Choosing Between the Sacred Right to Vote and the Filibuster Rules
FRED WERTHEIMER’S WEEKLY NOTE | May 27, 2021
“It is clear that to pass the Senate, S. 1 will need the vote of Senator Manchin both for S. 1 and for an exception to the filibuster rules.”
If, as expected, Republicans successfully filibuster the legislation to create a commission to investigate the January 6 insurrectionist mob invasion of the Capitol, this will only confirm the reality that there is no hope for Senate bipartisanship on S. 1, the For the People Act.
Meanwhile, Republican-controlled state legislatures are engaged in the greatest systematic domestic attack on the right to vote, the core of our democracy, in living memory.
According to a Washington Post analysis, we are facing “the most sweeping contraction of ballot access in the United States since the end of Reconstruction, when Southern states curtailed the voting rights of formerly enslaved Black men.”
Republican state legislatures are being joined in this effort by their Republican collaborators in Congress, led by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.
Republican Senators are committed to filibustering S. 1, which would override the voter suppression and disenfranchisement laws being enacted in states around the country that are aimed at people of color and likely Democratic voters.
S. 1 would also create a new small donor, matching funds system, which is essential for officeholders to finance their campaigns free from political money corruption. The current campaign financing system is dominated by political money from influence-seeking billionaires, millionaires, lobbyists, bundlers, Super PACs, dark money nonprofits, and special interest PACs.
It is clear that Senate Republicans will not provide the 10 Republican votes needed to break the filibuster that they will conduct to block S. 1.
It is also clear that the John Lewis Voting Rights Act (VRA) – which is also must-pass legislation – will not have any effect on state voting restrictions enacted prior to the enactment of the VRA. It is prospective legislation that does not apply to laws already enacted.
With 49 Senate sponsors for S. 1, the decision about whether millions of Americans will face the prospect of losing their ability to vote in the 2022 and 2024 presidential and congressional elections rests in the hands of one Senator, Joe Manchin, Democrat from West Virginia.
Manchin cosponsored the For the People Act in the last Congress and is the only Senate Democrat who has not cosponsored the bill in this Congress.
This legislation has broad bipartisan support in the country. For example, a recent poll in Senator Manchin’s state of West Virginia found that 79 percent of respondents supported the For the People Act, including 76 percent of registered GOP voters.
It is clear that to pass the Senate, S. 1 will need the vote of Senator Manchin both for S. 1 and for an exception to the filibuster rules.
The last Senator to create an exception to the filibuster rules was none other than the king of obstructionist filibusters himself, Senator McConnell. He had no problem changing the filibuster rules in 2017 when it suited his political interests.
The McConnell filibuster exception resulted in the confirmation by a simple majority vote of three Trump-nominated Supreme Court Justices who did not have the 60 votes needed to end a filibuster under the normal rules.
In fact, according to one study, Congress created 161 exceptions to the filibuster rules in statutes enacted from 1969 to 2014.
Senator Manchin himself has supported changes to the filibuster rules.
In 2011, he cosponsored and voted for S. Res. 10 which would have changed the filibuster rules, but was not adopted. At the time, Manchin said that “West Virginians deserve a government that works for them, and they are understandably frustrated with the way things get done – or don’t – in Washington.”
Senator Manchin will soon face the most important decision of his Senate career.
He can vote for the For the People Act and with its passage override the anti-democratic state voter suppression and disenfranchisement laws being enacted all over the country.
Or, he can join with Senate Republicans and vote to kill S. 1 and thereby protect state voter suppression and disenfranchisement laws which are attacking the sacred right to vote for millions of eligible citizens.
The choice here should be an easy one for Senator Manchin.
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