how one votes, including tweaking rules concerning the Electoral College and judicial elections, clamping down on citizen-led ballot initiatives, and outlawing private donations that provide resources for administering elections.
Pushback: This Republican effort has led Democrats in Congress to find a way to pass federal voting laws. A sweeping voting rights bill passed the House in March, but faces difficult obstacles in the Senate, including from Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia. Republicans have remained united against the proposal and even if the bill became law, it would most likely face steep legal challenges.
Florida: Measures here include limiting the use of drop boxes, adding more identification requirements for absentee ballots, requiring voters to request an absentee ballot for each election, limiting who could collect and drop off ballots, and further empowering partisan observers during the ballot-counting process.
Texas: Texas Democrats successfully blocked the state’s expansive voting bill, known as S.B. 7, in a late-night walkout and are starting a major statewide registration program focused on racially diverse communities. But Republicans in the state have pledged to return in a special session and pass a similar voting bill. S.B. 7 included new restrictions on absentee voting; granted broad new autonomy and authority to partisan poll watchers; escalated punishments for mistakes or offenses by election officials; and banned both drive-through voting and 24-hour voting.
Other States: Arizona’s Republican-controlled Legislature passed a bill that would limit the distribution of mail ballots. The bill, which includes removing voters from the state’s Permanent Early Voting List if they do not cast a ballot at least once every two years, may be only the first in a series of voting restrictions to be enacted there. Georgia Republicans in March enacted far-reaching new voting laws that limit ballot drop-boxes and make the distribution of water within certain boundaries of a polling station a misdemeanor. And Iowa has imposed new limits, including reducing the period for early voting and in-person voting hours on Election Day.
-------
Another avenue is a version of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would again subject Southern states to obtain federal clearance before making changes to their voting system — a requirement that a 2013 Supreme Court decision gutted.
Restoring the preclearance condition is of considerable symbolic significance, but it offers far less to reformers than the Manchin compromise. It does nothing to address the laws that Republicans have enacted this year. It would do little to protect against election subversion. It does not check Republican efforts outside the South. And it relies on the federal court system, which has a more limited view of the Voting Rights Act than reformers would like.
But unlike H.R. 1, restoring federal preclearance does have the support .. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/john-lewis-voting-rights-bill-faces-steep-uphill-climb-senate-n1269910 .. of Mr. Manchin and Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska. Mr. Manchin also seemed willing to embrace a variety of largely unspecified changes that might make preclearance somewhat more amenable to the Republicans, including an objective test to determine whether jurisdictions should be subjected to or relieved from preclearance and limits on the power of the attorney general. It remains doubtful that any changes would attract significant Republican support, but it also remains untested.
[[...] The GOP moves go back to the Caucus Room Restaurant: Oppose every bill Obama puts up.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=157545627]
A final avenue is an even narrower bill, comprising only provisions that attract bipartisan support. It remains to be seen whether even a single idea falls into this category. But many of the hypothesized proposals for addressing election subversion .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/opinion/republicans-voting-us-elections.html .. might have some chance to find Republican support, like reforms to the rules for counting electoral votes, and funding for election administration.
Other potential areas of agreement are a requirement for paper ballots; ballot chain-of-custody requirements; standards for certification of federal elections and establishing voter eligibility; and clarifying whether and when judges or local officials can defy a state legislature.
None of these proposals necessarily advantage either political party. All would have a chance to avoid the central, politicized debate over voter suppression and voting rights.
Realistically, even the most innocuous proposals would have a challenging path to passage. The window for bipartisan cooperation on these issues may have closed several months ago, as memories of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters were supplanted by politically charged fights over voting rights and voter suppression. Republicans have few incentives to support a bill, even if watered down considerably.
Yet all of these new avenues for reformers have something simple in common: They involve an earnest attempt to win 60 votes in the Senate, something that H.R. 1 did not. Many progressives scoff at the idea, but if moderate Democrats can be taken at their word, then reformers never had a choice but to at least try to find Republican support.
Voting rights activists on Tuesday called for a new push to ensure voting rights, and Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader from New York, pledged to keep fighting, calling the Senate vote “the starting gun, not the finish line.”
Perhaps reformers will surprise themselves and pull off a rare legislative win. More likely, their effort will fail and they can hope that their failure will demonstrate the impossibility of bipartisanship to Senate moderates, perhaps reopening the conversation about eliminating the filibuster.
Wherever the effort might end, a more realistic legislative push begins with an earnest effort to write a bill that is more responsive to the current threats to the system and is designed to win enough votes to pass.
Voting Rights
Democrats Vow to Redouble Voting Push: ‘Today Is the Starter Pistol’ June 22, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/us/politics/voting-rights-bill-democrats.html
Republicans Block Voting Rights Bill, Dealing Blow to Biden and Democrats June 22, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/us/politics/filibuster-voting-rights.html
Lessons from the Demise of a Voting Rights Bill June 23, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/podcasts/the-daily/for-the-people-act-voting-rights-filibuster.html
How Republican States Are Expanding Their Power Over Elections June 19, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/19/us/politics/republican-states.html
Nate Cohn is a domestic correspondent for The Upshot. He covers elections, polling and demographics. Before joining The Times in 2013, he worked as a staff writer for The New Republic. @Nate_Cohn
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/us/politics/voting-rights-bill.html
Why would you bother putting H.R. 1 forward??? There must be a reason i haven't clicked to yet.
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This is a more critical look at Biden's right to vote push. Is it fair? Why not a "carve out"???
Matt Ford/July 14, 2021
The Democrats’ Voting Rights Bill Is Dead
President Biden’s plan to protect the right to vote is to hope that someone else will come up with a plan to protect the right to vote.
President Biden offers a salute to the crowd during his voting rights speech.
Saul Loeb/Getty Images
President Joe Biden effectively conceded defeat on passing two major voting rights bills in Congress on Tuesday, pointedly declining to throw his political weight behind filibuster reform and urging private groups to find alternate means to resist voter suppression in lieu of strengthened federal protections. “Legislation is one tool,” Biden told the audience, “but not the only tool.”
The president’s speech .. https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/13/politics/voting-rights-joe-biden-trump-big-lie/index.html .. at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia carried dire warnings about the state of American democracy. Biden declared that efforts to thwart GOP-led restrictions on voting .. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/state-voting-bills-tracker-2021 .. are “the test of our time.” He described the wave of bills in Republican-led state legislatures across the country as “the twenty-first-century Jim Crow.” He offered grim predictions for the future, warning that Republicans’ “election subversion” efforts are “the most dangerous threat to voting and the integrity of free and fair elections in our history.” He told Americans that the eyes of the world and of history were upon them.
Biden’s substance fell far short of his rhetoric. Nowhere in the address did Biden mention the filibuster, which allows a minority of Republican senators to block any voting rights legislation from making it through the chamber. Earlier this year, Biden expressed some support for modest reforms, such as the so-called talking filibuster .. https://newrepublic.com/article/162023/talking-filibuster-democrats , that would make the practice harder to sustain. But he appeared to back down from that position on Tuesday. His speech included no call for even minor filibuster reforms, nor did it put any serious pressure on known Democratic holdouts, such as Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, to rethink their entrenched position.
The filibuster’s absence from Biden’s remarks lent a surreal air to the rest of his speech. At one point, he urged Congress to send both of the major voting rights bills under consideration to his desk for a signature. “We must pass the For the People Act,” he told the audience. “It’s a national imperative. We must also pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.” Republicans successfully filibustered the For the People Act last month, and it appears no closer to passage now. It was as if Biden had urged lawmakers to meet him on the other side of the Grand Canyon without saying how they should get across.
Biden and his administration have cast the struggle over voting rights and voter suppression as an existential battle for American democracy. Vice President Kamala Harris, speaking on the same topic last Thursday at Howard University, called it “the fight of our nation’s lifetime” and framed it as a continuation of past civil rights battles. “These laws create obstacle upon obstacle,” she warned. “These laws make it harder for you to vote because they don’t want you to vote. And so I will say again, your vote matters. Your voice matters.”
As with Biden’s speech this week, however, the filibuster’s role in stymying voting rights bills went unmentioned. Harris instead used her Howard address to outline a new voter-protection project at the Democratic National Committee. “With this $25 million, the Democrats are investing in the tools and technology to register voters, to educate voters, to turn out voters, to protect voters,” she told the audience. Her remarks acknowledged the intense grassroots pressure on the administration to take action. “People say, ‘What’s the strategy?’” Harris said. “Well, I just outlined it.”
The White House’s tacit admission of defeat came even as calls for filibuster reform intensified in Democratic circles. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, a major Biden ally, told Politico .. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/10/clyburn-biden-filibuster-election-reform-499051 .. last week that Biden should “pick up the phone and tell [West Virginia Senator] Joe Manchin, ‘Hey, we should do a carve out.’ I don’t care whether he does it in a microphone or on the telephone—just do it.” Since it’s unlikely that Democratic senators would abolish the filibuster in its entirety, some voting rights leaders have instead argued that a carve-out for voting rights would be justified.
But White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki almost immediately nixed the idea on Monday. “The president’s view continues to be aligned with what he has said in the past, which is that he has not supported the elimination of the filibuster because it has been used as often the other way around,” she told reporters at a press briefing. Ahead of Biden’s address in Philadelphia, Harris told NPR .. https://www.npr.org/2021/07/13/1015581214/vice-president-harris-hints-that-she-is-discussing-filibuster-changes-with-senat .. that she was “having conversations with folks” about filibuster reform, an apparent reference to Clyburn, but explicitly declined to go beyond the administration’s line on the matter.
Perhaps the strangest moment of Biden’s speech came when he criticized the Supreme Court’s ruling last month .. https://newrepublic.com/article/162698/alito-brnovich-vra-voter-suppression .. in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. His criticism was well founded: Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion lawlessly rewrote .. https://newrepublic.com/article/162912/samuel-alito-voting-rights-brnovich .. a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to make it easier for states to pass unequal restrictions. It’s hard to avoid the fact that three of the six justices in the Brnovich majority were only confirmed after Republican senators created a carve-out in the filibuster to confirm them. Despite his opposition to the ruling, Biden still refused to support a carve-out to limits or reverse the high court’s rulings on voting rights.
The Biden administration hasn’t completely abandoned the battle to protect voting rights from state-level attacks, of course. Last month, the Justice Department filed a Voting Rights Act lawsuit against the state of Georgia for its controversial slate of new restrictions on absentee ballots and polling places. Other lawsuits could soon follow. But Biden all but closed the door on Tuesday to going any further at the federal level. “Democracy or autocracy? That’s what it’s coming down to,” he declared. One side in that struggle is fighting with brand-new weapons. The other will have to simply make do with what’s left.
Matt Ford @fordm
Matt Ford is a staff writer at The New Republic.
https://newrepublic.com/article/162974/democrats-voting-rights-bill-dead
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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