GOP Blocks Voting Rights For 4th Time; It’s Time To Revise The Filibuster Rules & Protect Democracy

FRED WERTHEIMER’S WEEKLY NOTE | November 4, 2021

For the fourth time this year, Senate Republicans have blocked essential voting rights legislation.

Yesterday, their obstructionism blocked consideration of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

They previously blocked consideration of the For the People Act in June and again in August, and then, in October, they blocked consideration of the Freedom to Vote Act, compromise voting rights legislation crafted by Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV).

Led by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the self-described “Grim Reaper,” Senate Republicans have made crystal clear that they will use the filibuster rules to block consideration of any voting rights legislation.

Republicans are committed to protecting the wave of voter suppression and discrimination laws being enacted this year by Republican-controlled state legislatures around the country.

In the past couple of decades, Senate Republicans have turned the filibuster into a partisan weapon. The filibuster is no longer used to protect minority interests, but instead has become a process for Republicans to control the majority, paralyze the Senate, and prevent Congress from taking action.

By making the Senate an institution that requires, as a matter of course, a supermajority to act, Republicans have perverted the filibuster rules and the Constitution. The Founders did not create the filibuster and never intended the Senate to be a body in which requiring supermajority votes was the rule, not the exception.

The civil rights champion, the late Representative John Lewis (D-GA), whose name graces the vital voting rights bill Republicans blocked yesterday, fought for – and nearly lost his life in pursuit of – voting rights nearly 60 years ago. Today, we are in the process of returning to the ugly days of Jim Crow and its blatant discrimination.

Key provisions of the historic Voting Rights Act were gutted by the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013. The John Lewis bill would restore this Act.

Since the Shelby County decision, Senate Republicans have had eight years to support repairing the Act. Yesterday, they managed to produce just one Republican Senator – Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) – who was willing to allow the Senate to consider the John Lewis Voting Rights measure.

This is in stark contrast to the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act in 2006, which passed the Senate by a vote of 98-to-0, with 53 Republican Senators, including Senator McConnell, voting to reauthorize the Act.

The voter suppression efforts underway in our nation threaten the very foundation of our democracy and time is short if we are to implement new voting rules for the 2022 congressional elections.

It is time for Senate Democrats to act to revise the filibuster rules, restore the Senate to a functioning institution, and allow voting rights legislation – the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act – to pass by majority vote.

The ability of millions of eligible Americans to exercise their fundamental right to vote is at stake.

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Fred’s Weekly Note appears each Thursday in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter. Read this week’s newsletter here. Or, subscribe for free here and receive your copy each week via email.

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